Board Game Arena

Elo is a well-known system used in multiple competitive gaming, notably Chess, to rank players.

However, Elo has a lot of flaws, that pushed some competitive games (like Magic the Gathering) to move away from it in favour of other ranking system (MtG now use a system where you cannot lose points, only win some depending on the ranking of the other persons).

BGA's Elo system was introduced before Arena existed. Now that Arena are a thing, maybe Elo should be changed to something else?

In particular, in the case of BGA, the mains flaws of Elo I see are:
(1) New BGA players that are experienced IRL skew the system completely. As pointed in https://boardgamearena.com/forum, this can be very annoying to lose a lot of points against a "beginner" that has way more games under his belt than you do, just offline.
(2) The system is just ineffective for cooperative games like Hanabi, where it encourage abandon rather than finishing a probably losing game.
(3) Elo system discourage some players from playing as they don't want to lose their rank, and in general create negative experiences for players that can't just convince themselves to just "ignore it".

The Elo system is not without advantages:
(1) It creates a competitive place, which incentive a lot of players to play more and progress.
=> I'd personally argue that this is now taken care of by Arena.
(2) It gives a feeling of progression, especially early on as you learn the game
=> Any progression system would work, including systems where you can't lose points.
(3) It allows to sort players according to their rank, allowing for players to filter for "only masters" or "only novice" and have more homogeneous tables
=> This is far from perfect, but Elo is indeed one of the better system for this.

What are your though on the subject?

Probably the best presented argument against ELO, and there has been a lot of them, so kudos to you for that.
Maybe now we have a forum polling system, someone should start a poll.

Personally I think ELO is fine, you'll struggle to come up with something better, and the old saying - you can't please all the people all the time.
Even Arena at Elite level uses an ELO style formula.

It you can't lose points, then this seem to favour people who just play a lot.

I think this suggestion needs to be mentioned: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=14455

Apart from that, I hope that BGA will introduce additionally some kind of XP system independent of skill in some future. Most commercial online gaming platforms have it because people like to collect points and progress through levels. For platforms like 'Heros of the Storm' or 'Rocket League', you have general XP-meters that cannot go down and these are kind of unrelated to the matchmaking or competition parts of the platforms.

Hi, here are my thoughts

MoiMagnus wrote: ↑16 January 2021, 11:05 (1) It creates a competitive place, which incentive a lot of players to play more and progress.
=> I'd personally argue that this is now taken care of by Arena.

This is exactly why Arena was created on BGA: elo was seen by some players as a reward, as a competition, and this was not compatible with the real objective of elo points: reflecting player's skills.

MoiMagnus wrote: ↑16 January 2021, 11:05 (2) It gives a feeling of progression

This is not elo's purpose. Maybe some of the players who want this feeling of progression will find it in XP's and achievements.

MoiMagnus wrote: ↑16 January 2021, 11:05 (3) It allows to sort players according to their rank, allowing for players to filter for "only masters" or "only novice" and have more homogeneous tables
=> This is far from perfect, but Elo is indeed one of the better system for this.

This is exactly the purpose of elo. There are other systems, like TrueSkill (which is used on yucata.de), but there will never be a consensus, some people at yucata would like to use the elo system.

MoiMagnus wrote: ↑16 January 2021, 11:05 (1) New BGA players that are experienced IRL skew the system completely.

I think this is unavoidable, even with other systems. The only thing that can be done is to reduce (even more ?) the impact of losses against new players on BGA.

MoiMagnus wrote: ↑16 January 2021, 11:05 (2) The system is just ineffective for cooperative games like Hanabi, where it encourage abandon rather than finishing a probably losing game.

Totally agree, but this is another problem, that would be: Is it possible to have (on an online platform) a system that reflects skills for coop games? I doubt it is, unfortunately (for other reasons as well, not only for this one).

MoiMagnus wrote: ↑16 January 2021, 11:05 (3) Elo system discourage some players from playing as they don't want to lose their rank, and in general create negative experiences for players that can't just convince themselves to just "ignore it".

Maybe elo could be less "pointed out" ("highlighted", not sure what's the best word in english) by BGA. Now that Arena exists, I think that for non-Arena games, it may be a good idea to not show by default elo changes after a game, except if players click on a special link / button.

Worth noting that there is always an option to play games with no rating. So one has the choice to use the rating system or not to do so.

I think ELO is essential for players who have been playing for a long time and want to play against other people who have the same background because they feel it wouldn't be fair or enjoyable to play against newer, less-skilled players.

Since we are all putting in our 2 cents, I will say that I don't have any interest in a separate "XP system." I already find the achievements/accomplishments a bit silly. I'm sure others enjoy them, but what I enjoy is playing games

Patrick of the Isles wrote: ↑18 January 2021, 07:08 Since we are all putting in our 2 cents, I will say that I don't have any interest in a separate "XP system." I already find the achievements/accomplishments a bit silly. I'm sure others enjoy them, but what I enjoy is playing games

I think I agree with you that enjoying the games is the core fun and creating yet another XP system should be low priority.

My wish for yet another XP system stems mostly from some disappointment with the Arena. Let's be honest, Arena mode is mostly a progression mode and not very much a competetive mode. The league you are in mostly depends on the time you already invested during a given season (while skill is not entirely unimportant of course). I guess it's fine, people enjoy it, but I would love if the competition part and the progression part could be more disentangled. This is handled more clever on other platforms. Let the competitors compete and let the progressors progress.

Coming back to the thread*s topic, if we think about replacing Elo, we should keep in mind that there won't be any single score that reflects all our whishes - current skill, non-decreasing experience, sense of progression, historic merits, regular competition. There is a reason why there are several different systems in place.

Edit: There are people like me who love to have a bunch of different scores reflecting different things on their profile. Then there are people who are pretty annoyed by all the rating stuff and would like to get rid of it entirely. At least it is possible to get rid of the Elo display if you want to (taken from another thread):

bdrieu wrote: ↑18 January 2021, 16:04 One suggestion, you may want to add the following to your profile as custom CSS:

Code: Select all

.gamerank { display: none; }

That way you will never see any ELO rating, either yours or opponent's. This is crude and can be improved but I think that people who really do not want to see their rating could use such tricks.