donpipe wrote: ↑03 January 2024, 20:05
if this was chess that would make sense. but you can easily lose to a new player and be really punished with points. even when you toggle "strong players" only, it keeps joining games with non ranked players.
Again, that's the point. The inability to create that significant winrate vs those players keeps the ratings down. Games that don't struggle as much with this, such as Splendor, Ticket to Ride, etc. despite having some luck factor, will have higher ratings. I can play those, face 300-400s, and take those 5-1 odds in ratings and hold on, for every game I drop with bad luck or weaker play I can win multiple games back to climb back up and maintain those 500-600+ ratings, with several players doing even better than that. Such ratings don't even exist in Sea Salt (the highest atm seems to be scraping 500s). And games with even less of a luck factor, or none at all, can reach even higher peaks. Activity can play some factor in this, but a lot of it also comes down to variance, higher variance leading to a lower rating ceiling even for the most active of games.
I can't speak to your pairings, I don't see the settings you use and haven't checked what kind of opponents you're getting, though given you're playing Arena you'll have to keep an eye on the fact two ratings system exist. Arena keeps getting reset, so sometimes the ratings aren't in synch yet for accounts.