🌿ELO System Updates

[LesserJester]

I'm also not a fan of these changes. They seem awful and unecessary to me. ELO decay in particular. I tend to play certain games intensively for a while then go back to other ones. Why should my ELO decay? It's nonsense. The whole point of ELO is to see how skilled someone is and choose opponents near to your level. Artificially decaying it is not going to help anyone. Who cares if someone is hoarding ELO and won't play. Doesn't bother me. Arena is for the peeing contest and competitive play. Now decay of arena points for people sitting at the top and not playing matches in the final month makes sense to me. But ELO? Just leave it as it was. All the other changes just seem pointless and unnecessary to me tbh.

[LesserJester]

So to sum up where we stand: BGA admins changed the site without any advance consultation. We now have a 20+ page thread of many frequent site users who play all different types of games saying these changes made the site less usable and less enjoyable. Other than one account who has posted about 50 times on this thread to share that they like the changes, the reception has been universally negative. Are we just shouting into the void? Are the site admins taking this feedback under advisement?

The number of unanswered / unresolved suggestions that are years old in the bugs/suggestion area suggests the void tbh. I'd like to be wrong but I wouldn't hold out too much hope. I gather from friends who tried to influence the new lobby that they weren't too receptive to criticism of that, and pushed ahead with it regardless / irrespective of negative feedback.

[torvaldur_makan]

Power Leveling
The Elo system already accounts for this. If two players play each other and one player wins every time, each consecutive win will reward less points due to their rating difference growing.

The proposed change basically short-circuits the entire Elo system.

[frogstar_A]

Moderators - after 22 pages of players explaining how bad some of these changes are, do you have any response? Will you be reversing them?

[Ceaseless]

→ Power levelling
We encountered many situations of power levelling, linked to multi accounts, even if we are still fighting against such practices, it became obvious that the current system might encourage it.
To prevent this, any consecutive wins against the same opponent will reduce the amount of ELO points awarded from this victory. This reduction will be gradually higher as more consecutive wins are accumulated. This way, we encourage you to challenge other players to keep the original spirit of the ELO: show your skill at a game compared to the whole community, not just the same ones.

It's a tricky one. It helps deal with cheaters, I've already seen one player caught in the web. The ELO system doesn't have a way to deal with short pool players, as ELO just tells you how good players are relative to the pool in question, isolated small pools are going to be off. So keeping those from getting overrated increases is nifty. That said, it does have an unfortunate effect with sparring sets where a couple of strong players face off a lot of games, especially in shorter ones. Kalah, Connect Four, etc. I'm undecided on it. I approve of the concept, guess we'll see how it works out in practice.

[Wreckage]

The goals:
1. To continue to have a system like most of us have enjoyed.
2. To not have players who are basically inactive parked at the top.
3. To discourage cheating using multiple accounts.

The answers:
2. I suggest a single 1 point ELO decay every 3 days for ONLY the top 20 ELO leaders of each game (not arena leaders). The vast majority of players would not be effected. The top rated players would be effected equally. Perhaps the number of top players effected could be adjusted by devs, based on a game’s limited pool of players.

This is even worse than what we have now (at least for me) I am currently top 20 in 10 games and have been and could get into top 20 again in another 10 or so. You are saying I would have to play all of these games every 3 days. Even my favorite game (Sobek 2players you guys should try it ) I've gone a month or so w/o playing it several times.

First you don’t have to rush to protect that 1 elo point…let it go. By what you said, my suggestion would help you gain on the top players in 10 games and hurt you in 10 games. It doesn’t really hurt you much though, if you consider.

If you are top 20, but closer to 20th, you’ll drop to 21st and no longer be affected. If you are closer to 1st, your closest competitors aren’t gaining on you, since they are affected too. If you don’t play at all, it’s true, in a month you would lose the same 10 points as your closet rivals, and you might have to win a game or something.

[LesserJester]

I've always seen ELO as a personal target and Arena as a competitive target. I can only commit to one or two games in Arena in any serious way at any given season. That's all I have the time for.

Arena ranking is where people go if they want to rank themselves. When people talk about top 10/top 20 etc that's where it matters.

ELO for me shows personal improvement in a game and gives me the ability to play with people at a similar level in games I find difficult (innovation etc where player level really matters). It should only move based on when I play a game. Artificially cropping it/reducing it/reducing game wins for small pools etc seems punitive and unnecessary. I have what 20 different games played in my favourites, and some people 50-100. You can't expect people to keep playing all those games all the time.

Trying to make ELO a competitive ranking too just seems pointless to me. Please BGA just leave it how it was. ELO a non competitive "skill level" indicator and Arena for competitive ranking.

[JustYellow]

These changes seem really awful.

The power leveling feature and the elo decay seem to have been thoroughly addressed in many other posts on these thread and I feel I have not much to add, except that I really hope you take them in consideration as they demonstrate the uselessness of those methods to both prevent abusers, have a fair assessment of players elos and a fair arena competition.

