🌿ELO System Updates

[6element]

An online game website that claims to want to build a community makes a change that makes it more preferable to not make friends and avoid repeat playing someone!?!

Corporate strategy 101. Know your core purpose and ensure all business decisions serve that core purpose. If it doesn't it's harming the business.

Precisely.

[GeoPaladin]

The most infuriating thing about this is that the power levelling system is trivial for cheaters to get around but punishing for legit players.

I wish the admins would at least acknowledge the concerns.

[LesserJester]

The most infuriating thing about this is that the power levelling system is trivial for cheaters to get around but punishing for legit players.

I wish the admins would at least acknowledge the concerns.

There was a post by someone a few pages back along the lines of: it feels like if they cared about users concerns they might have sought the community's opinion before releasing this and forcing it on everyone.

I'm not sure why they felt this necessary to spend resource and dev time on but someone making the decisions clearly has a strong opinion on what ELO is for, and it does not seem to be the stated "This ELO score is an evaluation of your skill at this game" [as the BGA hover pop-up] any more.

In some games they have removed the score altogether. Eg hardback. Why? It's still a game you play against people. It's competitive. Why remove ELO score from it? Utterly pointless IMO.

[estroncio]

I disagree. Friendly games should be used only when you need them in an informal /teaching setting / distinctly imbalanced pool of player abilities. It's why it used to be called teaching mode. Why strip people of timers and the ability to kick non responsive players? The new ELO system is not good and that is where the problem lies, not in the selected game mode.

Better to do this than to lose ELO or to not play them I guess.

Also has anyone solved what consecutive means

"Consecutive" just means the number of wins you've had against that player in a row. As near as I can tell, this will never reset unless you lose to that player.

Recently I gained zero elo from beating a player for the 6th time in a row. I checked and discovered that the 5th time was four days before and I had finished 20 games against other players since then.

It's a really obnoxious system if you're near the top ranks where winning an overwhelming majority of games is required just to stay even.

You can fix this issue by creating a secondary account, then you get the full elo when you beat that player for the 7th time. On top of that, your new account will have less elo/arena score so you'll obliterate its elo/arena score and destroy its chances to beat your main account in the ranking.

Create 3rd or 4th account if needed.

[TheDiamondRuff]

It looks like bga is going to ride this out even though it received heavy immediate backlash. Lucky me I met my quarterly quota for most of my games but I guess the few I didn't will be reduced to 300. 300 will be the new 100 Bga didn't do nearly enough to inform players of these changes. There are post about purchasing a yearly subscription on the front page but nothing to inform users that there were major changes being made at the same time. Anytime I've ever referenced the forums to other users they had no clue it is here so I know the majority of users here have not been made aware of these changes. People at least deserved a warning that 10% of their elo is about to vanish in two weeks.

Power leveling - I've had to red thumb a few players already because of my win streak. Players who are friendly and challenging can become unsuitable opponents in this system which is sad. To the few posters that think playing friend mode is the answer what makes you think that the loser in this situation wants to play friend mode? I'm already seeing the power leveling take elo out of games with already low elo.

To me it is inexplicable that a company that takes money from its customers refuses to communicate with their customers when they have concerns. I have no idea if/when/how ELO decay will be implemented despite virtually everyone in the forums pushing back on the proposed change. Same with some of the other changes that are also bad for the majority of players. BGA used to be a refuge for me from the stresses of life. After finding out about these changes that has changed to a ball of stress as well. I was a non-Premium member for years and I will revert to such after my current subscription is over if these changes go through coupled with the lack of communication and listening to the community's feedback.

[Scops]

At this point I don't think they'll ever revert to the old system or implement any of the proposed fixes.

In the end it's not so surprising... all these measures are penalizing strong competitive players which are a very tiny minority.
Online gaming platforms are always looking for ways to make weak players feel less weak so that they don't quit. It's normal... nobody likes to lose... but public evidence of your poor performance can be even worse that the loss itself and people tend to quit when it becomes too obvious.
Power Levelling and Elo Decay do the job quite well by flattening the elo distribution curve so that everyone feels a bit less weak at the game.

For me, this is a major disaster and now I find this platform a lot less enjoyable. But that's just minor collateral damage for BGA.

