🌿ELO System Updates

[TricksyFox]

Interestingly, I can now see my ELO for each game (including co-op games) on the "play now" page just to the left of each game's cover image.

[nik592]

Interestingly, I can now see my ELO for each game (including co-op games) on the "play now" page just to the left of each game's cover image.

Has that changed though? As I understand it, the Play Now page (old lobby) is not in active development on the basis that it is inferior to the new lobby (game pages) and at some point will be discontinued. This seems to be the official line, in spite of the vocal opposition to it and many problems with the game pages as lobbies.

So it wouldn't surprise me to find it just hadn't ever been removed from there.

[ChiefPointThief]

Did anyone notice that we no longer receive messages in our game history when we reach a new level (Good, strong, expert, master elo)? Was this done intentionally by bga as a we don’t won’t you to care about elo change?

yes, true. the achievement is no longer published. a friend form the carcassonne national team reached master for the 1st time and got... nothing.

My friend loves living forest and finally got to expert status. He was proud of that achievement. I went to congratulate him and couldn’t find it but I thought it was just a temporary bug. Shame

They still give messages for the other awards like 1st win, bonzai, etc so I wonder why they deliberately took out the messages for elo status.

[KenFin1]

Interestingly, I can now see my ELO for each game (including co-op games) on the "play now" page just to the left of each game's cover image.

Please don't tell them. It's the only thing we've got left. It does show however that Elo still exists so reactivating it would be possible if they could just admit removing it was a bad idea to begin with.

[Osnofaac]

Did anyone notice that we no longer receive messages in our game history when we reach a new level (Good, strong, expert, master elo)? Was this done intentionally by bga as a we don’t won’t you to care about elo change?

yes, true. the achievement is no longer published. a friend form the carcassonne national team reached master for the 1st time and got... nothing.

My friend loves living forest and finally got to expert status. He was proud of that achievement. I went to congratulate him and couldn’t find it but I thought it was just a temporary bug. Shame

They still give messages for the other awards like 1st win, bonzai, etc so I wonder why they deliberately took out the messages for elo status.

If you go to the achievement list it is there but does not show on the user page.
This friend got to master at carcassonne and the achievement didn't show on his page. when he got top 20 world elo that one showed up.

[KenFin1]

It's a right hot mess that's for sure. Inconsistent, poorly implemented, poorly reasoned, poorly executed. Kind of my experience of bga in a nutshell tbh.

[Arxyj]

→ Power levelling
We encountered many situations of power levelling, linked to multi accounts, even if we are still fighting against such practices, it became obvious that the current system might encourage it.
To prevent this, any consecutive wins against the same opponent will reduce the amount of ELO points awarded from this victory. This reduction will be gradually higher as more consecutive wins are accumulated. This way, we encourage you to challenge other players to keep the original spirit of the ELO: show your skill at a game compared to the whole community, not just the same ones.

This is just bad. Lets say I have 700 ELO and I am playing somebody with 400. I should win 90% of the games. Therefore I get 2 ELO per win and lose 18 per loss. After 10 games, I usually win 9 * + 2 and lose 1 * - 18, so its equal. That's how ELO should work. But now I get only 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 or something per winning. But I will still get -18 after losing. So I got -12 just for playing the game on my level.

Another problem is that my opponent loses 2 for every lose. So not only I lost 12 ELO points, but those points are gone forever. We, as society, have lost them. And that is bad - especially combined with ELO decay. Because new points do generate only when NEW players joins the game.

This holds especially for games with few active players. I am playing only 1 single game on BGA. With ~20 (maybe 30) active players in arena, its very common to play several games with same opponent in the row IN THE ARENA, where "just play friendly mode" just is not the option.

Making this change not affect arena games is good compromise in my opinion. As you cant really farm your friends there in the first place.

[h_illes]

This is just bad.

All of your points are valid, and have been pointed out by others before (which is OK, I don't expect you to read through 500+ replies).

What I want to add is that apparently the win streak penalty only counts games played in the last 30 days. So you can avoid the penalty by playing less frequently. (I'm not implying this is what you should do, just letting you know about this aspect because it's not mentioned in the original post.)

[6element]

→ Power levelling
We encountered many situations of power levelling, linked to multi accounts, even if we are still fighting against such practices, it became obvious that the current system might encourage it.
To prevent this, any consecutive wins against the same opponent will reduce the amount of ELO points awarded from this victory. This reduction will be gradually higher as more consecutive wins are accumulated. This way, we encourage you to challenge other players to keep the original spirit of the ELO: show your skill at a game compared to the whole community, not just the same ones.

This is just bad. Lets say I have 700 ELO and I am playing somebody with 400. I should win 90% of the games. Therefore I get 2 ELO per win and lose 18 per loss. After 10 games, I usually win 9 * + 2 and lose 1 * - 18, so its equal. That's how ELO should work. But now I get only 2 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 or something per winning. But I will still get -18 after losing. So I got -12 just for playing the game on my level.

Another problem is that my opponent loses 2 for every lose. So not only I lost 12 ELO points, but those points are gone forever. We, as society, have lost them. And that is bad - especially combined with ELO decay. Because new points do generate only when NEW players joins the game.

This holds especially for games with few active players. I am playing only 1 single game on BGA. With ~20 (maybe 30) active players in arena, its very common to play several games with same opponent in the row IN THE ARENA, where "just play friendly mode" just is not the option.

Making this change not affect arena games is good compromise in my opinion. As you cant really farm your friends there in the first place.

Good news is that during last period of sanity they dropped the idea of turning on Elo decay.

Also, I don't see turning Elo stealing off for Arena only as an acceptable compromise - some people play Arena, some don't.

The acceptable compromise is - turn Elo stealing off, return stolen Elo, apologies to community, and remove responsible person from BGA.

[Osnofaac]

there is no responsibility, not even to show face and tell something to the community.