Board Game Arena

When you have the lowest experience points (XP) when playing and you come last in a game you shouldn't be deducted any XP's.

Long Duk Dong wrote: ↑02 December 2022, 20:36 When you have the lowest experience points (XP) when playing and you come last in a game you shouldn't be deducted any XP's.

I assume you mean ELO?

That's not how it works - and it's a mathematical system, which BGA don't have much control over (beyond deciding whether to use or not). It depends on the difference between that lowest ELO and the others. Broadly, if it's the lowest by a long away you wouldn't expect to lose much, if anything - but if it's quite close to that of one or more of the other players, you'd definitely expect to lose something, as statistically you wouldn't expect to come last every single time you play the same group of players.

Long Duk Dong wrote: ↑02 December 2022, 20:36 When you have the lowest experience points (XP) when playing and you come last in a game you shouldn't be deducted any XP's.

As robinzig said, XP isn't deducted, so you must be talking about ELO. ELO is supposed to be a measure of your skill in a game. How well you perform against other players is a reflection of your skill. When you lose, your ELO drops to reflect that your strength in the game may have been overrated before the game. The closer you are in skill to the other player while still being lower rated (you commented specifically about the lowest rating), the more the adjustment. On the other hand, if you lose to someone rated much higher, the inference is that your rating before the game is probably close to what it should be, so it isn't adjusted by much (but it still goes down).

The exception is that BGA artificially prevents ratings of 100 or below from dropping. This would not happen in a pure ELO system, but maybe you got used to that and thought it was just a general rule that the lowest rating doesn't drop?