Elo count

[xuorel]

Hello

My elo points was increasing constantly last year.

Now elo point seems to be harder to win and easier to lost.

Do you have explanation about how elo points are counts on hanabi ?

Eg : if I play with someone who have arround 500 point, if we finish the party whith 23 points (2 cards doesn't played) we both lost 7 elo points....

[Jellby]

ELO is (to some extent) a measure of your skill. Once your score reaches your skill level, you should expect it to remain more or less constant (with fluctuations), unless you increase (or decrease) your skill.

To increase (and "prove") your skill, you have to play with higher difficulty: including muliticolor and high player counts.

[xuorel]

I agree in principle, but in practice it does not work.

no matter how many stars you have at the end (20, 21, 22, 23, 24), if you don't put down all the cards you lose a lot of points.
This is not normal. The number of points lost should depend more on the number of stars at the end

for example:
I play a 3-way game (me 560 elo, my friends 260 and 960 elo points). We take 6 colors and black powder (thus difficult game and with an average player).
- if we finish everything, we have +4
- if we finish but with 2 or 3 cards not put, we have -7

the goal of the game in BGA is that all the games go to the end, except that in practice as soon as you know that you will not go to the end there is always a collective abandonment not to lose too many points.
This shows that the system is not good. Otherwise people would finish the games and accept to lose a reasonable number of ELO points.

[Travis Hall]

in practice as soon as you know that you will not go to the end there is always a collective abandonment not to lose too many points.

Why? You’ve mentioned the (or a) goal of the site, but what is your goal that drives you to do this?

[Stroom]

As said before, ELO is a skill measuring score. If you do not manage to get the maximum out of the game, it means that your skill level is not good enough yet.

ELO is not meant to increase indefinitely. It will eventually stay at one place... unless you start abandoning games where you know you will lose score... But that just means that you are cheating the system and are not actually as good as your ELO score would suggest.

The base game should be easy enough to get 25 points in 95% of the games anyway. Just get better at the game and stop thinking about the elo score overall.

[dschingis27]

You can also look at it the positive way. The fact that now elo points seem harder to win and easier to lose, it means you've already proven your skill level and reached a high Elo magnitude. Your Elo already reached such a high level that very slight mistakes or slight misfortune will bring it down quickly.

Look at the world chess champion, his Elo in chess is somewhere at ~2850 and that means he loses some significant Elo points even if he just draws against some 2700 player. To maintain a high Elo, you have to maintain a high skill.

Of course BGA could consider to introduce something like game-specific XP or XP level that just goes up all the time. Many other gaming sites have such a thing and it seems that some people would want it.

[xuorel]

you make me say what I did not say.

in practice as soon as you know that you will not go to the end there is always a collective abandonment not to lose too many points.

Why? You’ve mentioned the (or a) goal of the site, but what is your goal that drives you to do this?

I didn't say that's what I do. But you who are a regular Hanabi player, you can't deny that it happens very often.

When I play with players with more than 600 ELO, more than one time out of two if we know that we are not going to finish someone proposes the abandonment .... do you find that normal? It means that there is a problem in the system...

As said before, ELO is a skill measuring score. If you do not manage to get the maximum out of the game, it means that your skill level is not good enough yet.

ELO is not meant to increase indefinitely. It will eventually stay at one place... unless you start abandoning games where you know you will lose score... But that just means that you are cheating the system and are not actually as good as your ELO score would suggest.

The base game should be easy enough to get 25 points in 95% of the games anyway. Just get better at the game and stop thinking about the elo score overall.

There is a problem in your reasoning: the ELO rating is designed to work in one-on-one games (like chess), where there are exchanges of points according to the difference in winning probability between the players.
Hanabi is a cooperative game, so there is no point exchange, and the system should be adapted.

for example, if you have 1000 ELO and you play a game with someone who has 200 ELO, if you win the game, it doesn't seem normal to me that both players win the same number of points ....

