Board Game Arena

Stroom wrote: ↑15 December 2023, 11:32 Why do you people care so much about elo anyway? Your place in the rankings is not a meaningful representation of your skill. Only those that intentionally play to gain elo will climb to the very top. Elo decaying if you don't play similarly does not take anything away from you. You can always just play more and your score rises naturally.

Just play the games and enjoy it.

I think this is the general misunderstanding.
It's not that they care about their own ELO. But ELO is meant to be a system to gauge all players, all the time. So when it doesn't work, then what's the point of even having it?
The people here care about the ELO system as a whole, not just their own number. And they care about BGA and the service it provides.

ELO is meant to represent your skill level, that's the point.
Not how often you play.

We all enjoy playing games, that's why we're here. We all enjoy the BGA service that's why we vehemently post if something feels wrong.

Stroom wrote: ↑15 December 2023, 11:32 Why do you people care so much about elo anyway? Your place in the rankings is not a meaningful representation of your skill. Only those that intentionally play to gain elo will climb to the very top. Elo decaying if you don't play similarly does not take anything away from you. You can always just play more and your score rises naturally.

Just play the games and enjoy it.

I find the current system useful for creating matches between similarly-experienced opponents. The rating decay change will make the system less useful to me so I shared that fact, as have others. With respect, you have replied to this thread eight times in the past day so it feels a bit odd to criticize others for caring too much about this change?

RicardoRix wrote: ↑15 December 2023, 12:00

Stroom wrote: ↑15 December 2023, 11:32 Why do you people care so much about elo anyway? Your place in the rankings is not a meaningful representation of your skill. Only those that intentionally play to gain elo will climb to the very top. Elo decaying if you don't play similarly does not take anything away from you. You can always just play more and your score rises naturally.

Just play the games and enjoy it.

I think this is the general misunderstanding.
It's not that they care about their own ELO. But ELO is meant to be a system to gauge all players, all the time. So when it doesn't work, then what's the point of even having it?
The people here care about the ELO system as a whole, not just their own number. And they care about BGA and the service it provides.

ELO is meant to represent your skill level, that's the point.
Not how often you play.

Well, then an old elo vs new elo comparison does not really matter. You'd want to see the elo based on the recent ~1 year worth of games. Not of someone who used to play 2 years ago and might not play as well today. Maybe new strategies have been developed and players who use those would easily beat anyone who has 2 year old knowledge of the game. It's not like your elo is fully reset, only -10%. An elo from 2 years ago is not comparable to elo now. The system has changed slightly, players are constantly coming in and leaving, which actually inflates the elo score over time. Abandoning games had no influence on elo so players abused that a lot too etc.

Elo is meant to represent your skill level today not from 2 years ago. If it does not decay when you haven't played recently, then it does not represent your skill level, really. You have to be constantly playing with other players in order for your elo to be relevantly comparable theirs, in the system. Otherwise it's just 2 random numbers that do not really have similar value.

1000$ earned 10 years ago is not worth the same 1000$ you would earn today. Today it is much cheaper. Similar inflation happens to elo. If you want to see comparable scores, players either have to be competing constantly or they let inflation take their toll.

Maybe 10% is too much. Maybe a different kind of calculation would be necessary (Glicko?). But the current system is not really displaying comparable skill levels.

Similarly, many games differ alot based on game settings - player count, expansion etc. If you take that into consideration then elo is a completely pointless metric. Someone could get a super high elo playing 2p games and be completely useless when the 3rd player joins the game.

Patrick of the Isles wrote: ↑15 December 2023, 12:12

Stroom wrote: ↑15 December 2023, 11:32 Why do you people care so much about elo anyway? Your place in the rankings is not a meaningful representation of your skill. Only those that intentionally play to gain elo will climb to the very top. Elo decaying if you don't play similarly does not take anything away from you. You can always just play more and your score rises naturally.

Just play the games and enjoy it.

I find the current system useful for creating matches between similarly-experienced opponents. The rating decay change will make the system less useful to me so I shared that fact, as have others. With respect, you have replied to this thread eight times in the past day so it feels a bit odd to criticize others for caring too much about this change?

Do you think that if someone has not played for 1 year, he would be exactly as strong player as he is now? 10% decay is not that much, really. 100 elo is not a big difference.

I post here because I want to see elo scores in coop games. But the rest of the changes are OK. And the reasons for against those changes do not make much sense. Your gaming skill does decay if you don't play the game. Whether you want to admit it or not. So should elo.

Stroom wrote: ↑15 December 2023, 12:19 Someone could get a super high elo playing 2p games and be completely useless when the 3rd player joins the game.

At least half of your points are like this. That's completely irrelevant to rating decay. And there is also the denial of points from same pairings.
The analogies are close to worthless.

Stroom wrote: ↑15 December 2023, 12:19 But the current system is not really displaying comparable skill levels.

