Elo adjustment

[ufm]

My personal opinion is that this is too much for such a short game. Another co-op game that also requires many small moves (so it is slow on turn-based mode, but quick to play in real-time) is Bandido. It also involves laying tiles and can have a similar number of moves. However, sometimes you can be lucky and solve Bandido very fast, so on average it is perhaps a faster game than The way to Juliet.

It IS faster. Average turn spent is 38, and winning games play even quicker, especially when players are more skilled.

Bandido awards 1 ELO per win, regardless of how long the game takes. That seemed unreasonable to me at first, but there are other games that take longer to play that also give just 1 ELO. On the other hand, there are games that give quite a lot of ELO.

Bandido and Similo are fast enough.
Others are... well, I won't say Daybreak, Burgle Bros. and The Crews' rating system are decent.

People who enjoy a co-op game here on BGA will play it hundreds of times, and if the ELO awarded per game is too high, they all end up with 8700 ELO or whatever the system max is (that example is from Regicide, where it is easier to win with 4 players but you get 48 ELO for such a win, while you only get 24 ELO for winning with 2 players and 36 ELO with 3 players). It's hard to win Regicide so it is very nice to get a lot of ELO when you manage to win, but once you get good at it, you will win quite regularly and then you "easily" get a very high ELO.

Yeah, I agree I slightly overdid it in Regicide.
However, its win rate is quite low for beginners and there had been some easy modes with lower rating gain, so the base had to be somewhat high.

and the latter gives from 0 to 10 ELO (more when you have less than 100 ELO), depending on the difficulty level, but also on the number of games played

I designed the current Solar Storm rating system and it doesn't award extra rating to players with less than 100 rating.
Perhaps you played the version before update (which was done a year ago) then.
And honestly, that old ELO emulation is plain bad as players can lose rating even on a WIN.
For example: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=42314
So yeah, option B is the worst choice.
Have you seen any reports with enraged players like this from plain rating co-op games? Except The Crew, for obvious reasons.

PS: I don't think awarding more ELO is going to attract more players.

Of course it doesn't. However, changing rating system constantly is also not recommendable.
Also, even with the current rating system, to hit the cap a player must win at least 348 games (when playing the highest difficulty only).

[tiagovip]

10 elo per regular game is already quite good. I see no need to improve it further, regardless of mode.

On the other hand, 10 elo for regular may even be too much, as games are very fast and in regular level, losing is more a matter of attention than of planning - ie: player should not really lose with unlimited moves, except by mistakes.

Thus, to me, the sweet spot is 5-10 elo por game.

[Romain672]

My personal opinion is that this is too much for such a short game. Another co-op game that also requires many small moves (so it is slow on turn-based mode, but quick to play in real-time) is Bandido. It also involves laying tiles and can have a similar number of moves. However, sometimes you can be lucky and solve Bandido very fast, so on average it is perhaps a faster game than The way to Juliet.

It IS faster. Average turn spent is 38, and winning games play even quicker, especially when players are more skilled.

Just for this point Bandido is 7 minutes, Juliet is 6.
It's mainly because in Bandido you need to think every turn. You got three tiles, often like 4 options to play the tiles.
On the other hand, Juliet require thinking at specific times, in maybe two third of the turns, you either (think to?) know what the plan is, and can play instantly.
While in others turns, you need to check the new informations you got.

[ufm]

My personal opinion is that this is too much for such a short game. Another co-op game that also requires many small moves (so it is slow on turn-based mode, but quick to play in real-time) is Bandido. It also involves laying tiles and can have a similar number of moves. However, sometimes you can be lucky and solve Bandido very fast, so on average it is perhaps a faster game than The way to Juliet.

It IS faster. Average turn spent is 38, and winning games play even quicker, especially when players are more skilled.

Just for this point Bandido is 7 minutes, Juliet is 6.
It's mainly because in Bandido you need to think every turn. You got three tiles, often like 4 options to play the tiles.
On the other hand, Juliet require thinking at specific times, in maybe two third of the turns, you either (think to?) know what the plan is, and can play instantly.
While in others turns, you need to check the new informations you got.

I checked the statistics again... and in fact the average was quite affected by fast losses.
I even found 2-move losses. (facepalm)

[SimplicatusGames]

I checked the statistics again... and in fact the average was quite affected by fast losses.
I even found 2-move losses. (facepalm)

This is a family game with many players that are not experienced with abstract games and logic. So they might need to find out the hard way that it's necessary to let each player guide Romeo based on their knowledge. The risk of a loss after 2 moves is real, but it will be fast and the players will "learn by playing" so it makes it easy for them to play again.

[SimplicatusGames]

I designed the current Solar Storm rating system and it doesn't award extra rating to players with less than 100 rating.
Perhaps you played the version before update (which was done a year ago) then.
And honestly, that old ELO emulation is plain bad as players can lose rating even on a WIN.
For example: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=42314
So yeah, option B is the worst choice.
Have you seen any reports with enraged players like this from plain rating co-op games? Except The Crew, for obvious reasons.

