Why opening up ELO visibility to everyone?
ELO points you win/lose after each game are a motivation for a lot of players on BGA.
Until now, 1 month after your registration, you were not able to see your ELO anymore. Some players were losing a lot of their motivation after that.
To fix this, we have been wanting to open ELO to everyone for a long time, but of course we need money to run this service, and so the money generated by people subscribing because of the "hidden ELO" was needed. However, now that there is a strong catalog of "premium games" on BGA, we are confident that there will be the same number of players that will support us and get a subscription (and hopefully, more), so we thought it was time to open up ELO to anyone.
Is this risky for you? Is this change permanent?
Yes this is risky. But we are confident everything is going to went fine.
We will analyse the impact on subscriptions after a while, and check if we can continue to run the service like this. If this is not he case (ex : significant drop of Club subscriptions), we will find a way to fix this, probably by hiding/blocking something that is currently free. But this will probably not be ELO as we are convinced that ELO should be open to everyone for the reasons explained before.
Is prestige open to everyone like ELO?
We will make some adjustments too on prestige so there's going to be another news specifically on prestige. But yes, you can consider that prestige is/will be open to anyone for the exact same reasons than ELO.
Why did you introduce a minimum ELO on BGA?
When you learnt a new game on BGA, your ELO started at 1500 and used to decrease quickly to 1400 or 1300 because it is usual to loose your first games.
It was very discouraging for a lot of players to see that someone who never played had a 1500 ELO while they had a 1400 ELO after a few games.
We want to reward the effort of learning a new game, so we changed the system to make sure that you can only WIN points during your first games, and never have less than someone that just started playing this game.
Why subtracting 1300 to all ELO scores displayed?
With the new system, you cannot go below a certain value (initial beginner's ELO), so it is actually more simple to consider that this value is zero.
We know that you are used to playing with the old values, but we cannot keep an underperforming system because of that.
We are 100% sure you will get used to the new values after few games, and in the case you really need to compare with some old valuel, you just have to add 1300
The number of games played / number of victories have disappeared!
No they haven't.
When an opponent joins your table, just put your mouse over the ELO bar to see them.
These informations are less important than ELO and skill level (ex : "Expert"), so we moved them a little step further. This is a very small price to pay to have a more clear display, and to get everyone to understand that the best way to evaluate the skill of his/her opponent is the ELO score.
How did you convert old ELOs into new ones?
If you have 0 games played: new ELO = 0.
If you have more than 4 games played: new ELO = old ELO - 1300, with a minimum of 100.
If you have between 0 and 4 games played: new ELO = old ELO - 1300, with a minimum of 1.
Why did you keep the name "ELO" while this is not "ELO" anymore?
Because this is still ELO.
We are using the ELO formula, which still makes sense.
We just introduced a minimum. When you get a few points above 100 ELO, the new system has no difference with the ELO system.
Since there is a minimum, there is no way now to distinguish between a very weak player and an average player?
This is partially true: as the minimum ELO after a few games correspond to the old "1400 ELO", it may be more difficult to distinguish between a weak player and a very weak player.
However :
_ there is going to be a (limited) ELO inflation after the introduction of the minimum ELO, and consequently even a weak player should be able to have an ELO around 150 by beating very weak players, and consequently you'll be able to distinguish them.
_ we consider that it is way more important to not discourage beginners/weak players than to distinguish between weak/very weak players. After all, if you are a strong player at a game, weak/very weak is practically the same from your point of view.
I've noted that the ELO points we win/lose has decreased, it this normal?
Yes. We slightly modified the "K factor", which indicate how many ELO points you win/lose against an opponent with your level. We'd like to make ELO a little bit more stable for regular players (until now your ELO could vary way too much with only a few games).
If you have less than 10 games played, K=60 (you win 30 points against a player with the same ELO).
If you have between 10 and 20 games played, K=40 (you win 20 points against a player with the same ELO).
Above 20 games played, K=20 (you win 10 points against a player with the same ELO).
