ELO Ranking System - Thoughts

[skyburn]

Hi everyone! I've recently started playing Arena and have managed to improve my Elo and ranking. However, staying at the top has been quite challenging. On average, I gain around 12 points per win, but I lose about 30 to 35 points per loss.

I understand that the Elo system should make it progressively harder to climb, but isn't this level of punishment too harsh? Or is it because my MMR is not good enough?

For instance, if I’m ranked 300 and lose to an opponent ranked 150, I would need to win about three matches just to recover that single loss.

note: This is my first game in BGA, so I'm trying to understand better the system.

[Jellby]

Elo is not a reward/punishment system, it's an estimation of your (and others') skill. If you have a high rating, you are expected to win more often than lose, especially against low-rated players. In order to increase your rating, you need to exceed the expectations, so you need to win even more often. If you simply win as often as you're expected (which may be 3 out of 4, depending on the elo difference), you'll maintain, on average, your rating.

Arena score is not the same as elo, but it works in the same way.

[w41k3r13]

ELO is indeed frustratingly misused here. It's arbitrary to begin with, not implemented in any meaningful way, and easily abused. My advice is just focus on your win rate, and enjoying a great card game, not what a website that can't fix bugs thinks about you. I wouldn't hold your breath on it changing either, we have a better chance of Altered hopefully leaving this site for it's own app in the distant future.

[Tisaac]

ELO is indeed frustratingly misused here. It's arbitrary to begin with, not implemented in any meaningful way, and easily abused. My advice is just focus on your win rate, and enjoying a great card game, not what a website that can't fix bugs thinks about you. I wouldn't hold your breath on it changing either, we have a better chance of Altered hopefully leaving this site for it's own app in the distant future.

What do you mean ? How can you abuse ELO here ?

[ufm]

ELO is indeed frustratingly misused here. It's arbitrary to begin with, not implemented in any meaningful way, and easily abused. My advice is just focus on your win rate, and enjoying a great card game, not what a website that can't fix bugs thinks about you. I wouldn't hold your breath on it changing either, we have a better chance of Altered hopefully leaving this site for it's own app in the distant future.

What do you mean ? How can you abuse ELO here ?

I think it's about alt accounts (I was able to spot some in the leaderboard easily), but it's not an inherent flaw of Elo system.

[SBTFU - Faux7]

It's a shame, why winning 8 points for Losing 25 thanks BGA i just wanna quit Altered by ur fault gg

[SBTFU - Faux7]

The awesome thing about this horrible system is losing 25 "cause u must winning more than him".

No he's sometimes better than me at this game but i win between 2 (yes) and 8 points and i lose 25 when i lose against a guy who get approximatively my play lvl that's just unfair

[sliph1251]

How many total games played? As more games are played, ELO swings less and less.

[Neecow]

I have 460 games played and have the same issud lol
460 Elo, when I lose against a 250/300 Elo I lose 20 pts, while I gain 3/4 when I win haha
I should do the math because they explain their formula, but I have to admit this is discouraging

[Silene]

The awesome thing about this horrible system is losing 25 "cause u must winning more than him".

No he's sometimes better than me at this game but i win between 2 (yes) and 8 points and i lose 25 when i lose against a guy who get approximatively my play lvl that's just unfair

When you play same level as you say, you should have similar elo. If you have different elo, you will both feel a pull to the middle. So higher player will lose more than win and lower player will win more than lose. That works as intended.

Stronger players on high elo win more often than lose. So they gain less points from winning than they lose from losing (unless they play only others that also have such a high elo). It has to be like this for the system to be stable.

(The only problem that i can see right now is the diminished rewards when winning multiple times in a row vs. the same player. But that's unrelated to this thread I think. )