Abusing Matchmaking for ELO

[vojev]

There is a player who has more ELO than me who every time I match with them, they deny the match. This happened about six times in a row with the same player today, leading me to go from suspecting to being quite certain they are turning down matches with lower ranked players in order to preserve ELO (since you gain so much less from beating a lower-ranked player and lose so much more from losing to them). This seems especially suspicious in this case as the player has a sub-50% winrate, which is quite low for their ELO.

There is no way to report a player for this kind of behavior, but it seems like a clear way to exploit the current system. Why does the site expose any information about opponents (other than, maybe, karma and languages?) to players before the match is accepted?

[nik592]

I assume you're talking about non-Arena games, as Arena ones shouldn't be giving a confirm screen (although there may be some conjecture about there being an intermittent bug with that).

I would argue that that person is impacting their own experience more than others (who can, and probably should, red thumb after declining so many matches in a row). I personally come here to play games, ELO is interesting, but it's not that big of a deal. I could not be bothered to sit and turn down matches in order to try and stick with only ones that increase my ELO. That sounds like a really boring meta game.

Anyway, if it bothers you, red thumb them so they don't match with you again, and go enjoy games with people who want to actually play them.

[Ceaseless]

There is a player who has more ELO than me who every time I match with them, they deny the match. This happened about six times in a row with the same player today, leading me to go from suspecting to being quite certain they are turning down matches with lower ranked players in order to preserve ELO (since you gain so much less from beating a lower-ranked player and lose so much more from losing to them). This seems especially suspicious in this case as the player has a sub-50% winrate, which is quite low for their ELO.

There is no way to report a player for this kind of behavior, but it seems like a clear way to exploit the current system. Why does the site expose any information about opponents (other than, maybe, karma and languages?) to players before the match is accepted?

That's generally the opposite of abuse. The abusers are the ones who face lower rated opponent for easy wins farming off of them for free points. Lower quality players use this to get to ratings they otherwise would not be able to reach, as where they might be unable to challenge players at their own rating, they can reliably mop the floor with the levels far below. (Think a 500 always facing players sub 200 in a game with little natural variance.) Ratings tend to be less reliable as the gaps grow larger, as either the gap in skill grows so large the ratings do not properly reflect the absurdity of the difference, or the luck factor of the game puts a floor on the reasonable win rate after a certain point. It's going to vary based on the game.

A player choosing not to face players lower rated than them won't protect their rating. They may just be looking for a higher quality game. Facing higher rated opponents still requires the capacity to defeat them often enough to actually gain points, otherwise they will just be throwing points away to crushing defeat after defeat.

Win/loss can be shaky in this game, as unrated games can mess with said records, as can games early in their learning experience where they acquired many losses.

[ufm]

There is a player who has more ELO than me who every time I match with them, they deny the match. This happened about six times in a row with the same player today, leading me to go from suspecting to being quite certain they are turning down matches with lower ranked players in order to preserve ELO (since you gain so much less from beating a lower-ranked player and lose so much more from losing to them). This seems especially suspicious in this case as the player has a sub-50% winrate, which is quite low for their ELO.

There is no way to report a player for this kind of behavior, but it seems like a clear way to exploit the current system. Why does the site expose any information about opponents (other than, maybe, karma and languages?) to players before the match is accepted?

I agree with Ceaseless. It's usually not abuse but rather the opposite.
Seems they just don't know how to restrict table entrance by ELO.