🌿ELO System Updates

[h_illes]

You said something i suggested is a poor solution.

For some reason I thought you also listed a 3rd option (where the K factor would depend on the result of the last game), but I now re-read your comment, and you didn't. I probably mixed it up with the comment from gmrsmrt. Sorry for the confusion!

[Wonderful Plays]

I have kinda related question, is ELO decay still a thing? I think I've read that it isn't but I'd like a confirmation. Thank you in advance.

[Stroom]

My new suggestion:

Just bring back the old elo system. Let the cheaters cheat. No-one should care about their placement on the leaderboard anyway. At least they will shut up about the calculation being wrong.

Let elo be visible for coop games too (there are ways to find out other players elo values if you know where to look anyway). Having more information helps you make better decisions.

And for people who care so much about elo: Stop caring and just play the game for fun. Your placement on BGA has no real effect on your worth as a player. If someone else games the system better than you and reaches higher scores, it does not make them a better player. And you should not take it personally either.

[anykidrated]

When's the change coming? It's not good enough but I'm still looking forward to it.

In any case the lowering of K factor should not be 100% or even close to it. Otherwise I can stomach the changes even if it's overall bad.

[h_illes]

When's the change coming? It's not good enough but I'm still looking forward to it.

In any case the lowering of K factor should not be 100% or even close to it. Otherwise I can stomach the changes even if it's overall bad.

Another good point. There is a fundamental difference if the K factor remains bounded away from 0 or not.

If the K factor is too low, competitive games basically become friendly games, and it can also block a player from reaching the actual ELO corresponding to their skill. Personally, I suggest not going below 20% of the original K factor value; that's low enough to make cheating infeasible, but high enough so that honest games still have some stakes. It will slow down players' overall convergence to the ELO score reflecting their actual skill, but I can live with that.

[KenFin1]

My new suggestion:

Just bring back the old elo system. Let the cheaters cheat. No-one should care about their placement on the leaderboard anyway. At least they will shut up about the calculation being wrong.

Let elo be visible for coop games too (there are ways to find out other players elo values if you know where to look anyway). Having more information helps you make better decisions.

And for people who care so much about elo: Stop caring and just play the game for fun. Your placement on BGA has no real effect on your worth as a player. If someone else games the system better than you and reaches higher scores, it does not make them a better player. And you should not take it personally either.

If elo doesn't really matter and isn't a measure of anything other than a vague skill identifier why make changes to it at all?

They want it to matter, but they don't want you to think that it matters, because of this it can be bad in certain aspects, but you should overlook that, because it shouldn't matter to you, even though it does actually matter even according to them.

Well said Stroom. ROFL. As someone else mentioned above (quote now added) if ELO doesn't matter why change it at all? You both wonderfully point out the complete nonsense that is the BGA stance on this. Clearly ELO does matter to BGA, so then why keep such a broken system? Is it, could it be, I dread to think, but maybe they CAN'T roll it back because they don't have sufficient backups? I mean they said they can't reinstate old arena scores to correct the problems that happened at the end of last season, so maybe this is also similarly affected?

[hammastahna]

Forums' search feature usually works fine. It is highly suspicious that if one tries to search for "elo" it gets ignored though. If somebody gets win strkeak penalty and are not aware of these changes they'd probably search forums for "elo" to find out what is happening, but they can't. Searching for "elo" is forbidden. They'd still find this thread by searching for "power leveling", but how could they possibly know to search for that if they are not aware of changes in first place.

[Meeplelowda]

It is highly suspicious that if one tries to search for "elo" it gets ignored though.

It's not suspicious. Many search systems have "stop words" that are ignored because they would produce too many hits, tax the database, and/or not yield narrow enough results. Common stop words are things like articles, prepositions, and pronouns. But stop words can be specific to the context of a particular site:

For example, if your product database is comprised of all products related to scented candles, you can think about adding “scented” and “candle” as stop words as it would return every product on your site when searching.

Other BGA stop words include "player," "game," and "arena."

[h_illes]

It is highly suspicious that if one tries to search for "elo" it gets ignored though.

It's not suspicious. Many search systems have "stop words" that are ignored because they would produce too many hits, tax the database, and/or not yield narrow enough results. Common stop words are things like articles, prepositions, and pronouns. But stop words can be specific to the context of a particular site:

For example, if your product database is comprised of all products related to scented candles, you can think about adding “scented” and “candle” as stop words as it would return every product on your site when searching.

Other BGA stop words include "player," "game," and "arena."

But then e.g. the word 'put' is not a stop word, and produces 4000+ hits. I'm pretty sure 'ELO' would produce far fewer hits than that.

[KenFin1]

I agree it does seem odd to block Elo searches but h_illes is right I've seen similar on other forums. I would attribute this to poorly thought through implementation rather than deliberate conspiracy/cover up etc. If there's one thing I conclude from recent Elo changes/game in progress pages it's that BGA and poorly thought through heavily overlap on the Venn diagram.