🌿ELO System Updates

[GeorgeShortwell]

Maybe they think that because it is only a small number of people posting in this thread that the majority of players don’t care? If so, I thought I should post that I have been following this thread since it started and agree whole-heartedly that the power-levelling “fix” is absurd. How they looked at the feedback, the majority of which regarded the power-levelling, and thought, “yeah, this one can stay for now while we do more analysis” is beyond insane.

If this is not changed, and soon, there is no way that I am renewing my Premium membership. Please respect your paying customers or you will undoubtedly have less of them.

[Ownards]

Please do something about ELO stealing

[nicit]

Posted this in the Innovation forum, but wanted to add my voice here about the new ELO power leveling change.

There's so few players for innovation that I play a ton of consecutive games with the same opponent, go on a run, and end up winning and getting 0 ELO. Super frustrating. Not going to be playing here anymore with this system in place. Seems like a lot of others feel the same way. Not sure what can be done though.

Hope a change can be made, think this is the end for me...

[Jellby]

If I'm not mistaken, the "win probability" according to elo is something like 1/(1+10^(d/400)), where d is the elo difference between the players. For a win probability higher than 1/7, streaks of 6 consecutive wins are expected and should not be "penalized", that translates to an elo difference of 400*log(7-1) ~ 311. I'm not sure what that means, but maybe it means that you should avoid playing against players below 300 elo lower than yours.

[dschingis27]

The main problem I see in this "system" is the overall downwards spiral in Elo that inevitably happens, since it is not a zero-sum system anymore. The downwards spiral can probably take a while, but it is going to happen. It's hard to imagine how a system like this (that constantly reduces the overall summed up Elo across all players in a game) can be sustainable in the long run.

Ok, it is somewhat counterbalanced by the fact that you can't go below 100 Elo. So it wasn't a zero-sum game in the first place. However, for player groups that comprise "Good or above" players, the downfall in Elo will happen and just squeeze everyone's Elo closer together for no reason.

[Ownards]

So many people from the existing player base will be demotivated by the ELO stealing

[h_illes]

Brief summary.

You (the BGA team) introduced a bunch of changes, one of which was a good idea (no ELO loss on winning team), while all other changes were bad ideas which nobody asked for in the first place. Some of these are still in effect and doing constant damage to the player experience. They also caused a lot of issues at the end of the Arena season, some of which were not even acknowledged, and even more were left unfixed. Meanwhile, communication has been scarce and insufficient, with virtually no transparency as to what's being done and what players can expect for the future.

You seriously need to improve at decision-making and also communication, because that was just horrible.

[jgpaladin]

Just to chime in and add another voice...

Specifically to say that I agree with every word written by orgle on the topic of Hanabi and ELO hiding over the past month.

I just want to match with the right players. Hiding ELO does nothing but make that more difficult. And in a cooperative game with lots of conventions, that is a recipe for not having fun.

[anykidrated]

Brief summary.

You (the BGA team) introduced a bunch of changes, one of which was a good idea (no ELO loss on winning team), while all other changes were bad ideas which nobody asked for in the first place. Some of these are still in effect and doing constant damage to the player experience. They also caused a lot of issues at the end of the Arena season, some of which were not even acknowledged, and even more were left unfixed. Meanwhile, communication has been scarce and insufficient, with virtually no transparency as to what's being done and what players can expect for the future.

You seriously need to improve at decision-making and also communication, because that was just horrible.

What were these issues?

[h_illes]

What were these issues?

I recommend this topic:
https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=34262

This was posted in it, and I recommend reading the earlier comments too.

Hello!
I want to acknowledge the issues concerning the end of Arena Season 15 that have emerged in the past few days and explain a bit what happened and how we managed the situation.
Basically, everything was linked to the recent ELO changes (released last December), which included changes to how BGA processes the player rankings, including Arena. Those were complicate and delicate changes to very old parts of the platform and they were especially hard to test, so some difficulties where expected.

• some players didn't get their arena league reset: there was an issue with league promotion to Elite, which meant that some players got stuck in nonexistent leagues (for some games). As a result, the system simply ignored those players when resetting the Arena Rating during the end of season process. Those players were reset to the correct Area rating just the day after. Unfortunately, due to technical reasons, this process caused some players to be reset twice.
• some players did not receive the Top Arena Player award: for the same reason (promotion bug -> never reached elite) some awards were never granted, like the Top Arena Players for the rankings of each game (since they are awarded only to Elite players). We were able to recover most of them today.
• odd behavior for ongoing TB table at season end, which caused wrong loser and ELO update: there were some incompatibilities that we hadn't predicted between the end of season process (very old) and the newer ELO changes + a small bug in the re-adapted process. The bug caused the result to be based on the current players' score instead of the time spent (as it should have). Additionally, the incompatibilities mentioned caused the "partial" result of the game to be processed as a standard arena game, thus updating the ratings of all players (not just the loser) and causing the mysterious ELO updates that never got to be notified to the players. Sadly, since the arena season has ended, and the result have been permanently recorded, we have no way of recover the arena points lost due to this issue.

I hope that this update cleared some confusion!
As always, thank you for the patience, the support and the quick reports that helped us identify the issues