Board Game Arena

Hi! I have a question about the ELO ranking. I thought that when someone doesn't play a game for 2 months, he/she disappeared from the ELO ranking until he/she won't play another ELO ranked game.
But now I found a situation in which a player had an high position in a game ranking, and he played the last game more than 2 months ago. Now he played an unranked ELO game and he came back into the ranking... I didn't think it was possible, so I'm asking how does it exactly work.
If my description is correct, honestly it doesn't seem fair IMHO... theoretically a player can reach an high ELO value, and he can continue to stay into the game rank without playing anymore. Can this be changed?

I agree with the notion that being "not ranked" in a game is a really crude way to balance ranking in terms of players' activity, especially if you can jump back to ranking by playing non-ranked game (that actually sounds like a bug). BGA should really either:

1) manually implement ELO decay (e.g. 1% of ELO in first week of inactivity, 2% in second, etc.), or
2) adopt a better ranking system which accounts for inactivity in its algorithm, such as Glicko 2.

totes_not_pej wrote:I agree with the notion that being "not ranked" in a game is a really crude way to balance ranking in terms of players' activity, especially if you can jump back to ranking by playing non-ranked game (that actually sounds like a bug). BGA should really either:

1) manually implement ELO decay (e.g. 1% of ELO in first week of inactivity, 2% in second, etc.), or
2) adopt a better ranking system which accounts for inactivity in its algorithm, such as Glicko 2.

1) Probably a week of inactivity is too little to let start the decay, there are games on the sites with a few games played every week, and if someone play mostly turn-based games it's possible they last more than a week. The 2 months are a good amount of time to let start the decay probably... or still better, it won't be possible to regain the ELO rank with unranked games.
2) I didn't know that ranking system, thanks for posting it !!!

I was just coming across this too. I've been trying to play through and get good rankings on all the games here on BGA (almost halfway now ). I have been noticing my old games slipping into the unranked category, which is really annoying.

I wish it was based off of complete player inactivity instead of a player not playing a single game for a while. I don't want to revisit old games just to replace myself in the rankings.

cosmosis wrote:I was just coming across this too. I've been trying to play through and get good rankings on all the games here on BGA (almost halfway now ). I have been noticing my old games slipping into the unranked category, which is really annoying.

I wish it was based off of complete player inactivity instead of a player not playing a single game for a while. I don't want to revisit old games just to replace myself in the rankings.

I have to mostly agree with this one, although I do somewhat get it.

Actually, I somewhat dislike the decaying skill concept. (We argue over this on Yucata all the time. ) But if something like that were to happen, I think it should be a much longer time period. Not only is there a huge difference for those playing turn-based, but also someone may skip around to different games. I do mostly turn-based, and don't play very many at once, meaning my ELOs would all be decaying, cause I could easily go a month or two without playing one particular game, but I haven't gotten any worse at them, nor see why I should suddenly become unranked. A week or two is an extremely short period of time relatively to turn-based games - extremely short. And really, two months is short too. Even for those playing live, think about the people who know a lot of games on here - they can't play all of them all of the time.

And if completing the game is the factor here, that's even worse - over half my games are abandoned by someone. So... I'm going to be unranked in Hearts in 6 days cause I can't get anyone to actually stay and play the freakin' game? (Those of you who want people to become unranked after two months might want to take that into consideration. By the way, where is this in the FAQs? I will never comprehend why this site has so little information available - what is with leaving so much stuff out of the FAQs???)

So complete inactivity does seem like a better idea, i.e. someone who has simply left the site.