But it's doing the best it can. And that's not a reason to make it even worse.

The arguments here are about reverting the recent changes.
If you want to talk about different systems, then just do that, stop trying to just muddy the waters.

RicardoRix wrote: ↑15 December 2023, 12:27

Stroom wrote: ↑15 December 2023, 12:19 Someone could get a super high elo playing 2p games and be completely useless when the 3rd player joins the game.

At least half of your points are like this. That's completely irrelevant to rating decay. And there is also the denial of points from same pairings.
The analogies are close to worthless.

It's another good example for why elo in the current form is not "a system to gauge all players, all the time" - your own words.

It's an example for why elo is a pointless metric. It's a very rough metric. Adding decay to the mix does not really change the comparison value either. What it does is only bringing down inactive players - whose elo does not matter anyway as they are not playing the game actively. It is not getting worse.

Seriously, elo decay is not really that big of a deal than people think.

Stroom wrote: ↑15 December 2023, 12:26
Do you think that if someone has not played for 1 year, he would be exactly as strong player as he is now? 10% decay is not that much, really. 100 elo is not a big difference... And the reasons for against those changes do not make much sense. Your gaming skill does decay if you don't play the game. Whether you want to admit it or not. So should elo.

If someone has played in other fora while not active on BGA then they might be a stronger player than they were months ago. Yes I suppose in theory they could also be a weaker player if they somehow forgot key principles. My experience in many games does not at all match with a 10% per 3 months (35% annually) degradation.

It does not seem possible for any reasonable person to conclude that if Magnus Carlsen took a break from playing rated classical chess for one year his accurate rating would degrade 35% from 2800 to 1800.

The bottom line is that the system will be less useful to me if these changes are not reversed. I understand it may be more useful to others, but I wanted to add my 2 cents to this subject, and there is no question it will be much less useful to me.

Stroom wrote: ↑15 December 2023, 12:38 It's another good example for why elo in the current form is not "a system to gauge all players, all the time" - your own words.
It's an example for why elo is a pointless metric. It's a very rough metric.

Absolutely it's a rough metric. To make it even rougher is not the answer. It's doing the best it can.

ELO as an eco-system. Players gain/lose by the same amount. The overall numbers are meant to stay equal.

The decay, and frequent player pairings will simply take away numbers in quite a large amount. EVERYONES ELO will decrease - to what end?
Personally speaking, and there are a lot like me. All my ratings will in the future hover around the 200 mark, since I currently rank 200-500 in 70 odd games.

You won't be able to tell anything about my skill level in any of the games.
Where it's 500 in Innovation now, it will be 200 in a year or 2.
Where it's 200 in haggis, it will be 200 in a year or 2.
That will be a catastrophic failure.

I'm a better Innovation player than haggis. And I still will be in 2 years time.

Patrick of the Isles wrote: ↑15 December 2023, 12:48

Stroom wrote: ↑15 December 2023, 12:26
Do you think that if someone has not played for 1 year, he would be exactly as strong player as he is now? 10% decay is not that much, really. 100 elo is not a big difference... And the reasons for against those changes do not make much sense. Your gaming skill does decay if you don't play the game. Whether you want to admit it or not. So should elo.

If someone has played in other fora while not active on BGA then they might be a stronger player than they were months ago. Yes I suppose in theory they could also be a weaker player if they somehow forgot key principles. My experience in many games does not at all match with a 10% per 3 months (35% annually) degradation.

It does not seem possible for any reasonable person to conclude that if Magnus Carlsen took a break from playing rated classical chess for one year his accurate rating would degrade 35% from 2800 to 1800.

The bottom line is that the system will be less useful to me if these changes are not reversed. I understand it may be more useful to others, but I wanted to add my experience to this forum, and there is no question it will be much less useful to me.

So the problem is with 10% decay. What if it was 5%? 2800 going down to 2280 seems more reasonable. Either way you as an active player would barely notice it because you would not be playing with inactive players anyway. And if they come back and play a bit with less skilled players, their elo would quickly rise back to their old level. And the elo would be more of a representation of skill based on how the current meta of the game is.

Someone who has been inactive, his elo already has a level of uncertainty compared to your elo. So it is safer to assume that it is less rather than more than it was. If he goes and beats a few less skilled players, he'll be back soon anyway.

Stroom, you barely play anything else than Hanabi. So it makes sense that you can't process the reasons why people who play many different competitive games and worked their way up in those want to keep that proof of their past on the profile even if they don't play much anymore. Why people want their opponents have a good rating when they are good players and not have them 200 points less than they are by skill. Why we want to see valuable information on our friends profiles. Why we want the system to work and not leak points into nothingness leading to even more inflation.

You are right with glicko would be good and showing the difference of trueskill and uncertainty. It would work well for both our goals. But we don't have glicko and plain decay is not the next best thing. Saying glicko would be good does not defend the implemented decay.