Board Game Arena

Phoxtrot wrote: ↑10 October 2026, 18:54 There are many games where you cannot possibly gain ELO if you don't finish first.
For instance in Innovation, play a 3p or more game and only the winner can gain ELO because people "on the loosing team" cannot win ELO.
Now, games that are not actually not team games can get around this with the proper settings, this issue was solved for King of Tokyo for instance.

But...
The whole handling of team ELO in the first place is WRONG.

1) One thins that should change when you are in a team, losing or winning, is that you should not be compared to your teammate. To win or avoid the loss of some ELO because your teammate has an higher ELO than you is absurd (and vice versa) .

-------
Now, to make team ELO changes fully "fair" is difficult and probably subjective.
If I am ELO 100 in team with an ELO 300 and opposed to 2 ELO 200 guys and we win, the current situation is that I win ELO for drawing with my team mate (absurd, see point 1) but I also gain more for my matchups against my opponents than my teammate does and that is probably not right. This really mean that you have everything to gain and nothing to lose by teaming with an higher ELO.

2) So on balance, I think it would make more sense to compare the team average ELOs or something like that.

I'm sure that this is an issue that has been tackled in game theory somewhere by someone so ideas are welcome.

ChiefPointThief wrote: ↑11 October 2026, 21:44 Is the fix that hard? Taking into account teammates elo their should be a rating per team instead of per player. Then even pts distributed for all members of each team.

ChiefPointThief wrote: ↑11 October 2026, 21:44 Is the fix that hard? Taking into account teammates elo their should be a rating per team instead of per player. Then even pts distributed for all members of each team.

yakko_ wrote: ↑11 October 2026, 22:36 The rating system is for individual players. The idea of rating teams, and expecting that both players on a team should have the same rating, might make sense if each team of two were tracked as a distinct entity and each player had many ratings with which they were associated, one for each partnership, but that is not going to happen.
In a game like spades, a player plays with many different teammates from game to game. Arena matchmaking in particular enforces this. What ChiefPointThief, Frank, and I and others would like to see is a rating system that assesses chances of winning for the two teams within each game and distributes rating points for the game result accordingly, consistently with the Elo system's basic principle for 1v1 games. Currently, if I'm at, say, 450, and get into a match vs. a pair of 300 players, the system expects the 450 player to win a certain % of the time, >50%, and gives out points after the game in accordance with that, supposedly so that we all maintain our ratings if we win and lose at that expected rate. But that says nothing about the 450 player's partner. If I'm paired with another 450 player, or if I'm paired with a 150 player, our chances of winning that game are going to change drastically, but the current system assigns my rating adjustment the same in both cases, as if my chance of winning depends only on my strength and that of my opponents.
Put another way, all members of a team win or lose each game together. It is not possible for one partner's chance of winning to be 75% in the same game that the other partner's chance is 25%. But the current system awards points as if it were.

tbhp wrote: ↑11 October 2026, 23:51 What is the way it works for esports? Many games work in teams and have ranking systems that seem to work appropriately (they have to when money is on the line and you want a player's rank to be a reliable indicator of their skill). Why doesn't BGA use the same system that is used for those games?