Board Game Arena

the ranking system is so bad in this game. when you get to a higher rank you start losing +30 point each game, and only win 5-7 point for a win. i get that you are losing more because you are higher rank, but you shouldnt have to win 5 games to make up for a loss. Specially when it isn´t a skill based game and mostly based on luck.

for example, i played 3 games with the same player today. i won 2 games and got 12 points in total and lost the third game with -34.

makes no sense.

I agree

If you speak about the ELO ranking, it's common to BGA, nothing specific to the game

donpipe wrote: ↑03 January 2024, 13:41 the ranking system is so bad in this game. when you get to a higher rank you start losing +30 point each game, and only win 5-7 point for a win. i get that you are losing more because you are higher rank, but you shouldnt have to win 5 games to make up for a loss. Specially when it isn´t a skill based game and mostly based on luck.

for example, i played 3 games with the same player today. i won 2 games and got 12 points in total and lost the third game with -34.

makes no sense.

You seem to be referring to the Arena points for your numbers. When you get a large rating gap over another player, you are expected to obliterate them. If the game is more luck-based, that hampers how far up you can go compared to a game with less luck in it. That's to be expected.

When you're "so good" that you win 5 out of every 6 games, it makes all the sense that you lose 5 times more points with the loss than the points you get for every win. Anything else would mean your score would constantly increase or decrease with time. So it has to happen. The only open question is at which score it should happen.

if this was chess that would make sense. but you can easily lose to a new player and be really punished with points. even when you toggle "strong players" only, it keeps joining games with non ranked players.

donpipe wrote: ↑03 January 2024, 20:05 if this was chess that would make sense. but you can easily lose to a new player and be really punished with points. even when you toggle "strong players" only, it keeps joining games with non ranked players.

Again, that's the point. The inability to create that significant winrate vs those players keeps the ratings down. Games that don't struggle as much with this, such as Splendor, Ticket to Ride, etc. despite having some luck factor, will have higher ratings. I can play those, face 300-400s, and take those 5-1 odds in ratings and hold on, for every game I drop with bad luck or weaker play I can win multiple games back to climb back up and maintain those 500-600+ ratings, with several players doing even better than that. Such ratings don't even exist in Sea Salt (the highest atm seems to be scraping 500s). And games with even less of a luck factor, or none at all, can reach even higher peaks. Activity can play some factor in this, but a lot of it also comes down to variance, higher variance leading to a lower rating ceiling even for the most active of games.

I can't speak to your pairings, I don't see the settings you use and haven't checked what kind of opponents you're getting, though given you're playing Arena you'll have to keep an eye on the fact two ratings system exist. Arena keeps getting reset, so sometimes the ratings aren't in synch yet for accounts.

Question to OP: if it isn't a skill based game, how comes the best players have a win rate of 65-80% over lots of games? Statistically it's extremely unlikely that this is "mostly based on luck".

- so how do I get an assigned an opponent who is marked as "my first game" who already has 111 ELO on them? - \\\ Like how does a 'never played before' oppo have 100+ ELO?

Completely agree. I strongly think that BGA should switch some Arena Rankings to % of wins instead of that sort of ELO ranking. A strong player will be benefited by showing that he/she wins well over 50% of the games and wouldn't be hurt for a loss due to bad luck. Right now only a good streak is considered, once the player get it, they seem to stop playing, Top3-Top5 looks pretty much the same for multiple days.