Unethical play in Love Letter

[Call me Ishmael]

There continues to be rampant kingmaking in certain games, such as Love Letter, insofar as persons will ignore the winning player and target the low player, an action which only leads to them self and the low guy losing, and thus high player winning. Problems I come up against:

(1) The reporting process is too cumbersome, esp trying to locate the instances of said unethical behaviour in the game, eg, to come up with turn numbers. One should be able to mark a turn for reporting within the game with great facility.

(2) As far as I know, nothing is really done to reprimand such unethical behaviour. It seems that board game arena is only concerned with whether it can be proven if two players formally collaborated or not. But I think this policy should be changed. Whether they formally collaborated or not shouldn't factor in...each player should be playing to win the game , not playing to suppress a low player and thus leave the winning player unscathed.

(3) Someone pointed out to me that in ELO games, the person in third place loses less ELO points that the person in fourth place. If this is true, then BGA is rewarding deplorable behaviour. Each player should be doing his best to win each game, not to be pushing another player into last place on these multi player games.

I have lost a great deal of respect for Board Game Arena for harbouring this poor sportsmanship as it has been doing. If either (a) it would open up Love Letter to all players (as it is frustrating to wait all day to finally get into a game, only to have it ruined by someone turning on the lowest player), or (b) have the admins step up to the plate and not tolerate said behaviour, I would regain that respect.

Already in Hearts, the rules forbid a player pointing out to the table that one is trying to 'Shoot the moon'. If that can be held up as a standard of conduct in Hearts, why can't 'leave the low player alone and focus on eliminating the lead player' be similarly the standard in Love Letter?

[senatorhung]

dunno why you are so bothered by this. my experience with Love Letter is that it is a 90% luck game ... even Can't Stop has more skill.

if you don't want this type of kingmaking to bother you .. just sign up (or start yourself) Love Letter games with ELO off.

as for the correspondence between the prohibition in Hearts to a situation in Love Letter ... your analogy makes zero sense. pointing out that someone is making a moonshot in Hearts ... the corresponding situation would be to indicate that whoever is ahead in score will win if someone else doesn't play 'properly'. which is the exact opposite of what you seem to be asking for.

and the Hearts restriction is no biggie anyway. all you have to do in chat is say ... "maybe i should shoot for the moon ?" if the other non.mooning players don't clue in ... there is no hope of stopping the moonshot anyway.

[Shaq Jenkins]

I think Love Letter should be scored similarly to Quantum - the first person to win four rounds comes in first place and everyone else comes in last place regardless of how many rounds they won. This will cut down on the amount of people who target players beneath them rather than the winner.

Love Letter is a luck based game, which is why it makes absolutely no sense that players refuse to target the person who's winning. The leader could have several rounds of bad luck - why give the game away and not fight for first place? Such a ridiculous strategy.

[StringsAndVerses]

dunno why you are so bothered by this. my experience with Love Letter is that it is a 90% luck game ...

as for the correspondence between the prohibition in Hearts to a situation in Love Letter ... your analogy makes zero sense. pointing out that someone is making a moonshot in Hearts ... the corresponding situation would be to indicate that whoever is ahead in score will win if someone else doesn't play 'properly'. which is the exact opposite of what you seem to be asking for.

I am bothered by this because by targeting the lower player, it shifts the balance of luck even further towards the winning player.

As far as your comparison to Hearts is concerned, you are dead wrong. Announcing that Joe is on his way to shoot the moon in this current hand is quite different from noting which players have already scored few or no points already in this current *game*, and to spend one's plays attempting to eliminate them rather than attempting to eliminate the player who is manifestly (by the scoreboard) on his way to win the whole game is blatent "I'm gonna make both myself and low guy lose" play.

[demiurgsage]

People will do such things untill rewards system doesn't change. If you can get a few extra points for 2nd place why you shouldn't do it?

[Alectric]

Just give those players a thumbs down. That's what it's for, right? You won't play with them again, and if enough players do it they'll lose reputation.

[StratThinker]

dunno why you are so bothered by this. my experience with Love Letter is that it is a 90% luck game ... even Can't Stop has more skill.

Suppose there are 5 other players. A guard on its own can give you 5*9 possibility. A cardinal on its own can give you 2*(5 choose 2) + 5 = 25 possibilities. Several other cards give you 5 or 6 possibilities. Also between your turn you should be watch who plays what card against whom, to guess what was that player's other card. I think the biggest reason for the low rating spread (typically games with less luck have much higher rated players), is not luck but rather how everyone targets the highest rated player.

[Jessicannot Sp eak]

for 3-4 player games, or the game itself is very luck-based
eg in 4player games, if players attack the leader but not the guy with lowest score at that time
it will be more likely to have a 3333 situation at last, rather than 3330

in 3333, players have 25% chance to win, in 3330, there are 3330, players have 33% to win.

[Jessicannot Sp eak]

and personally I think sometimes intentionally losing a round may not be bad
the first guy to get 3 points will likely to be attacked by everyone
if a player can be the 2nd or 3rd person to have 3points, they can get better advantage