But I want to really emphasize my disagreement with the planned red thumb changes.

I almost only play Agricola which is a up to 4 players, 90min+ game. The worst experience anyone can have at these games is to have a quitter after playing for the last 80 min or so. This is regardless of one fighting hard for elo and arena points or playing just for the sake of having a good, entertaining game.

The karma system for this kind of games just doesn't work. The quitter, who has just disrespected 90min of three other player's time, can go play a few 10min heads up games and be back at 100% karma very quickly.

Of course, anyone can have a disconnection issue or something like that once or twice, but when you see a player that has quit 4 or 5 games in the previous month, then there is a pattern and it is obvious that they just don't care and will do it again.

Currently the red thumb system is the only thing that works to prevent one from playing with these people. I use it every time someone quits on my games, I denounce them as quitters and it easily verifiable as it happens right after they quit. I just don’t want to ever cross paths with them again.

Now you are considering removing this from arena games.

I can tell you that the next game where I have to play a red thumbed quitter will be my last game in arena. And, as this is the most challenging format (at least of you’ve became good enough at the game), it will make my desire to play the game wane over time.

Can you understand how demoralizing it is to know for the (long) duration of the game that, if you are doing well the game will probably never be finished, whilst if the quitter is doing well they will obviously let it finish to beat you?

I really don’t care if some top players are abusing this because they’re afraid of other top players. You can’t just make this an awful experience for everyone else, having to sit through a game they’ll not enjoy at all because they can’t prevent disrespectful people from joining their games.

Just let quitters play half games with each other, while considerate players can play proper games to the end.

[alocirga]

→ Power levelling
We encountered many situations of power levelling, linked to multi accounts, even if we are still fighting against such practices, it became obvious that the current system might encourage it.
To prevent this, any consecutive wins against the same opponent will reduce the amount of ELO points awarded from this victory. This reduction will be gradually higher as more consecutive wins are accumulated. This way, we encourage you to challenge other players to keep the original spirit of the ELO: show your skill at a game compared to the whole community, not just the same ones.

This seems like it will unfairly punish skilled players of games with smaller playerbases. Competitive games with small communities are bound to see tables with more repeat opponents, intentional or not.

show your skill at a game compared to the whole community, not just the same ones

Arena already solves this or attempts to solve it by not being able to pick your opponents.

My proposed alternatives:

1) Revert these changes, and make all future ELO gains/losses arena-only. If you can't choose your opponents, you should not be arbitrarily punished for consecutive wins against the same opponent. Being unable to choose opponents should cut down on number of abusers.

2) Revert these changes, and code better detection of abusers intentionally playing with alts. Perhaps thresholds can be employed - certain obvious levels of abuse could result in auto-suspensions or even bans. Another threshold of suspected abuse could result in being flagged for manual account review by a human. If that is too much work for site admins, perhaps a community tribunal system could allow communities to self-detect and self-police abusers.

3) Revert the changes, and implement some degree of skill based match-making in competitive play. If you can only match with similarly skilled opponents - say within 100 ELO of your own, I think this could solve the problem. For games without lots of active players at varying skill levels, a quasi-skill based match making could be used instead. Say those under 400 ELO can only match with others under 400, and over 400 can only match with others over 400. Could use different numbers and ranges, this is just an example.

[LesserJester]

omg I'd missed the arena red thumb change. * yes, red thumbing quitters is essential. Also rude players, i can think of one in particular I never want to play because they;re just so awfully rude. The whole point of red thumb is to help you avoid these obnoxious folk. Don't change that!

I think an example might be useful: In some games eg ticket to ride you can get some very aggressive players who are just unpleasant to have to play with. Eg in TTR they don't try to build routes, only to block yours. It doesn't make for a fun game. Now some blocking is legit, and I sometimes have to use it too if my own routes become impossible, but when someone is only trying to block and at game end you can see they had no reason to build where they did other than spite from turn 0 onwards then yup I red thumb them.

I have also red thumbed someone not because I wanted to block them permanently but just because I had played them 5 times already that day and I wanted a different opponent. (I made sure to remove the thumb before logging out). Having the option to say "not this player again for X hours" would be useful. An orange thumb if you like. It's not trying to block someone to avoid them 100%, but when there is a big disparity in skill level, be it they're a lot better OR a lot worse than you, and the site keeps pairing you with them game after game after game it just gets too tedious. And weirdly this is despite my setting preference being only to play people at my own level and not any other +/- deviation. Suddenly the site seems to override this and keeps pairing me with people outside of my setting. Not cool.

Lastly is anyone else missing seeing the K factor in ELO calculations? Having spent a while reading up on what it was I now miss it being around.

*Moderator edit: please refrain from swearing on BGA, this is a family-friendly platform.