Board Game Arena

Here to add weight to this question since I did a search and found it after encountering the same problem. It took me two wins to get five points in cubirds and then I lost all five points to the subsequent game when I lost by one turn and luck is a huge factor in this game!

Ridiculous! You should lose the same number of points as you win, regardless of the ELO/rank of the opponent!

I'm stuck forever at zero in the gold rank even though I've twice gotten to one point away from Elite. 2 bad games can take away what it took you 5 wins to earn. If I hit zero again I'm probably going to drop the arena. If you make loss penalty too steep on a luck-influenced game, it stops being fun!

Kruszer wrote: ↑08 October 2021, 08:47 Ridiculous! You should lose the same number of points as you win, regardless of the ELO/rank of the opponent!

Then it's not ELO anymore. You gain less and lose more against opponents with lower ELO and vice versa. That's the point of the system.
ELO is not appropriate for heavily luck-based games (no match play yet), but it's how BGA rating works (and this won't change probably).

Kruszer wrote: ↑08 October 2021, 08:47 I'm stuck forever at zero in the gold rank even though I've twice gotten to one point away from Elite. 2 bad games can take away what it took you 5 wins to earn. If I hit zero again I'm probably going to drop the arena. If you make loss penalty too steep on a luck-influenced game, it stops being fun!

Please limit your preference setting to exclude bronze players as Jest Phulin and GreenP55 suggested.

I agree.
Also for me happens the same.
We are very close in elite, I won and I received only +18

Table n. 239345899

Arena swings are huge also when you have already reached Elite. I had a very unlucky streak which brought me from arena top 50 down to approximately place 400 in just a few games. For several days/weeks I stayed there and now I had a very lucky streak (16 wins out of 20 games) and only the last 15 games of this series brought me from arena no. 350 to arena no. 17.

But that is not really a problem of arena but just a property of backgammon - as we all love (and hate) it. It is quite common to have a losing streak of 10 games in a row or a winning streak of 10 games in a row.