[LesserJester]

It looks like bga is going to ride this out even though it received heavy immediate backlash. Lucky me I met my quarterly quota for most of my games but I guess the few I didn't will be reduced to 300. 300 will be the new 100 Bga didn't do nearly enough to inform players of these changes. There are post about purchasing a yearly subscription on the front page but nothing to inform users that there were major changes being made at the same time. Anytime I've ever referenced the forums to other users they had no clue it is here so I know the majority of users here have not been made aware of these changes. People at least deserved a warning that 10% of their elo is about to vanish in two weeks.

Power leveling - I've had to red thumb a few players already because of my win streak. Players who are friendly and challenging can become unsuitable opponents in this system which is sad. To the few posters that think playing friend mode is the answer what makes you think that the loser in this situation wants to play friend mode? I'm already seeing the power leveling take elo out of games with already low elo.

To me it is inexplicable that a company that takes money from its customers refuses to communicate with their customers when they have concerns. I have no idea if/when/how ELO decay will be implemented despite virtually everyone in the forums pushing back on the proposed change. Same with some of the other changes that are also bad for the majority of players. BGA used to be a refuge for me from the stresses of life. After finding out about these changes that has changed to a ball of stress as well. I was a non-Premium member for years and I will revert to such after my current subscription is over if these changes go through coupled with the lack of communication and listening to the community's feedback.

I have friends who quit the site a few years back now due to the lack of response when they tried to contact BGA. It's nothing new apparently.

I know where you're coming from re stress etc. I have played less on here recently to avoid getting too bothered by it since this ELO change was announced. BGA has been an emotional crutch/distraction for me recently but this has reminded me not to rely on it and encouraged me to move away from it sooner rather than later. It's annoying yes, but I am finding other places to divert my energies and money towards. I have taken up a few dormant hobbies again and I am happier for it. I was going to purchase premium membership but I've but the money towards something else instead. Once this arena season is over I will probably mothball the account and my aim is to stop playing tbh. A crutch is only good as a crutch if it supports you.

At this point I don't think they'll ever revert to the old system or implement any of the proposed fixes.

In the end it's not so surprising... all these measures are penalizing strong competitive players which are a very tiny minority.
Online gaming platforms are always looking for ways to make weak players feel less weak so that they don't quit. It's normal... nobody likes to lose... but public evidence of your poor performance can be even worst that the loss itself and people tend to quit when it becomes too obvious.
Power Levelling and Elo Decay do the job quite well by flattening the elo distribution curve so that everyone feels a bit less weak at the game.

For me, this is a major disaster and now I find this platform a lot less enjoyable. But that's just minor collateral damage for BGA.

An interesting perspective and not one I had considered. It would explain a lot if that is their outlook. Pandering to the lowest common denominator seems to be the norm for so much of modern life sadly. It's kind of tragic really, and I'm not sure it really benefits anyone in the long run.

[h_illes]

In the end it's not so surprising... all these measures are penalizing strong competitive players which are a very tiny minority.
Online gaming platforms are always looking for ways to make weak players feel less weak so that they don't quit. It's normal... nobody likes to lose... but public evidence of your poor performance can be even worst that the loss itself and people tend to quit when it becomes too obvious.
Power Levelling and Elo Decay do the job quite well by flattening the elo distribution curve so that everyone feels a bit less weak at the game.

For me, this is a major disaster and now I find this platform a lot less enjoyable. But that's just minor collateral damage for BGA.

You might overthink this. What you say means that they (a) put in the amount of thought that you did, (b) intentionally lie about the purpose of these changes. I doubt both. I think the intention was as stated, they just failed badly at thinking through the consequences. And also failed at communication since then. All of which are very disappointing, and I think is enough reason for many competitive players to stop playing (and paying for premium subscription).

[zizzeus]

I've canceled my premium subscription renewal as well, because of these changes. I guess we vote with our wallets until we can vote with the forum.

[Ebis]

→ ELO Decay

It's not a good change. We have arena for this...there you start almost from 0 each season.
If a player doesn't play the game for a longer time they don't appear in the main statistics so we have there only active players.
So you might as well eliminate elo completely from the site because.
Many top players have really amazing top elo's results in many games and I believe they are not able to play those games all the time bc a lot of new game appear.
Plus people are bored playing 1000 times the same game ..and is it the reason they should lose all points they gathered? I do not think so.