🌿ELO System Updates

[LesserJester]

I love the way people ask BGA direct questions, ones that are easy to answer, and they just ignore them entirely. It makes me feel so valued and appreciated as a customer.

I have again declined their offer of a premium membership trial. I'm not going to sign up until they start caring for their customers instead of ignoring them and/or fobbing them off with nonsensical excuses.

For the third time now, please can someone at BGA explain why hardback, a competitive game, has no ELO? Why remove ELO scoring from the competitive games? What is the point of that? You could easily have just forced all coop mode games into friendly mode only. Noone I've seen uses it other than for solo play anyway so I don't think anyone would have minded too much. But no, for some reason this competitive game is not allowed to be scored anymore?! Please explain why not. What abuse did you find in Hardback? What was so bad that it needed you to remove all ELO from it for?

Isn't Hardback listed as cooperative? Also, have you checked the Hardback forums?

I've been discussing it with the game owner, the publisher, etc. What I want is BGA's explanation. Just because a game has a coop mode doesn't mean the competitive game should be stripped of ELO. Nobody plays it as coop. Frankly I wouldn't care if coop mode option was removed. Or coop mode made friendly game only. Or coop mode placed in a separate game altogether. Whatever, but give back ELO to competitive games. That is what people are playing and that is how people measure their progress and choose which opponents to pair themselves against.

[KenFin1]

I love the way people ask BGA direct questions, ones that are easy to answer, and they just ignore them entirely. It makes me feel so valued and appreciated as a customer.

I have again declined their offer of a premium membership trial. I'm not going to sign up until they start caring for their customers instead of ignoring them and/or fobbing them off with nonsensical excuses.

For the third time now, please can someone at BGA explain why hardback, a competitive game, has no ELO? Why remove ELO scoring from the competitive games? What is the point of that? You could easily have just forced all coop mode games into friendly mode only. Noone I've seen uses it other than for solo play anyway so I don't think anyone would have minded too much. But no, for some reason this competitive game is not allowed to be scored anymore?! Please explain why not. What abuse did you find in Hardback? What was so bad that it needed you to remove all ELO from it for?

Isn't Hardback listed as cooperative? Also, have you checked the Hardback forums?

If you go back to page 60-62 something around there the publisher's rep TricksyFox was commenting in this thread too. They didn't know why the change was made and weren't happy about it, and were looking at what they could do. We haven't heard much since then sadly.

I share LJ's annoyance but BGA are a law unto themselves and they're not going to explain anything to anyone, even assuming they could explain it to begin with. h_illes asked them the same simple question multiple times and never got so much as an acknowledgement.

[Ceaseless]

I love the way people ask BGA direct questions, ones that are easy to answer, and they just ignore them entirely. It makes me feel so valued and appreciated as a customer.

I have again declined their offer of a premium membership trial. I'm not going to sign up until they start caring for their customers instead of ignoring them and/or fobbing them off with nonsensical excuses.

For the third time now, please can someone at BGA explain why hardback, a competitive game, has no ELO? Why remove ELO scoring from the competitive games? What is the point of that? You could easily have just forced all coop mode games into friendly mode only. Noone I've seen uses it other than for solo play anyway so I don't think anyone would have minded too much. But no, for some reason this competitive game is not allowed to be scored anymore?! Please explain why not. What abuse did you find in Hardback? What was so bad that it needed you to remove all ELO from it for?

Isn't Hardback listed as cooperative? Also, have you checked the Hardback forums?

I've been discussing it with the game owner, the publisher, etc. What I want is BGA's explanation. Just because a game has a coop mode doesn't mean the competitive game should be stripped of ELO. Nobody plays it as coop. Frankly I wouldn't care if coop mode option was removed. Or coop mode made friendly game only. Or coop mode placed in a separate game altogether. Whatever, but give back ELO to competitive games. That is what people are playing and that is how people measure their progress and choose which opponents to pair themselves against.

From a quick glance cheating could be one of the issues.

[KenFin1]

From a more detailed read of the thread the changes don't prevent cheating. They do penalise regular players. It doesn't solve what they claim it should. And how exactly does someone cheat at a cooperative game exactly?

[Ceaseless]

From a more detailed read of the thread the changes don't prevent cheating. They do penalise regular players. It doesn't solve what they claim it should. And how exactly does someone cheat at a cooperative game exactly?

Your reference to a cooperative game has me thinking you're referring to the Hardback discussion. I'm not sure why you think cooperative games are immune to cheating. Standard outside assistance methods should still do the trick. That said, I'm guessing the cheating issues emerged in the competitive variants being mentioned that weren't cooperative.

[KenFin1]

From a more detailed read of the thread the changes don't prevent cheating. They do penalise regular players. It doesn't solve what they claim it should. And how exactly does someone cheat at a cooperative game exactly?

Your reference to a cooperative game has me thinking you're referring to the Hardback discussion. I'm not sure why you think cooperative games are immune to cheating. Standard outside assistance methods should still do the trick. That said, I'm guessing the cheating issues emerged in the competitive variants being mentioned that weren't cooperative.

You're joining a thread 77 pages long with mere speculation and that is not helping. Can i suggest reading the thread and then making comment as guessing wrongly like this is just going to derail the thread into nonsense. ELO was changed because they said some people were taking it too seriously in certain coop games (not hardback). They took ELO away from all coop games as a result, but in so doing removed it from hardback competitive mode too. Several people, myself included, and tricksyfox - the publisher's own rep - think this was a mistake and want it reinstated. It has nothing to do with anything people were or weren't doing in hardback. Please don't guess and speculate otherwise when reading the thread would show your guesses to be inaccurate.

