Why ELO doesn't suit to BGA

[sprockitz]

What if you maintain a permanent Elo which remains hidden but is still used for computing seasonal scores of your opponents. My thought is if someone knows I'm a 2000+ player in a game but am ranked 1500, they won't want to play me because they expect to lose substantial Elo points for the current season.

So what you do is have n+1 Elo calculations for each game, where n is number of players. So the 1st n calculations, one for each participant, use the kth participants season Elo and everyone else's permanent Elo, and are used to update the season Elo of the kth participant. Then the +1 calculation uses all the permanent Elo to update those player's permanent Elo.

So say we have 2 players whose current Elo's are both 2000...but a new season starts and they are both 1500. So for each individual in the season ratings, their Elo would be computed as if they were 1500 and opponent was 2000. For the permanent Elo both would be 2000. Again permanent Elo wouldn't be displayed, or at least not awarded, so people would not be as protective of it. So permanent Elo remains a zero sum game (minus K-factor and leave penalties, though without award permanent Elo shouldn't incur a penalty for leaving above the loss, only season Elo should incur a leave penalty), while season Elo would not need to be zero sum as playing opponent's who are better in real terms than their season rating indicate would provide a larger benefit. This could at least help compensate for the fact that a season is likely not going to be long enough for people to reach their true ratings, as you at least get awarded for beating people at their true ratings. And, anyway you decouple prestige and permanent Elo should prevent people from protecting their ratings and actually lead to more accurate permanent Elo.

Also, this allows you to use different K-values for season versus permanent, as you could make season more volatile and permanent less. For permanent could add extra levels of K-values (like if >100 games, K=15)

[cosmosis]

Needless to say that this is impossible to organize a turn based tournament with so much players

I agree that just having massive tournaments isn't the correct solution. Here's a solution for tournaments:

Create a metric that accumulates results from tournaments played for a specific game during a season. Then people can create their own regional (or global) tournaments. This metric could just be people getting points at the end of each tournament based on the difficulty of the tournament.


Now, the biggest potential problem I see is that people can game the system by choosing who participates in their tournaments. So here's a solution to that:

People who want to have their tournaments count towards the season have to register their tournaments to make them official. These tournaments probably have some criteria they have to fulfill:

• The person creating the tournaments should commit to holding recurring tournaments. I already see people doing this with (for example) weekly Tash Kalar tournaments. This also makes it so that people don't just create one-off tournaments to unfairly boost their season scores.
• Access to these tournaments should be fair. People can't restrict them to friends, or just do two-person tournaments, etc.
• Any other criteria BGA deems necessary to make the contest fair.

Here are some benefits of this kind of system:

• It helps boost the BGA community without BGA putting in much work. I'm sure there are many people on this site who would be excited to put in the effort to organize official tournaments for, and build up the community around, their favorite games. I already see this happening in the current tournament system.
• Having the players actually participate in the creation of official tournaments encourages more site participation. Seriously, what could be better? Players are excited to put in work that builds community on BGA and promotes the site. If they're hosting tournaments, they'll probably even try to get friends who don't use BGA involved in their tournaments.
• The community will police the tournaments. They already police the top ELO rewards by reporting players who cheat. If people start gaming the tournament system, the community will report them and BGA can remove their tournaments from seasonal scores.
• It doesn't seem hard to implement. All of the ingredients are already here on the site. It only requires allowing players to create official tournaments, and then finding a way to have these tournaments count for the seasonal ranks.
• People won't get upset. Am I missing something that people would get upset about? I don't know, but it seems much less harmful than suddenly dropping everyone's ELOs that they've put hours of time into.
• BGA could restrict official tournament creation to members-only. Half-joking here, but I'm sure for some it would be enough incentive to keep them signed up with the site.
• It means BGA can concentrate some effort on making the tournament system better and integrating it more fully into the site. This might be more of a selfish reason, but I love the that players can create their own tournaments here. There are definitely things broken about the tournament system as it currently is, and I'm hoping that BGA will keep working to make tournaments here better. I know they've put in a lot of effort already.

I'd like to hear what you think of these suggestions, sourisdudesert.

[glitter and doom]

The only games with a decent rankings are the new ones : for most of the recent games, top players have all played a significant number of games and no one is "defending a position" => This is what incite me to recreate these conditions for all games at each seasons.

The new games are played a lot simply because they are NEW. No one has got bored of them yet. You can reset the Elo to everyone, but the old game will still be OLD.

I don't quite understand what would be a benefit for BGA if I play something old and boring instead of something I really enjoy.

[sourisdudesert]

I'd like to hear what you think of these suggestions, sourisdudesert.

Well, looks interesting, but this is way much complicated that you imagine.

Beside this, as there are "seasonal points", that are "reset each new season", and that you are winning them by beating other players without risk for you, it is very close to the first system I proposed (which was really much simple).

[cosmosis]

Beside this, as there are "seasonal points", that are "reset each new season", and that you are winning them by beating other players without risk for you, it is very close to the first system I proposed (which was really much simple).

Except that it doesn't reset ELO, which is the thing that everyone here is concerned about. Having the seasonal contests depend on ELO just encourages more of the same ELO cheating you are currently seeing, but on a shorter timescale.

[cosmosis]

Well, looks interesting, but this is way much complicated that you imagine.

What are the complicated things? I work in software development so I understand that there might be a lot of things I'm missing there, but on the surface it doesn't seem horrible. I guess it depends on whether the idea goes along with the way in which you want the site to progress (because if they're aligned it might be worth the effort).

[latexrhombus]

Edit: apparently club members can create tournaments so I have just deleted my post. I didn't realize that. That's pretty cool.

[cosmosis]

This post is slightly off topic, but regardless of whether tournaments have anything to do with season-based prestige, it would still be pretty neat to allow players to make their own tournaments (if only club members as cosmosis jokingly suggested). They do not even have to award prestige (if not used in the season-based prestige system). It would just be a cool offering as I do believe people would get their friends to join their tournaments.

Players already can make their own tournaments. And I have seen people get off-site friends involved in their tournaments. Which is the reason I thought that idea would not take much work to implement, and that it would be great for getting more BGA members.

[sprockitz]

Well, looks interesting, but this is way much complicated that you imagine.

What are the complicated things? I work in software development so I understand that there might be a lot of things I'm missing there, but on the surface it doesn't seem horrible. I guess it depends on whether the idea goes along with the way in which you want the site to progress (because if they're aligned it might be worth the effort).

For starters tournaments are currently only 2 player games, so this would have to change

[cosmosis]

Well, looks interesting, but this is way much complicated that you imagine.

What are the complicated things? I work in software development so I understand that there might be a lot of things I'm missing there, but on the surface it doesn't seem horrible. I guess it depends on whether the idea goes along with the way in which you want the site to progress (because if they're aligned it might be worth the effort).

For starters tournaments are currently only 2 player games, so this would have to change

Good point. I have wondered whether that will be implemented in the future.