Board Game Arena

The new tie breaker in Carcasonne makes no sense. Awarding the win based on the last player to place a tile is no better than flipping a coin. Has nothing to do with playing ability. A 400 ELO should not loose 17 points because they tied with a 100 ELO player. This will discourage better players from accepting low ELO opponents. Go back to the old rule.

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I don't think the rules even specify what happens in the case of a tie (they're pretty rare).
Some googling led me to find that supposedly Carcasonne tournaments use this metric to determine the tie-breaker:

Ties will be broken in the following order:
a. Most unused Meeples remaining at the end of the game
b. Most points from farmers
c. Reverse turn order at start of the game (i.e. person who went last has highest tie-breaker)

Going straight to whoever played last does seem unfair.

It has been shown that the starting player has a statistical advantage, winning about 54% of the time, if I am not mistaken. Actually, the starting players wins 52% of the time even with the new tie-breaker implemented. This is intuitively understandable, too. The first players has 36 tiles to play and the second player has only 35 tiles.
Nowadays, in most international competitions, both live events such as the World Championship and the Mind Sports Olympiad, and online tournaments, such as the World Team Carcassonne Online Championship, as well as many national championships, this tiebreaker (starting player loses) is used.

Alexey_LV wrote: ↑27 August 2024, 23:19 Nowadays, in most international competitions, both live events such as the World Championship and the Mind Sports Olympiad, and online tournaments, such as the World Team Carcassonne Online Championship, as well as many national championships, this tiebreaker (starting player loses) is used.

Oh, well, what do these groups know anyway? Can't I just rely on my feelings that it is wrong?

Actually, the new tiebreaker rule makes perfect sense, and it's no coincidence that this rule is present in Carcassonne tournaments around the world (including Brazil, where I live). As already mentioned by Alexey in a previous response, there is proven advantage for the starting player in the game, and the logic behind the new BGA tiebreaker lies precisely in a minimal attempt to address this imbalance.