I have been playing for some time on BGA and last months I ventured to try competitive play as well and I joint various arena seasons.
After playing over hundreds games on Arena competitive play, I realized that the way the ranking works is quite deceiving and incentivizes no play. I found out that the ranking works as an ELO (once you reach elite league), but for games where there’s chance involved I think that’s a bad approach.
Let me argue my points. In most board games (except some full strategic like chess) some portion of games will be won by luck, where players skills won’t matter as the luck factor was to big to overcome. That’s fine, is how board games work. However when you have this unlucky games against opponents with a significant lower ranking than yours, you take a massive hit, and you need many wins to overcome that single loss.
In my experience, I think that players on top of rankings tend to play very few games, afraid of losing many points. The top 10 ranking looks pretty much the same during several days. Hence, once you start reaching high rankings (Top 100 - Top 50) you play most of your games against weaker players and here is where the problem begins. If you win those players, you get little reward, while if you lose, you drop many points. I have done some series of 3-4 wins and then one loss, my ranking didn’t vary as the loss compensated all wins. Should I play those games then? I understand that we are playing just for fun, but if we do a competition it shouldn’t have a negative effect to play those games, otherwise I prefer to switch to regular play.
That way of handling rankings can lead to unfair outcomes as well, as what makes you climb is a streak of wins, not an overall good result. For example let’s imagine 2 players on Elite league, A and B who play 100 games against random players. Player A wins 3 games and then loses one every time, while player B loses the first 80 games and then gets a 20 win streak to close it up. What is the outcome? Player A is likely to reach a ceiling. When he gets high in the rankings the 3 wins will likely not be enough to compensate that loss, considering that most of their games will be played against lower ranked opponents, hence the loss will deduct more points than the ones won. Meanwhile player B will drop to bottom of the rankings at first, but when it starts to win it will climb very fast as it plays better opponents. When he catches player A maybe the winning streak is not over yet and those final wins will be sufficient to surpass the ceiling that player A was never able to break. Is it fair that a player with 20% of wins ends up higher than one with 75%?
The current method bases everything (or at least most of it) on “the last winning streak”. It seems that this is all that matters to get a good ranking. Hence, when players get that good streak they stop playing, which in my opinion is a big problem. It clearly shouldn’t be the way to handle a 3 month competition.
I consider that there are 3 main parameters when valuing player performance during an arena season.
1 Games played - A player needs to play a significant number of games to consider his ranking legit. Currently this is somehow adressed by playing multiple leagues before reaching elite, but you can reach elite in around 10-15 games, which might be a little bit low.
2 Winning percentage - The overall perfomance through the whole season is a defining parameter as it tracks all of your games, not just the most recent ones.
3 Average ELO of opponents played - This is an important parameter as well, if someone tends to play easier games it should be penalized for that.
If the ranking is a formula combining these 3 factors I think we can obtain a more fair outcome. Players would be incentivized to play games as this is positive for the rankings. All games would be worth playing, as if you play a weaker opponent you have greater chances of winning while if you play a stronger opponent your avg ELO of opponents will increase. We would avoid the “no play” scenario as losses could be overcomed.
We could also have a more objective way to track our own progress, if we have a winning % of x one season, targetting to improve that for the next looks like a realistic goal.
In my opinion, this switch is a must on games with a significant size of its games (I consider 10-20% already significant) decided by luck. Thanks!
After playing over hundreds games on Arena competitive play, I realized that the way the ranking works is quite deceiving and incentivizes no play. I found out that the ranking works as an ELO (once you reach elite league), but for games where there’s chance involved I think that’s a bad approach.
Let me argue my points. In most board games (except some full strategic like chess) some portion of games will be won by luck, where players skills won’t matter as the luck factor was to big to overcome. That’s fine, is how board games work. However when you have this unlucky games against opponents with a significant lower ranking than yours, you take a massive hit, and you need many wins to overcome that single loss.
In my experience, I think that players on top of rankings tend to play very few games, afraid of losing many points. The top 10 ranking looks pretty much the same during several days. Hence, once you start reaching high rankings (Top 100 - Top 50) you play most of your games against weaker players and here is where the problem begins. If you win those players, you get little reward, while if you lose, you drop many points. I have done some series of 3-4 wins and then one loss, my ranking didn’t vary as the loss compensated all wins. Should I play those games then? I understand that we are playing just for fun, but if we do a competition it shouldn’t have a negative effect to play those games, otherwise I prefer to switch to regular play.
That way of handling rankings can lead to unfair outcomes as well, as what makes you climb is a streak of wins, not an overall good result. For example let’s imagine 2 players on Elite league, A and B who play 100 games against random players. Player A wins 3 games and then loses one every time, while player B loses the first 80 games and then gets a 20 win streak to close it up. What is the outcome? Player A is likely to reach a ceiling. When he gets high in the rankings the 3 wins will likely not be enough to compensate that loss, considering that most of their games will be played against lower ranked opponents, hence the loss will deduct more points than the ones won. Meanwhile player B will drop to bottom of the rankings at first, but when it starts to win it will climb very fast as it plays better opponents. When he catches player A maybe the winning streak is not over yet and those final wins will be sufficient to surpass the ceiling that player A was never able to break. Is it fair that a player with 20% of wins ends up higher than one with 75%?
The current method bases everything (or at least most of it) on “the last winning streak”. It seems that this is all that matters to get a good ranking. Hence, when players get that good streak they stop playing, which in my opinion is a big problem. It clearly shouldn’t be the way to handle a 3 month competition.
I consider that there are 3 main parameters when valuing player performance during an arena season.
1 Games played - A player needs to play a significant number of games to consider his ranking legit. Currently this is somehow adressed by playing multiple leagues before reaching elite, but you can reach elite in around 10-15 games, which might be a little bit low.
2 Winning percentage - The overall perfomance through the whole season is a defining parameter as it tracks all of your games, not just the most recent ones.
3 Average ELO of opponents played - This is an important parameter as well, if someone tends to play easier games it should be penalized for that.
If the ranking is a formula combining these 3 factors I think we can obtain a more fair outcome. Players would be incentivized to play games as this is positive for the rankings. All games would be worth playing, as if you play a weaker opponent you have greater chances of winning while if you play a stronger opponent your avg ELO of opponents will increase. We would avoid the “no play” scenario as losses could be overcomed.
We could also have a more objective way to track our own progress, if we have a winning % of x one season, targetting to improve that for the next looks like a realistic goal.
In my opinion, this switch is a must on games with a significant size of its games (I consider 10-20% already significant) decided by luck. Thanks!
I didn't do the math on if someone was to win their first 75 games vs players with a consistent rate of 1550 and then lose the rest but I believe they would fall below that 1620 mark which is interesting. I don't think their ceiling surpasses 2200 and they would lose in the upper 300s in the first 10 games and then they would lose another 300+ in the next 15 games. And it is very possible to win 75% of your games and fall below 1620 but that would also depend on your streaks and the elo of who you won/lost against.
