Board Game Arena

In the current implementation, it appears that you lose less MMR for coming in second in VP points (or can even gain MMR) than you do for having the least VP points.

This makes sense in a game like Agricola, but it doesn't make much sense in TI4. It's pretty important that there is no "second" place in the game and that winner takes all.

Keeping the current method encourages more solitaire play, where people try to score rather than do a risky play to stop the winner.

Is there a way to update the game outcomes to reflect that only the winner matters, or is it something inherent to BGA?

Was about to disagree with you when I read the title, but... Couldn't agree more. Worse, this creates situations where you're encouraged to 'kingmake' someone in order to end the game faster and secure 2nd place.

Example: You're on 8 and have no way to score more points, another player is on 9. A third player has 7 points but is holding Imperial and will go to 10 points on their next action. You're now incentivized to give your Support for the Throne to the player on 9 points to end the game and secure 2nd place.

It's a problematic play pattern for sure!

Support for the Throne can specifically be disabled as a table setup option e.g. for tournaments to avoid that.

Otherwise yes, it is normal BGA elo behavior and was discussed with the publisher. It's generally good to reward players for trying to get points. To phrase the argument another way, if one person passes every single turn of the game and sits in their corner with 0 VP, and another player works hard the whole game to end up with 9 VP, should they lose the same elo at the end?

Personally, I feel that would be very discouraging and might make players not want to try at all.

A player with 0 points should get just as much points a player with 9 points. At low level play it doesn't really matter much, but at high level play this is very important. It influences many aspects of the game and makes it much more like solitaire if I can just play passively to score knowing I won't lose much or any ELO even if I don't win. To me that's pretty antithetical to what the game is about

I'd even say give MMR spread evenly for 50% of the placement to ensure less winmaking. 1st should have a really good amount of MMR and 2nd and 3rd, for example, in a 6 player game, should get almost identical with 2nd just get a small buffer. So in a 4 player game, second place should not get a lot of points as well, but reasonable.