Board Game Arena

I haven't really understood how training mode works, I think. It reads like this: "Training mode: no rankings, no time limit, no penalties."

There seems to be a time limit attached to it (however large), which is not my issue.

But "no ranking" seems to not be true, too: I lost points in an "unranked" training mode game, see:
https://boardgamearena.com/gamestats?pl ... finished=0

And I gained points in a similar manner as well:
https://boardgamearena.com/gamestats?pl ... finished=0

I am fairly certain this is a reporting issue, not an issue with training mode. I just looked at your profile page, and it shows 135 ELO for Race for the Galaxy (the ELO you had before the training mode game) and doesn't show any ELO for Sapiens (not even a 0 ELO, [which is consistent with no finished games]).

The BGA system was not designed as a whole. It has grown over the years. With each new part, old parts don't work as well. Most likely what happened was that when Training Mode was introduced, rather than go into the ELO code and set it to 0 before the reporting code, an adjustment back to the original ELO was made after all previous steps were done.