Hello and a question about ELO

[brasspigeon]

Hello BGA!

First things first: BGA is great! I had some doubts about the legality of it but after some googling around I have a feeling it's all good (nowadays!).

Second: I'm playing mostly against a friend with ELO enabled. I was wondering if that's alright, it seems a bit weird to me but I couldn't find anything about it not being legal. It's on by default so we never turn it off. Should we?

Grz,
brass

[Jest Phulin]

First, Welcome to BGA.

Second, I am not an administrator of this site, so my word isn't final.

However, from what I've seen, it generally is not a problem keeping ELO on if you both are playing at your best capacity. If you both are evenly matched, you will stay at the same ELO. If one person wins, say 75% of the time and the other 25%, the ELO eventually will reach a plateau. One person's winning 3 games might be 10 points each game, but the other person's one win would be worth 30. My math is probably off on that, but the general idea holds.

Where people have issues is when one person is deliberately losing in order to artificially increase the ELO of the other. If one of you becomes a top ranked player, people will probably cry "foul" unless you also play against other people and win against them. There are people who treat BGA as a game unto itself, with prestige and ELO being used as victory points. The people who are high up, but not at the top of these values tend to be the ones complaining the most about it not being fair, from what I've seen. (Non-scientific sampling, your mileage may vary... ) If your rank stays below theirs, I don't think you'll have a problem.

[JollyBird]

Hoi brasspigeon; welkom

You're right; BGA is great!
And one of the things I really enjoy here is the freedom to play in different ways; just how you prefer it.
So I think it's your choice if you want to play with ELO on or off; or sometimes on and sometimes off.
That's the way I use it anyway.

Normally I play with ELO on but there are also times when I prefer to play with ELO off.
Some examples:
- I've joined a group called "Game Tutors" where we also help eachother to learn new games; mostly played with ELO off.
- I come home from work really really tired and just want to play a quick game for fun without concerning losing lots of ELO because I maybe have trouble to concentrate so I open a game with the lines: "Just for fun! Without ELO " and people join the table very fast.
- Or I want to play a somewhat luckbased game with a friend but we have a very big difference in ELO-rating. So we agree to play without ELO.

[brasspigeon]

Ok, thanks guys. I'll just ignore that settings since we both try to win anyway. ELO doesn't really concern us, reminding the other of winning streaks is way more fun.