Continuation of Official Comments on New Karma

[sourisdudesert]

Does it mean that kingmaking is actually allowed on BGA and when you can't win you can choose the player and help him to win?

Obviously not. Believe it or not, but most players here are not sore losers who start doing kingmaking when they are losing a game. Almost all of them are playing the best, as they would do with friends.

The distibution of quits isn't uniform. Even with 5% chance to quit the game you may have 3 quits in a row. This is the nature of randomness.

Again, statistics : only a very few proportion of players have a low karma so your fear has no reality. I even do not understand why you are constantly arguing that this system is too punitive while in the same time you manage to have a 100% karma ...

[chrisa]

Since we can talk about the karma system again:

Several of us have pointed out an issue, which is the speed with which your reputation can be destroyed if you happen to be offline for serious reasons and are expelled from a series of turn-based games you had in progress. Being expelled from 6 games in a couple of days degrades your karma to 0% ("very bad"), and forbids you to chat and join tables that have restrictions, whatever your personal history (# of green thumbs, # of leaves except for those recent ones, # of games played, etc.)

If you finish a game per day, it takes one month to be able to chat again (you cannot even say "hello" or "gg"), one month to switch from "very bad" to "bad", 65 days to retrieve a "good" reputation (while it can take only 2 days to fall from "excellent" to "very bad"...).

In the meanwhile, people who see you have a poor reputation do not exactly know why: they can see you have timed out several times, that you got leave penalties (but they do not know whether you left the games yourself or were expelled because of time out), and they cannot see whether this is due to an excess of red thumbs. Everything is hidden behind: "you have a very bad reputation", once again whatever your global history...This is really offending and if this should happen to me, I would seriously consider leaving this platform (although I am quite addicted to it).

Now, as I mentioned, this point has been raised by several people in the official (now locked) thread, but I do not think that the admins gave us their views on this question and I would be interested to know what they think about it.

[sourisdudesert]

Several of us have pointed out an issue, which is the speed with which your reputation can be destroyed if you happen to be offline for serious reasons and are expelled from a series of turn-based games you had in progress

Well, at first, BGA is providing a "holiday bonus" to make sure you don't get penalty during a period of time where you are not available. If by any chance you couldn't use this bonus because of a major issue in your life, we used to be comprehensive and may cancel some of these penalties.

The most common situation is a turn based tournament, where you can play a lot of games in parallel, with a strong time constraint and no possibility to use bonus. In that case, the karma penalty is -4, so even leaving 6 games in a row does not affect your reputation so much.

But again, this is theory. During the 2 last months, I never received an email from a person that was complaining about a very low reputation with a good reason to complain (= wasn't a regular game leaver).

[demiurgsage]

Deleted, to discuss kingmaking go next topic
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10868

I even do not understand why you are constantly arguing that this system is too punitive while in the same time you manage to have a 100% karma ...

Because I think about other people, not about myself.

[demiurgsage]

• Players are actually using the personal note system, so that's why we kept it.
• Approximately 60% of of the red thumb given are given for "personal reason". It means that the players explicitly decide not to hurt their opponent reputation.

I want to tell about some user experience with using new red thumbs.
I tried to give a red thumb to a user a couple of times since personal red thubms were added and can say that it is not easy to give a red thumb now. You can't give a red thumb to a user with which you didn't finish a game recently. (If it's a turn-based game you could want to give someone a red thumb in the middle of the game. Or someone can insult you on forum or in real life.) You can't give a red thumb to beginner. I think that it should be allowed to give personal red thumbs to anyone. Sometimes someone insult you but you are not sure that moderator will think that he insults you enough and your red thumb is correct. Sometimes you don't know was it kingmaking move or just a mistake or stupid move of a player who didn't know rules good enough. So you instead of explaining why you want to give a red thumb to a certain player and why the community shouldn't play with him, give him a personal red thumb and go ahead.

[chrisa]

If by any chance you couldn't use this bonus because of a major issue in your life, we used to be comprehensive and may cancel some of these penalties.(...) During the 2 last months, I never received an email from a person that was complaining about a very low reputation with a good reason to complain

Honestly, I would never think to send an email to complain on my personal case...I don't like bypasses, and I would prefer the "law" to be less inflexible, to consider the history of players, e.g. as suggested in the other thread: viewtopic.php?f=10&t=10651&start=70#p32400, which would be fair to everybody, those who dare complaining, and those who don't, instead of blindly degrading someone from "perfect" downto "very bad" in a couple of days (even if he has been "perfect" for several months/years).
If I am so sensitive on that point, it is because I have seen someone in that situation recently, and I found that extremely violent.
Especially because nobody can know why he has a poor reputation: does he insult people, or leave games on purpose? He cannot use the chat to explain it. Now, the good (or bad?) outcome of this story is that, for this reason, I never restrict my tables anymore on reputation.