[Ceaseless]

From a more detailed read of the thread the changes don't prevent cheating. They do penalise regular players. It doesn't solve what they claim it should. And how exactly does someone cheat at a cooperative game exactly?

Your reference to a cooperative game has me thinking you're referring to the Hardback discussion. I'm not sure why you think cooperative games are immune to cheating. Standard outside assistance methods should still do the trick. That said, I'm guessing the cheating issues emerged in the competitive variants being mentioned that weren't cooperative.

You're joining a thread 77 pages long with mere speculation and that is not helping. Can i suggest reading the thread and then making comment as guessing wrongly like this is just going to derail the thread into nonsense. ELO was changed because they said some people were taking it too seriously in certain coop games (not hardback). They took ELO away from all coop games as a result, but in so doing removed it from hardback competitive mode too. Several people, myself included, and tricksyfox - the publisher's own rep - think this was a mistake and want it reinstated. It has nothing to do with anything people were or weren't doing in hardback. Please don't guess and speculate otherwise when reading the thread would show your guesses to be inaccurate.

Yes, this thread is 77 pages long. With all of the other fun stuff in this thread, I don't see why this particular query would stand out to BGA staff. You already know why Hardback would have gotten hit with the new rules, due to the labelling system. So it's not really a question of why it would be affected. It would be a question of why someone doesn't manually make an exception for it. I already checked for posts by TrickysFox after their namedrop before I posted, so I got to see things like the following.

Yeah sadly this appears to be the case. I just went up a grade in hardback, and got no XP notification, no award. In a competitive game FFS. BGA again, what is the point of removing ELO from a competitive game? Can you please respond on this.

Hi! So I'm the community manager for Fowers Games. I talked a bit about this with quietmint, who did the BGA adaptation. Apparently BGA fundamentally doesn't support a game that can be competitive OR co-op, so it treats it as co-op. Which is annoying, but there's not much we can do about it.

Why might BGA not choose to go out of their way to fix Hardback in particular? Things like https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22542 probably don't do Hardback, and other word-based games, any favors in this regard. It wouldn't surprise me if BGA just hasn't dug much into this particular query yet. This sort of stuff is just the first thing that stands out to me when looking at Hardback. If I'm wrong, then I'm wrong, just another speculation among the masses of this vast thread, and not pretending to be anything more.

[KenFin1]

Why shouldn't his post get answered by BGA? They asked for feedback and said they would monitor the thread. So it's the appropriate place to ask the question. I don't get why you're defending BGA tbh but each to their own.

Good to see you now agree it was nothing to do with cheating. It's amazing what a bit of reading can reveal isn't it!

[ErikLevin]

I'm super confused about the Hardback discussion. All spelling games are set to non-competitive: Hardback, BuyWord, Letter Tycoon. It's not because they have cooperative modes, I assume it's because it's so easy to cheat with a tool. What does Hardback's cooperative mode have to do with it? Many other games have certain settings that make the game coop or solo, and thus force it into friendly mode without requiring the whole game to be set to non-competitive. Ceaseless's link seems to confirm that Hardback was indeed set to non-competitive in 2021 due to issues of cheating? https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22542

All non-competitive games have their Elo score hidden (except in some places...). Again, nothing to do with cooperative games. All cooperative games are non-competitive, but not the other way around.

[KenFin1]

I'm super confused about the Hardback discussion. All spelling games are set to non-competitive: Hardback, BuyWord, Letter Tycoon. It's not because they have cooperative modes, I assume it's because it's so easy to cheat with a tool. What does Hardback's cooperative mode have to do with it? Many other games have certain settings that make the game coop or solo, and thus force it into friendly mode without requiring the whole game to be set to non-competitive. Ceaseless's link seems to confirm that Hardback was indeed set to non-competitive in 2021 due to issues of cheating? https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22542

All non-competitive games have their Elo score hidden (except in some places...). Again, nothing to do with cooperative games. All cooperative games are non-competitive, but not the other way around.

Nope. Hardback was removed from ARENA but standard games between players were still ELO scoring and are described as competitive games in the settings menu. The removal of ELO scoring only changed with this latest ELO nonsense. SFAIK that is what people want reinstating. It's certainly what I'd like to see put back. I never played it as an Arena game, though I probably would if the option were there.

Hardback has two modes, a coop mode where all players try to outscore the computer player ("Penny") and a competitive mode (players vs players like any other game) where players try to outscore each other. The latter is a competitive mode in that you compete against other players. It is not coop in any way. Why should players playing against each other not score ELO for that?

This confusion perhaps highlights the unhelpful language used by BGA. There were lots of questions earlier in the thread as to what was a "ranked game". Is that a scoring game (as opposed to a friendly game) or an arena game etc. Similarly here I took competitive to mean ELO could change hands because you're playing someone else. The game options in the simple (non arena) mode menus use this description where you choose between "cooperative" and "competitive" game modes. It's BGA's own language. Clearly they do not intend competitive to just mean ARENA games, but elsewhere they say that people should use Arena for competitive ranking of players so i can see why there might be misinterpretation.

I can't speak for what Lesserjester was asking for, but they were asking for their 100 ELO award so I'd be surprised if they were playing it when arena was an option. I presume therefore they also want ELO scoring back as opposed to anything else.