Board Game Arena

A certain player seems to be capable of beating many of the best opponents, yet consistently loses to beginners and low ranking players, even conceding games early on that would be won. These games look very suspicious. Kind of fake moves. Could even be playing himself??

Is this player gaining something by keeping his score down? I really can not make heads of tails from it. And I lose quite few points when I play him, as his ranking is so low. Life would be better if I could at least beat him!! Intrigued at least.

There are two possibilities that I see.
1, some of the games are teaching games. They make a bad play on purpose, to show why it is a bad play. Normally, teaching games are suggested to be with ELO off, but not everyone follows that all the time.
2, they want the thrill of beating mid-level players. If their ELO says they are a poor player, they get more plays against mid-level players looking for an easy win (vs if their ELO showed mid to high level). The world is full of strange people, and this wide web catches a lot of them.

You can always write a personal note about an individual, which will be displayed back to you when both of you are at a table. You might suggest playing with ELO off if you are worried about losing several points to someone whose stated ELO doesn't match their playing ability.

Well stated. Pretty sure it is the second case. He seems to be abandoning that strategy lately.

Thanks for the suggestion about ELO off. I hadn't considered that before.

Love the game. Still learning.

Would love to see a feature added where different moves can be tried in replay, to use as a learning tool. Jeff

I realise that I have taken a long time to reply to this thread, but seeing as the same guy is still doing it today (currently using the elijo account), I guess it is still topical...

My contention (99% sure) would be that the reason is not those given above. He does it to deflate everyone else's rating, so as to keep his other player(s) at the top of the leaderboard - I imagine he also owns the aley account - an account that only plays the occasional game against a beginner as otherwise it would lose its highly unrealistic (and dubiously acquired) rating.

Reason I am so sure is that previously the same guy (well i presume it was the same guy), used to create many many different accounts (a quite staggering number) and played them all up to master level (which also deflates everyone elses rating).

This has been going on for quite a few years, and he must have spent a lot of time doing it - it is a lot of effort to singlemindedly deflate the ratings for an entire game...you might have thought he would have gotten over it by now

I have only started playing on the site yesterday. Today I played elijo 3 games of Quoridor in a row. All 3 times the games played out move for move the exact same. He also conceded in exactly the same position each time.

Could this be a bot?

No idea about this particular person, but the Arena as designed gives a poor incentive. If you are sitting at 0 stars of a particular level and you are paired with someone 2 levels below you, you have no chance to gain stars even if you win. If your goal is Arena stars and you don't care about ELO, might as well concede and hope to get paired with an opponent where you can gain stars.