Board Game Arena

I'm not mad, upset, angry, or whatever you would have. But I bring this up because I think it's weird and damaging to me being able to play on here. I had elo of 310, three games later I'm down to 266. That's basically 50 points lost within a very small frame of time. How this works or happens I don't know besides playing terribly. Refer to subject but if I'm not understanding it, let me know.

You lost 4 games in a row, costing you 46 Elo. Nothing unusual here.

Every single 2p game that does not end in a tie has makes a difference of 20 Elo points (the contrast of your resulting Elo if you won vs. resulting Elo if you lost will always be 20 pts). From that you can infer that there is a big variance in your current Elo value, at least in games with a lot of luck like Ticket to Ride. It's best to not care about current Elo, if anything, you can look at average Elo of your last 50-200 games if you want a more reliable evaluation of your skill.

If it helps you, it happens to everyone, including the best players, everyone kind of bounces up and down in a range of 100 Elo points or more in games like Ticket to Ride. Some players say it should be like that for reasons I don't understand, I'd say we should change this and don't have a bouncy Elo value in the first place, but there is no consensus on BGA on whether the Elo bouncing is something to change or not.

dschingis27 wrote: ↑01 October 2026, 02:56

If it helps you, it happens to everyone, including the best players, everyone kind of bounces up and down in a range of 100 Elo points or more in games like Ticket to Ride. Some players say it should be like that for reasons I don't understand,

This happens to the best players in high-skill low-luck games also.

Now I'm at 186 elo after 3 days ago being at 310. I feel a lot of people cheat or get around ways to either make sure you lose or make you give up. And I've had to give up a lot.

What is the distinction between making sure you lose and making sure you give up? Isn't that just playing well?

Lucan 2 wrote: ↑06 October 2026, 06:59 Now I'm at 186 elo after 3 days ago being at 310.

You played 25 games and lost a lot of them. Dropping 124 in Elo rating is going to happen if you have a rough stretch of 25 games.

Yeah, if OP thinks this is bad, I wonder what they would think of losing points when at a much higher Elo and then having to win a dozen games to get back to where they were.

The idea of Elo is that the higher you climb, the more you have to do to maintain your spot. If people kept climbing despite still only winning half the time, then Elo wouldn't be a measure of skill, just of how much someone has played a game.

Curious, as to how other players make you give up ? You give up, not them making you give up ! . You cant handle losing, so it sounds like you rage quiit. Dont understand that losing causes elo loss. And yet you have played over 2000 of the same game. Surely you lost elo before. This thread cracks me up, they make me give up. Lol.

They go on this rant every few months. People explain how things work. They ignore all the explanations and just continue to complain that when they lose games they lose Elo. I don't think they're actually interested in how Elo works, they just want it to work different so they don't have to feel bad when it goes down.