orgle wrote: ↑16 December 2023, 03:09
Perhaps the competitive players were too vocal about their disappointment during their games, but the casual players failed first. They failed at warning players at their tables about their desired play style & known conventions in the Presentation field
before the game started. It's easy enough to ward off competitive Hanabi players: tell them in advance that you're "casual," that you don't play with conventions (or list the handful you do use), or turn on Friendly Mode -- they'll never bother you again.
While I don't necessarily agree with the change to hide ELO for Hanabi (and/or other coop games), I think you're saying here that casual players should be avoiding high ranking players tables and/or announcing to the table that they are casual players. This seems like a strange idea to me - casual players are often unlikely to even know that there is a non-casual way to play Hanabi. Surely the experienced player should be announcing what they expect?
I owned Hanabi IRL before joining BGA and I'd played it... maybe 20-30 times. We'd never heard of conventions, we just played casually I guess you'd say. But sometime after I joined BGA, I decided to try out Hanabi on here. I think in my early games, I had the experience of a person asking to abandon as soon as we made an error - with no explanation in chat. I found that frustrating but didn't think much of it. Maybe the player just had to leave, though it did seem tied to the error we'd made - and as someone who had only ever played casually, and was used to accepting errors as a part of play, I didn't understand a mentality where 1 error = abandon game.
Another game I had included an (experienced) person with myself and another inexperienced person. The experienced player brought up (what I later learned was) a convention, but didn't really explain how to use it, just made some digs that we should be playing better than we were (to be fair, there was also a mild language barrier, which may have made explanations harder). And then after a while of this, also abandoned. After that experience, I went to read in the forums and discovered conventions, and ultimately decided I wouldn't be playing Hanabi on BGA anymore.
The thing that got me was that you can set your tables to only include players of a certain level OR you can choose not to join ones that include/are open to inexperienced players. If you want to play with a specific convention, that can be noted in the settings of the table (which it wasn't for any of the tables I joined - I don't join tables with options I don't understand), and as you say, you can mention others in the chat. Typically, a casual/uneducated player is likely to set their table with default settings and without restrictions and surely it is up to the experienced player to decide they don't want to join that table and/or setup their own tables the way they want to play.
And while I can play in Friendly mode (and actually might, now that I'm thinking about it), I typically don't consider playing in Friendly mode for any game (probably because in my mind it's still associated with being "Training mode" and once I understand the rules of a game, I generally don't play that way).
orgle wrote: ↑16 December 2023, 03:09
The proper solution to appease casual players who
say they don't care about ELO is to tell them to only play Friendly games. Or announce themselves as "Casual" in the Presentation field. We all need to warn our table what sort of game we're expecting. High Ranked Masters used to do that simply through their host's ELO or the "Layered" tag.
I'm not totally clear on what you mean here either - what is the Presentation field? Is this the "Convention" field in the settings? If it is, there is no option for Casual, though I expect Standard convention is much the same. You say they use their host's ELO - so if the table host has an ELO of 750, this indicates that... players of lower score shouldn't join? How would an inexperienced player know this? And I'm also not clear what the "Layered" tag is - all of these are probably just reflections of my lack of knowledge within the Hanabi community, but that's pretty much my point - how am I to know to look for these things, or how to interpret them to avoid joining games with experienced players who are going to get angry at me when I inadvertently spoil their perfect games? Surely the easier way is to set the table to only include players of Master level and higher, nominate a convention, etc. If a player joins a table where a convention is nominated in the table settings and doesn't play with it (or doesn't know how to), I agree that players have a right to be annoyed by that, tell the player (politely) that they shouldn't have joined, and/or abandon the game. But otherwise, I don't understand how experienced players are ending up at tables with casual players - I understand the reverse, that can be just inexperience on the part of casual players. But experienced players know better, so why aren't the settings being used as designed? I am genuinely curious about this, wondering if there is some issue with the table settings that I'm not aware of.
but then I also have to lose pts to my teammate. Keeping the system the way it is just keeps players elo relatively the same which defeats the purpose of the system. You mentioned 3 games that the change does apply for but left us in the dark about the other 38 team games on this platform. There are several things about this update that weren't made clear and we are just having to find out these things on our own.