Hi,
I like BGA a lot, and mostly play Hanabi, as the play is very advanced compared to my gaming group. Sadly, the rise of my ELO score shows a bad side effect very specifically to the game of Hanabi: People keep abandoning games to early just because they are afraid to loose ELO (at least that is my assumption).
So there are actually two possible explanations why high-ELO (>500) often abandon Hanabi-games:
1. They want to maintain a high ELO score (feeling of success/achievment) and therefore propose to abandon games that seem lost (maybe even because of bad luck) or where maybe just one mistake was made and they suspect the others are simply bad Hanabi players, therefore abonding the game avoids loosing ELO points.
2. They do not care directly about the ELO score but more about just winning the game, and abandoning the game early is for them like saying, "Ok, we had bad luck, or you do not play well, I do not want play along and loose, so lets quit and start a new game with a better deck/players".
The second explanation is not directly related to the ELO score per se, but still applies more often to high ELO players, as people behaving in this way just get as a by-product an higher ELO score, and also lower ELO score players just loose more often and have a lower threshold for this kind of behavior, so this is something that can certainly grow with the experience (and therefore the players expectation to play a good game).
Possible Solutions to this problem:
- removing the ELO from Hanabi: As there are no Arena games, I think ELO is actually nothing worth on BGA except for the prestige, which is the one thing that it is actually not doing well by the above reasoning. The downside is, it is harder to figure out players that play well, so that the game can be interesting for the ones who play more complex Hanabi strategies. Same reasoning for newcomers applies. A simple "Games-played-counter" might mitigate this (and with not counting Abandoned games, this would actually also counteract the 2. explanation).
- Regulating the possibility of abandoning games: Maybe just being able to do it in the first round. Or allowing each player to abandon only every 10th game or so. Of course, the very competitive players than just might get angry at the other players for no good reason other than them being not perfect robots. So they might just use the chat for making sure nobody plays bad or they downvote other players after the game or or or. I experienced this behavior, when not agreeing to Abandon the game with them. Some go even so far to just stop playing, being so angry about the game and loosing ELO that they don't care that when loosing they even loose more ELO this way. So regulating might not be the best way, but it would allow good players (independent of the shuffled deck) to actually get higher ELO scores, so that they can find each other and avoid the players that get angry to fast and more often than not actually play not that well because they cannot handle the uncertainty in bad shuffled decks.
Maybe there are other solutions, to this problem I myself might only have?
What do you think about this? Is it maybe not to annoying to you? To give some concrete numbers, right now I am just above ELO 500 and I suspect the match making algorithm takes this into account, so I have many high-level Hanabi players on the table, and I find myself aggreeing to Abandon a game in about 1 out of 3 games :/.
Thanks for sharing your opinions on this, if I have the feeling many agree on this, I would put a "Bug" report forward.
I like BGA a lot, and mostly play Hanabi, as the play is very advanced compared to my gaming group. Sadly, the rise of my ELO score shows a bad side effect very specifically to the game of Hanabi: People keep abandoning games to early just because they are afraid to loose ELO (at least that is my assumption).
So there are actually two possible explanations why high-ELO (>500) often abandon Hanabi-games:
1. They want to maintain a high ELO score (feeling of success/achievment) and therefore propose to abandon games that seem lost (maybe even because of bad luck) or where maybe just one mistake was made and they suspect the others are simply bad Hanabi players, therefore abonding the game avoids loosing ELO points.
2. They do not care directly about the ELO score but more about just winning the game, and abandoning the game early is for them like saying, "Ok, we had bad luck, or you do not play well, I do not want play along and loose, so lets quit and start a new game with a better deck/players".
The second explanation is not directly related to the ELO score per se, but still applies more often to high ELO players, as people behaving in this way just get as a by-product an higher ELO score, and also lower ELO score players just loose more often and have a lower threshold for this kind of behavior, so this is something that can certainly grow with the experience (and therefore the players expectation to play a good game).
Possible Solutions to this problem:
- removing the ELO from Hanabi: As there are no Arena games, I think ELO is actually nothing worth on BGA except for the prestige, which is the one thing that it is actually not doing well by the above reasoning. The downside is, it is harder to figure out players that play well, so that the game can be interesting for the ones who play more complex Hanabi strategies. Same reasoning for newcomers applies. A simple "Games-played-counter" might mitigate this (and with not counting Abandoned games, this would actually also counteract the 2. explanation).
- Regulating the possibility of abandoning games: Maybe just being able to do it in the first round. Or allowing each player to abandon only every 10th game or so. Of course, the very competitive players than just might get angry at the other players for no good reason other than them being not perfect robots. So they might just use the chat for making sure nobody plays bad or they downvote other players after the game or or or. I experienced this behavior, when not agreeing to Abandon the game with them. Some go even so far to just stop playing, being so angry about the game and loosing ELO that they don't care that when loosing they even loose more ELO this way. So regulating might not be the best way, but it would allow good players (independent of the shuffled deck) to actually get higher ELO scores, so that they can find each other and avoid the players that get angry to fast and more often than not actually play not that well because they cannot handle the uncertainty in bad shuffled decks.
Maybe there are other solutions, to this problem I myself might only have?
What do you think about this? Is it maybe not to annoying to you? To give some concrete numbers, right now I am just above ELO 500 and I suspect the match making algorithm takes this into account, so I have many high-level Hanabi players on the table, and I find myself aggreeing to Abandon a game in about 1 out of 3 games :/.
Thanks for sharing your opinions on this, if I have the feeling many agree on this, I would put a "Bug" report forward.
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