The most common situation is a turn based tournament, where you can play a lot of games in parallel, with a strong time constraint and no possibility to use bonus. In that case, the karma penalty is -4, so even leaving 6 games in a row does not affect your reputation so much.

As far as I can see, most turn-based players have several (if not many) games in progress at the same time (not in tournaments) and then take the risk of having their reputation damaged very fast (if you play 2 moves per day, you can be expelled after 2 days offline - that's enough if your connection drops for a week-end, which you generally cannot anticipate and use a joker).

a regular game leaver

Imho, there should be a distinction between someone who leaves games because it does want to make the effort to go to the end, and someone who is expelled from a game, sometimes only a few seconds/minutes after the time limit expires...

[Ranif88]

Thanks for your message.

Some "admin" point of view :

We recently measure the effect of the new Karma system (+ all associate changes, like emailing penalties) on BGA statistics. Basically, the number of games with a leaving player has decreased by -40% (September has been compared to November). If you exclude games that did not end because players decided it, we increase the % of finished games from 95% to 97.5%.

At the same time, we re-work how the moderation works, and at now 100% of player's reports are judged in less than 4 weeks - and most of them are judged in less than 1 week. It has slightly decreased the number of reports, as "bad" players knows now that they cannot stay in this website more than few days before having their accounts suspended.

Finally, as you know you have now to give a reason when you give a red thumb, which allows us to distinguish between the "I just dont want to play with this player, please do not hurt his reputation" and the "everyone should avoid this player". Players with too many red thumbs gets an explicit message with a statistic showing why they received red thumb to make sure they can improve their attitude.

I know changes are difficult, but as long as the system is more simple, more tolerant for beginners, and if metrics show us that it is going in the right direction, there is no reason to take a step back.

Thank you for the response. Your take is indeed from the "admin" point of view, and kudos for enhancing the moderation and report tool efficiency for you and the site - good positives, as is the red thumb reasoning inclusion.

A note: It is not understanding the difficulty of change, but the interest in addressing the still-unaddressed points or use cases that drives the conversation.

One note still outstanding from my comments is that the system continues to not account for any utility of the green thumb (good player) awarding within either karma or presentation of (again) a games to good/bad thumbs received metric, still considered a valuable distinction for players. A karmic system of gamer presence without inclusion of a key "goodness" metric continues to reward simple stay/play/time and avoidance of reds (not accrual of greens) as behavior guidance. While "dont be bad" is admirable, no weighting or visibility to just "how good are you" continues to be an odd if not erroneous exclusion to a "karma focused quality assessment" of players. My point remains valid to either modify karma for inclusion of accumulated greens and/or provide an additional games played+green/red thumbs received metric to aid player (not admin) evaluations, as more visibility to the "whys" (good and bad) of a player remains a key desire of many of the players/supporters of the site.

A small second note (observation) is that many of the admin and player responses for rationale behind the karmic changes or other tool discussions often include subjective notes ("obviously this would happen...of course a player would...no one would ever..."). The reality is of course no system is perfect; however, use of subjective assumption of what players should do, play well, be courteous, etc. (as this often is proved wrong) should factor less into solutions. The use of statistics in forming changes is welcome and appreciated as well but even when 90-95% of a case appears to support a change, the opportunity to address the remaining 5-10% of issue with a simple solution should not be waved away through subjective impression of what "should" occur. To this point there remains a real interest in understanding why someone is receiving a red thumb and a desire to pursue redress/appeal/counter (rather than the snipe-y give one back anonymous effort in place) which is not addressed yet beyond dependency on a poor sport to offer comment via text.

[demiurgsage]

I have also another observation. Before karma system players loved to add reputation restrictions to their tables like <10% red, >90% green. Now it looks like more than 70% of table starters don't add karma restrictions to their tables.
I think that this happened because players know that karma don't differ bad people with those who had a couple of random quits. You have statistics that can shed light on this point. But players don't have this statistics and don't know if they see a really bad guy or someone with 3 recent quits.
I understand that you love this karma system and will not change it. But maybe you add something that help players to differ two types of players with low karma. E.g. you can show for players with recent quits the number of quits and overall quit percent over a karma strip or near it. And you can for players with big percent of red thumbs paint karma strip in different colors.

