Wreckage wrote: ↑01 September 2023, 18:36
1. More even elo for all player counts. Someone who generally plays 3p games will have about 150 less elo than someone who plays 5p games, if they have equal success. This is ridiculous. I don’t even think 3p is an easier game. There should be a slight (emphasis on “slight”) difference for each number of players. 2p is the most difficult, then it’s slightly easier with each added player. Perhaps 4p and 5p should gain the same elo.
I honestly think that 3p is the hardest variant, at least at some skill levels. Definitely harder than 4p, which is the easiest. Possibly 3p is easier for players who are just starting out on learning multiplayer techniques, with less to take into account when cluing and reading basic finesses, but harder for advanced players because it provides so many fewer opportunities to apply highly efficient techniques.
5p is also harder than 4p. There are more visible cards, and more capacity to hold cards, but the amount of information that has to be taken into account when cluing, and the greater distance ahead players have to look to account for what happens over multiple rounds can much more easily overwhelm players’ cognitive capacity.
2p is a special case. Hardest to get a perfect score with perfect play, but the format cuts out so many possible techniques that perfect play is much easier to achieve.
The truth is a bit more complex than one player count simply being easier than others (especially considering 2p). Each has a different learning curve. That could be represented more accurately by changing the steps between bot ratings for scores on the tables (it’s always a step of 10 at the moment, IIRC - that is, the bot rating for a 29 is 10 ELO less than for 30, and 28 is 10 less again)… but working out exactly what the steps should be would require a lot of difficult analysis of game result data, and I don’t think anyone is going to do that. I probably don’t have the skill to do it myself, and my bachelor’s degree was in statistics.
Wreckage wrote: ↑01 September 2023, 18:36
2. There should be separate adjustments for black powder and flamboyants. I’ve seen it stated many times that flams don’t help scores much on a tables of all masters, because they don’t let important cards get discarded anyway. This is wrong. If a table of masters play 10 games without flams, they will have about 6 perfect games, and about 3 - 4 games where the last card in the deck matched an early discard. If flams are on, all these games become 30s.
There should be adjustments for Black Powder and Flamboyants, yes. At least at high levels, Black Powder more than outweighs Flamboyants, but both are significant. It’s not unrealistic to hope that this may be implemented some day.
Your estimate of 6 perfect games may be true for low-end masters, but it isn’t for high-end masters (with >2p). From a rating of 800 or so, players are getting better at saving cards early. I think it’s around that point where you have to learn to do that to push your results better. You can’t get the probability of being bottom-decked down to 0%, of course, but if you are losing 30% of your games that way, you aren’t playing very well.
Of course, adding in Flamboyants will push the limit very close to 0% for this, so it is useful for highly-skilled masters. But getting that benefit requires knowing a whole new set of Flamboyant-related skills.
The usual attitude towards Flamboyants is that they just let you undo serious mistakes, and that’s wrong. Without appropriate skills, I really think they
cause serious mistakes - way too many players who won’t play their 5s when they need to, leading to unexpected discards, or reaching the endgame with too many unplayed cards. But with highly-skilled players, these things should not occur.
There's no way you are saving 4s that are on chop at the start of the game for no reason. Maybe it's not a third of your games, but I'd bet it's a fourth. This is more about random luck than about skill of saving cards. Anyway, I think we are in near agreement about an adjustment for flams. Maybe not about the degree of adjustment.