There's a philosophical argument there about playing for 2nd place. Some people see 2nd place and 4th place as equivalent losers. Some people see 2nd place as better than 4th place. How much better? People differ on that, too. Clearly, 2nd place in Hearts for you holds no value. Even without ELO, some people would disagree and play for 2nd place if they felt that 1st place was out of reach (even if it wasn't mathematically impossible).michlang wrote: ↑30 March 2021, 23:31 I've had many similar feelings -- I absolutely detest the ELO system -- it is irrelevant for many games and more importantly it fundamentally shifts the strategies to games. A good example is hearts -- there is absolutely NO reason, whatsoever, to play for second place, and yet, on this site, people do all the time because they are aiming for ELO. And don't even get me started on Arena mode...I've been a turn away from winning so many times, have a player quit, thus robbing me of shields -- and the worst part is, at least in Arena, you can't even quit when you see a bad reputation as the game is loading...so you are stuck. Honestly, it's only because of the pandemic that I reupped my subscription. If I were to address the issue, I'd have three modes: Arena, Regular ELO, and no ELO (I'm not talking about training mode). It takes forever to get someone to join a training mode game because the site has built competition into game play -- which I get -- AND, with such a broken rating system, it just makes all of it so frustrating at times.
BGA should be able to easily adjust ELO for any game such that 1st place is the winner and all other players are tied as the losers. That would remove the incentive that you reference, but I'm not sure that all players would agree with your view on 2nd place. If they do, it should be pretty easy to convince the Hearts developer to make the ELO switch for that game.