PS: I don't think awarding more ELO is going to attract more players.

Of course it doesn't. However, changing rating system constantly is also not recommendable.
Also, even with the current rating system, to hit the cap a player must win at least 348 games (when playing the highest difficulty only).

Thank you for explaining, and linking to that bug report! I agree if course that you shouldn't earn negative points, but I think it's reasonable if experienced players earn zero ELO for a win on basic (especially when there are unlimited moves and no other factors like in this game), so they need to play on advanced to keep earning ELO.

It's a while since I played Solar Storm so it could have been before the ELO adjustment, but in any case I didn't find it completely unreasonable that I got only 2-3 ELO per game, once I accepted that different co-ops have different amounts of ELO awarded, so you cannot compared their ELO scores directly. But I also agree that it would have been nice to get a little more, perhaps 5-10 per game. For instance, when we optimize a win with 6 cards left on advanced, or with zero damage, or with both players on the core when the game ends, we could get more additional rewards.

As the bug report discussion mentioned, this should be a discussion about co-ops on BGA in general, it would be better if there was more consistency in the amount of ELO awarded based on the difficulty and possibly additional factors as I suggested for Solar Storm above.

So I don't agree that option B is the worst one, but I do agree that 5-10 ELO per game could be reasonable. The consequence of that would be to accept that many more people will have thousands of ELO in co-op games. Many BGA users play more than 348 games/tables of games they like, both competitive and co-op games.

[ufm]

So I don't agree that option B is the worst one,

At least all active co-op devs agree as literally nobody's using it for 2 years.

but I do agree that 5-10 ELO per game could be reasonable. The consequence of that would be to accept that many more people will have thousands of ELO in co-op games. Many BGA users play more than 348 games/tables of games they like, both competitive and co-op games.

The current number of players who reached the cap (8700):

Regicide (>20)
Bandido (16)
Baby Dinosaur Rescue (10)
Just One! (5)
Legends of Hellas (2)
Narabi (2)
Similo (1)

0 in all other co-op games.

Imo the current state is adequate, but seems 5/10/15/20 might be an alternative as well.
No need to reset rating again this time though.

[miklomike]

Once I realize that a co-op game only gives 1 elo for a win, I stop playing it. It's not rewarding at all makes it harder to see just by seeing if someone is a beginner, expert, etc. It also means (especially with small player base) that it becomes difficult to filter players. You may be fine to play with someone with 75 wins, but they are counted the same as someone who played one and lost instantly (1-99 elo)

There is nothing wrong to me about having players in the thousands of elo if they play enough, they will all be masters and then you just get a nice big number to look at, it does nothing.

The main challenge of expert mode is that you cannot reverse a move, so that alone I think deserves double the normal mode. I also don't think we should be giving examples based on highest difficulty as the dev said, only a few games of that have even been played. 50 turns is not easy and you can fail at that right away just by map setup alone, as in impossible from the start.

If you are staying with the base 10 (i wouldn't go lower), then it should be 20 and 25 for the expert modes. I'm not even listing 50 turns mode, because its elo i don't think will ever match its difficulty.

[ufm]

Once I realize that a co-op game only gives 1 elo for a win, I stop playing it. It's not rewarding at all makes it harder to see just by seeing if someone is a beginner, expert, etc. It also means (especially with small player base) that it becomes difficult to filter players. You may be fine to play with someone with 75 wins, but they are counted the same as someone who played one and lost instantly (1-99 elo)

I agree. Especially The Crew. You know, one mission and then quit.
At least Bandido or Similo have larger player base and are relatively fast, but most co-op games are either slow or do not have enough players.

If you are staying with the base 10 (i wouldn't go lower), then it should be 20 and 25 for the expert modes. I'm not even listing 50 turns mode, because its elo i don't think will ever match its difficulty.

I'm not sure about this though, as most beginners don't play advanced modes and this makes the win rate of advanced modes higher than expectation.

[SimplicatusGames]

So I don't agree that option B is the worst one,

At least all active co-op devs agree as literally nobody's using it for 2 years.

I'm happy to hear that - having a similar approach and approximate "value" of a win measures in ELO is more important than the actual number.

The current number of players who reached the cap (8700):

Regicide (>20)
Bandido (16)
Baby Dinosaur Rescue (10)
Just One! (5)
Legends of Hellas (2)
Narabi (2)
Similo (1)

0 in all other co-op games.

Imo the current state is adequate, but seems 5/10/15/20 might be an alternative as well.
No need to reset rating again this time though.

Thank you for sharing those stats! How can you find them, is there a database only devs can see, or is this info available to all players?

After reading the discussion I have changed my mind and I agree with you and the others. Thank you all for sharing opinions and explaining why you have those opinions, I appreciate learning so I can improve my understanding.

Would it be possible to adjust the ELO rating of games that only give 1 ELO per game, to make them more in line with the rest? Or even Solar Storm, that gives only 2-3?