Need feedback from turn-based players to counter ELO boosting

[sprockitz]

What about increasing the priority of "last move"-tables to very high in a way that "Go to next table" leads to these games? Perhaps the game progress percentage can help here.

Ordering criterium: (Time left)*(100%-percentage)

The problem is people purposely avoiding finishing games, this would have no impact on forcing them to finish those games.

[sprockitz]

I disagree for limited turn-based games. As we cannot play tournaments with more than 2 players, some of us created tournaments on their own. We then play turn-based games against each other's and scored results outside of BGA. At start, we created lots of table.

are you really playing more than 30 of the same game at the same time? If you need to do more than that, you would still be able to play with Elo turned off...a setting which would make no difference from the perspective of your external tournament.

[ollyfish2002]

We are playing 15 games (16 players). I agree ELO can be off, but beating masters and experts in the group is good for my ELO...

[CB Droege]

Could you please explain your note? I'm not understanding why calculating ELO change based on starting ELO instead of ending ELO would require recalculating all opponents' ELOs also.

While I can see that a player may increase their skill during a game by playing several simultaneous games, I don't see this as a large enough change to affect everyone else's rating.

I would suggest just using the starting ELO of each player to calculate ELO change. Unless, of course, that figure is difficult to obtain as only the current ELO is listed in the database.

However, if no other solution is proposed, limiting the number of simultaneous ranked games is a good solution. The purpose of this site is to have fun playing games. There should be no difference in fun from playing games 1-50 at once, or 1-10, followed by 11-20, followed by 21-30, etc. If people think that there is a difference in fun, they can turn ELO off and play as many as they want.

My first thought was also, "just use the starting ELO to make the calculation at the end, even if it changed since the start", but upon thinking, I wonder if this could still cause an issue if used in bulk? Like: If one starts 200 games at once while they are at 1500, then that's 200 games in a row that will all end up being calculated as if their ELO is 1500. Is that fair?

I think if you wanted to calculate ELO in game start order, the only way to do it would be to create an ELO calculation queue in which games which were started later would have to wait, and the ELO simply wouldn't be calculated at all until games begun before it end. This would be a lot of extra programming though.

[Liallan]

(Another idea would be to forbid you to play on a turn based table while there is another table with the same game and less time to play, but I really dislike this).

Actually, this is what they do at Yucata and mostly it works OK, although it's for all games you're playing and not just the same game, and the reason is specifically to prevent people from just ignoring games they are losing. In other words, it's not about this particular type of situation, but just avoiding losses in general.

Although, I think I'd be disappointed if that were implemented here. The two sites are very different and I guess I sort of expect them to be different.

I don't honestly see why anyone needs to play more than 10 of the same game at once. If this can still be done with 30, make the limit lower. How many people really play that many of the same game at once?

I'm not sure if I'm fond of the idea of using the ELO from the start of the game. Maybe that's just psychological since I'm used to it being as of the end of the game, at two different sites.

[demiurgsage]

I don't honestly see why anyone needs to play more than 10 of the same game at once. If this can still be done with 30, make the limit lower. How many people really play that many of the same game at once?

Quite a lot. In most turn-based games players do only 1 or 2 moves per day. People want more actions. If you can't play realtime and really love some game then you create 20-30 or more tables.

[dremaa]

How much of an ELO difference is there from winning 195 games and losing 105 games versus losing 105 games then winning 195? Either way, you have won 90 more games than you have lost, does the order in which it happens matter that much? If the other players you are beating later have lower ELO's, wouldn't that mean that you will acquire less points?

The idea of a "k-factor" seems like it might work if the games at first are weighted more than the games later. This would seem to make it harder to change your ELO the more games you play. Losing the games faster would have a larger impact on your games than winning the games later. Of course, the reverse would then be done where people finish games they are winning faster and boost their ELO that way.