Stroom wrote: ↑01 May 2023, 11:56
I guess for some players even abandoning or not isn't the issue... I just encountered a player who boasted about his 1300+ elo claiming that he is more skilled. I then looked into his game history. For some reason he had a lot of sequential games with the same partner. And a little bit earlier another bunch of games with another player with a similar name... but that user has been deleted by now. Really weird.
Then I looked at one of the replays. The first move of the game was to blindly play a 1 card at the 3rd or 4th position. Some clues were given but when it seemed easier, random card plays without any meaningful clues given.
Some people are really desperate for that elo. Wow. Not sure if that can even be prevented other than actually analyzing each game.
This might NOT be someone cheating. If they have conventions that you don't understand, their plays would look random to an outsider.
I saw one convention where the players would clue color to the card beside a playable card, then their partner would play the expected card even though it was unmarked. The benefit to this is keeping more info in the player's hand. Usually, we clue a color on a single card, giving info on that card. Then that card is played immediately, but the info is spent immediately too. By marking a useful card beside it instead, it plays a card, but the info is still useful for the future. Obviously they had to work out many other details to make this work, but it was a very effective strategy.
I had to replay several of their games to understand their clues, and I still didn't understand it all, but I am sure they weren't cheating, just playing a different style.
I have played using conventions where certain clues meant to play a certain slot. I have even played where white means play your left two cards. This is actually quite powerful, but situational. You lose the ability to clue a normal white, but you may only need 3-4 tokens to play 6-8 cards some games. It gets really powerful if you can use finesse with it as well. If you watched those games, it would look like we made random plays, but we didn't.
I think you should replay those games again, and see if they gave some clues that made no sense at all that might be associated to those random plays.
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I think most players that abandon are not doing it because of concern about ELO. They see 30 as a victory, and 29- as a loss. So once 30 is no longer achievable, they challenge is over for them, and they are eager to try again.
Perhaps a setting could be made "30 or bust!" And when this is toggled on, all games end in 30 or a loss, and games end immediately as soon as 30 is impossible. Perhaps the elo would need to be adjusted because you will have substantially more losses with that option on.