🌿ELO System Updates

[RazorOz]

→ ELO Decay
In the past, some of the strongest players refrained from playing as they could lose ELO, attempting to prevent losing their hard obtained current rank. This lead to situations where players kept their rank without playing anymore. We clearly want to encourage you to play to keep your rank. This will also help other players to be able to compete against the best.
Doing so, a regular ELO decay is introduced to slowly drop the ELO from top ranked players that do not play anymore. The decay will be -10% at the end of the Arena Season for all Strong players and above that did not play any ranked game, but this could be adjusted later (both scope and frequency). The decay will not move player from a rank lower than Strong.

Where does the -10% come from? Do y'all even know what ELO means? It's an insult to the ELO rating systems to "invent" a derivative that works with goals opposite to what ELO does and still call it ELO. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system

Did ELO Decay ever actually happen? I'm not sure it was really necessary anyway, what is mentioned there about maintaining rank by not playing was never possible was it? Because if you don't play for 60 days you drop off the rankings.

The irony of that post is the quote "We clearly want to encourage you to play to keep your rank", yet they've created a system that does the exact opposite of that. The system now encourages you to not play to keep your rank, as if you just plough on and keep playing high volume under the current system you get wrecked.

I feel like the "some of the strongest players refrained from playing as they could lose ELO" is more true today than it ever was, because today the strongest players can enter a game where they cannot win ELO before it even begins, only lose, it's not a particularly attractive proposition, if anything you end up more self-aware and caring about ELO now than you did before.

[yuniboshi]

Duh. The game gives you -100% ELO for winning if you "win" against the same player 6 times in a row, which is mathematically anti-ELO. And you want high ranking players to continuously play to keep their rank when the player base keeps shrinking and shrinking and people move onto newer games? Best joke of the year.

[GeoPaladin]

Good to see I'm not the only one who continues to be disappointed by this system a year later.

It's a bit sad. I'd originally intended to buy a subscription, but I find I've been playing much less. While the elo changes are not the only reason, they contributed heavily to my reduced interest. Competition is more fun when your progress is displayed honestly. The efforts to fix the system only made it less accurate overall.

I cannot begin to express how infuriating it is to be randomly matched against someone against whom I can gain nothing if I win, but will take the full penalty if I lose. I've tried in the past, but we were ignored.

[RoyalRook]

I think the -10% elo doesn't work the way it intended. Win trade players will always get discovered and banned just see what happened in the Ark Nova community. In my Terraforming Mars community, especially for this Arena Season, just because me and my rivals tend to be match up together, b/c there are less expert/master level players, we shouldn't be punished. Since we just want to set our games to against other expert/master level players. That's how the system want us to do anyway. Please consider reverse this -10% consecutive elo structure back.

Also, the red thumb system is not good, think about this: you can switch back and forth anytime you want with a specific player, so in practice, you could abuse this system by dodge a player on demand. And trust me, a lot of players don't understand the consequence of red thumbing someone. So you get situations that they have a negative experience in one game, and they never get to play with that player ever again without them even realizing that. A better system would be you only cut off from a player by red thumb AND blocking them, so intuitively the player understand he won't ever interact with the player again.

[--Q--]

→ Team play
It is obviously unfair for games that play with teammates to have different ELO wins/losses within the same team. From now on, when playing games such as Belote, Decrypto, Tichu etc, you will not gain/lose ELO from the other players within your team.

Is frequently partnering with the same teammate in a Team game still a bannable offense at BGA as it is considered ELO cheating? (Although partners don't trade ELO to each other)

[h_illes]

I want to acknowledge the issues concerning the end of Arena Season 15 that have emerged in the past few days and explain a bit what happened and how we managed the situation.
Basically, everything was linked to the recent ELO changes (released last December)...

We're always listening to your feedback and working to make Board Game Arena the best place to play. Keep those messages coming!

*

*Moderator edit: text removed for insults towards the BGA Admins

[AKuras]

If you are keeping this illogical rule to give negative for consecutive wins against the same player at bare minimum there has to be notification before a game that you beat that player how many times in a row.
Now I play against random guy. I can't remember all of them. And I'm risking like 12-16elo points if I lose and then all of a sudden I only win 2 elo points. I did not know in advance that I beat that guy multiple times I a row. If I knew I wouldn't play him.
That's very bad.

[hammastahna]

If you are keeping this illogical rule to give negative for consecutive wins against the same player at bare minimum there has to be notification before a game that you beat that player how many times in a row.
Now I play against random guy. I can't remember all of them. And I'm risking like 12-16elo points if I lose and then all of a sudden I only win 2 elo points. I did not know in advance that I beat that guy multiple times I a row. If I knew I wouldn't play him.
That's very bad.

At least it tells you afterwards so you can red thumb them. Silly system requires silly solutions.

[BananaHarambe]

I've discovered that the number of days to reset the consecutive win penalty is variable for each game. Most games seem to have a 30 day "lookback" period, but some games seem to only have 7 day lookback. For example, Five Tribes has 30 days and The Vale of Eternity has only 7 days based on personal research.

7 days isn't too bad in my opinion for most games and players have a workaround by red thumbing players and writing a note on their profile with a date to unblock if they REALLY want to stop playing against the same player over and over who happens to queue up whenever you do. There shouldn't be too many blocks to manage with 7 day lookback unless you are playing an insane number of games.

30 days is a bit much considering how small the community in most games are. There are only so many players doing real time at certain hours.

Rather than encouraging players to block others when the consecutive win penalty gets too high (100% of whatever your personal cutoff is) might be better to just block the matchmaking entirely until the consecutive win penalty resets to a more reasonable level.

Think about it, if you won or lost against someone 6 times in a row you would want a break from playing against that person. I'm sure both players would want a break.

[KenFin1]

Think about it, if you won or lost against someone 6 times in a row you would want a break from playing against that person. I'm sure both players would want a break.

Some people come on here specifically to play with a set group of friends over and over and over. They would not want to see any auto-blocking of repeat matches based on number of wins/number of times played in a row.

Now Auto-pairing algorithm for arena matches and the like, sure why not. But a hard block for everyone, even manually setting up matches? No, Not a great idea.

Given how much BGA seem to struggle to treat individual games differently from others (this ELO tampering nonsense was to try and stop perceived silliness with one or two specific games for example, but all games got hammered with it) I would rather not see such an auto block implemented.

Currently I can choose not to play someone over and over again (and IMO three times is usually more than enough unless they are a friend) but i do not want the system trying to think it knows better than me. But repeated automatic opponent selection for arena matches? Yeah that needs improving.