Is ELO precious? No, but yes, but not exactly but yes.
What do I mean? To start with it doesn't matter. Then you try and improve and it does matter in that reaching a certain milestone is an achievement. Then the aim is to stay in that category right? And with those categories you can find similarly experienced players, or even select higher tiered players to try and improve your skills and go further in the game. ELO systems that destroy and erode ELO at freak losses more than you accrue it in wins are helpful to noone and just demotivate me from trying to improve frankly.
Innovation is a tough game and the strong/expert players are incredible at it. I have to usually select Average or Below if I'm tired and want a chance of winning. On a good day I can sometimes beat a 200ELO good player but it's not guaranteed. The ELO system now in place will over time trend everyone towards 200-300 ELO. This will happen more rapidly in games with smaller player bases, and assuming the people currently playing them keep doing so without significant numbers of new players joining the game and continuing to play it, which for innovation, given current numbers and the moderate learning curve, is not likely.
Occasional visitors won't really see any difference. ELo points are just a confusing thing that happens. I remember lockdown games and wondering wtf the funny numbers and animation were at game end. We could just ignore it though, and ELO meant nothing in casual games between friends. So ELO in that case was useless. Its use comes later if you stick around on the site, and the new ELO changes make it worse for long term users of the site.
Which is a long way of saying
TLDR the old ELO system wasn't perfect but to me it seems it was a lot better than the current implementation.