[ojomojojojo]

Karma force people to finish their games but also it makes them unhappy.
I wrote before about two situations when you want to quit.
1. You lost chances in multi-player game. So you have no interest to continue it. The best solution would be to allow player to quit game honorably like in TTA or to replace player by bot. Now the player should remain at the computer to not lose his karma.
2. You play tournament game. I don't know why but you can't concede tournament game. So you should end your tournament game even if you have no chances or no interest to do it.

Also I think this system punishes players too much for random quits.

So basically you are asking why people cant quit when losing? And there lies the problem.

[Ankeszu]

I have three issues about the Karma/red thumb system that I don't see neither in Introduction (including comments), neither here.

1. In the old system, I used to play with a guy of nearly 50/50 red/green thumb ratio - and I enjoyed playing with him, AND chatting with him. I remember he had once punishment about not talking (due to grades - some report on him), and I was sad when he didn't talk with me during/after our games. But it didn't last long at least.
Although he stopped playing BGA before new system, I wonder what would happen if he was back.
As his Karma is now 85%, I assume old red thumbs became 'personal' red thumbs, not influencing the Karma. (Which I also think a bit odd... see point 2)
But if he was back and he was again gaining a lot of red thumbs, he may get the chat ban. And despite there are players who like the guy, who do think he is - even if not the most polite - smart and worth chatting with, they cannot chat with him. And they would feel punished, for liking the person that others don't like. Especially as - see point 3 - many people will see no point in giving green thumb (what would lower the ratio red/all thumbs and make possible to chat again).

I am not sure what would be the answer to this. Just raising the question. What if somebody wants to chat with someone who is chat-banned? (Does talking ban include PM via forum?)
Can there be any option to turn on chatting with banned played (by the player interested in chatting), even if only in private chats?

2. Old red thumbs... Seeing the mentioned above guy's Karma, I have to assume old red thumbs became 'personal' thumbs. I went to the profile of one player I gave red thumb, just to check if there is an option to change it for a warning one. (When I clicked, it - ofc - went to "no thumb", and when I tried to give red thumb again it showed - ofc - I didn't play with the guy recently so I can't give him red thumb. If there is a way to change thumbs private->warning, it isn't intuitive.)

But I won't play with the guys I gave red thumbs just to thumb them again. I don't care about personal red thumbs, I don't use them anyway. But...

You made changes that his old red thumbers voice doesn't matter at all as for his behavior. It's like their thumbs vanished. They didn't matter for his Karma or anything, and - as they already gave him red thumb - they won't be playing with him again. So they won't give him warning red thumb. I really don't like it. It's like telling me my voice didn't matter, coz I played with the bad guy too early.

3. After reading few discussions on forum, I started to notice that the quote below (from KarmaFAQ) is contradicting itself...

How can I see how many green/red thumbs a player received?

You cannot anymore, and they cannot see yours.

Green / red thumb was designed to be a private and subjective opinion on another player: if you want to remember that this player is nice, give him/her a green thumb. If you never want to play against that player again, give him/her a red thumb. That's it, and this is your personal opinion on him/her: there is no need to bring shame on a player by showing to everyone he/she got a red thumb.

However, the previous system was helping us to identify the "really bad guys" thanks to their high number of red thumbs. We did want to keep this "wisdom of the crowd" aspect so we introduced the following: the players who have really too many red thumbs in regards to green thumbs have now a special "warning" message on their home screen to encourage them to change their behavior, and in addition their Karma cannot go over a given value (which will make their reputation bad, regardless of other factors).

The new system isn't making green thumbs any more private matter, if they are taken into calculation %age of red thumbs for limiting Karma. The system only pretends it's private, and that pretending is a problem.

So: if a player is pretty typical - not rude but not really nice either - and people often don't give him green thumbs (because there is nothing to remember, i.e. players who just play without talking at all), and the player receives rarely red thumbs - as everyone. In this system each green thumb not given make given red thumbs more powerful. I don't think it's fair. But it is suggested by the system. (As the website doesn't force anyone to give any thumb, there isn't duality red vs green, but red vs green vs none. But the current ratio kinda didn't see it.)

It wouldn't be a problem if the % of red thumbs was calculated by taking red thumbs vs number of all players playing against the person. (It was the way I thought it works, for some time after introducing Karma.)

It was noticed also by some players on red thumb evolution topic ( viewtopic.php?f=10&t=10597 ) :

I think that instead of making red thumbs more powerfull maybe a good idea to make more powerfull green thumbs. I think that green thumbs should be for good people with whom we want to play, for others we need a yellow thumb that means "OK player". Now we give green thumbs to all players who didn't disappointed us too much. I'm not sure we use thumbs in the right way.

And this idea is ok too, if the system forces to give a thumb for a player after the game (i.e. to start any new game - though it would require to think about influence on turnbased games). And the ratio would count red to all thumbs.