Board Game Arena

The current method of calculating ELO for Spades seems broken in how it treats your partner's ELO.

Imagine that you are at a table where your opponents have the same ELO as you, and imagine these two scenarios:

(1) Your partner has a much _lower_ ELO than any of you.
(2) Your partner has a much _higher_ ELO than any of you.

Doing well in scenario (1) is arguably more difficult task than doing well in (2), so one would expect to gain more (or lose less) ELO for the outcome of (1) than (2), but the opposite is true.

Because Spades always records a tie between the two partners, in scenario (1) you always record a tie with a lower-ranked player, causing a net loss of ELO, whereas in scenario (2) you always tie with a higher-ranked player, causing a net gain of ELO.

Is there a different result other than "tie" that can be used to score the relationship between partners?

Are there any other partner games on BGA that score the component with your partner differently, that Spades could use, instead?

I don't think so. The BGA ELO calculation is set up with individual players in mind. Things get wonky and don't behave the way you would think it should when partnership or cooperative games are involved.

https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=11297
This is a longstanding problem of BGA rating.

This is a problem. More points should be awarded for winning with a lower ELO partner. It doesn't make sense that I would receive more ELO for winning with partner with a 200 rating thanI receive for winning with a 100 ELO partner. This is backwards. It's much harder to win with a partner who is elo level 100.

For opponents it is to wage ELO averages. However for partners the penalty for having a lower ELO partner should be eliminated.

I dont agree, we should be paired at random so low and high elo randomly get together.

I agree that would be great for pairing. They just need to eliminate the partner penalty. That is why player partner those with similar ELO.