As Hanabi is a cooperative game, it would be necessary that the classification encourages more to play with less well classified players to make them progress. For that, it is necessary that the lost points are less strong if you lose.
Otherwise the result is that you only play with people exactly of your level where you are sure to win, and there is no challenge anymore....

[Silene]

you make me say what I did not say.

in practice as soon as you know that you will not go to the end there is always a collective abandonment not to lose too many points.

Why? You’ve mentioned the (or a) goal of the site, but what is your goal that drives you to do this?

I didn't say that's what I do. But you who are a regular Hanabi player, you can't deny that it happens very often.

When I play with players with more than 600 ELO, more than one time out of two if we know that we are not going to finish someone proposes the abandonment .... do you find that normal? It means that there is a problem in the system...

It's mostly a problem in the community. But the system probably lead to it because it allows abandonning without point loss. Instead of abandonning there should only the option to give up and get the elo loss like when you bombed out.

for example, if you have 1000 ELO and you play a game with someone who has 200 ELO, if you win the game, it doesn't seem normal to me that both players win the same number of points ....

I think it's correct that players of a team should always win or lose the same amount of points. When one player is very strong and the other is a beginner like in your example, then it makes sense to assume that the stronger player contributed more good moves for the result than the weak player did. And in addition the strong player teamed up with a much weaker partner (so of course they scored worse than they usually would) and the weaker player teamed up with someone very strong (so they could get much better result than they usually would).

Let's say a team of very unequal skills, like in your example plays a series of games together. And let's say they indeed have very different skill (not just the elo). On average, they get results as expected (like a team of both 600 elo players). But does it mean they both played as well as each other? Probably not. Probably the 200 elo player still made a lot of mistakes while the 1000 elo player made some brilliant moves. If you reward unevenly, then it would have the effect that both their elo would be pulled towards each other. That would make no sense and would demotivate strong players to ever team up with low elo players.

It is even possible that the weaker player was overrated and their true skill is more around 100 while the strong player's true skill is around 1100. The system can't know how well they played individually. It can only see in the result whether both as a team performed more around 400 or around 800 elo.

[Stroom]

Elo also work in multiplayer games, not only one-on-one games.

Elo is not a very good metric for Hanabi, sure. but it is a good enough rough estimate for skill level anyway. It is an artificial comparison to some arbitrary scores: "If the player average is x and their score is over y, then we calculate as if they won the game collectively. If not, then they lost so they lose collectively".

There should be some kind of score calculation for the game so that the players could tell if someone is good in the game or not. Elo is currently the best thing we have. And there is no need for anything better anyway. It's a rough estimate and that's it. You should not take it seriously.

Elo calculation or Hanabi takes the average of the players because even if you are a strong player, the lower elo player could mess up the game for both of you. So you as a stronger player can win as many points because you got over the "handicap" of the weaker player in your team.

You should not play the game trying to increase your elo at all. This is what you seem to try to say. It's a pointless metric and you should not think so much about it. Just play and get better at the game in the long run.

Lost points being more strong is a feature. This is how Elo works when you reach your skill level. Elo is not meant to increase indefinitely. Winning is already quite easy so you win less points. But losing happens less often so you have to lose more in order to balance out the winning point increases. So losing more just balances it out.

The challenge in Hanabi is not to gain elo. Playing with people at your skill level is the most fun as you can develop more and more efficient tactics. Actually, you stand to gain more points if you play with people of smaller elo - if you win then, you win more, if you lose, you lose less... as your average elo is lower. At 1000 average elo, you basically gain 0 elo even if you win.

[Jellby]

If I remember correctly, the ELO gain for each match is calculated as if you tied with some ghost player with some pre-defined ELO. The ELO of the "ghost player" is defined by the difficulty of the game (settings, number of players) and the result of the game (the higher the score, the higher the ELO). The ELO of the real players is averaged, and the two are compared, if the ghost player's is higher, you win some points, if it's lower, you lose some points.

As Stroom said, there's incentive to team with lower-ELO players, since that brings down the average of the team and makes it more likely to win points. On the other hand, lower-ELO players tend to make more mistakes...