Board Game Arena

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Isn't average ELO 100? Which players can get by winning just 1 game, or from coming second place a few times? I feel that for most games, it's a pretty achievable and normal entry requirement. When I create tournaments recently, I've generally set the ELO to 'all' on games where the game is new to the site and most people won't have had time to get to 100 ELO yet, games where getting to 100 ELO may take a long time (ie. Twilight Imperium where games take months, and it may be a year before someone actually wins one), or elimination tournaments where it doesn't really matter if bad players enter as they'll just get eliminated in 1/2 rounds anyway.

There's good reason to not allow players below 100 ELO imo. These players are by far most prone to quitting/slow play as they enter not knowing what they're getting into, things which are disastrous for tournaments, so I am happy with the defaults, I often bump it up to 200 ELO for my own tournaments for these same reasons.

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The default isn't exactly some arbitrary thing, 100 Elo is the minimum before you get to the point where it's impossible to lose Elo, so it's not really exclusive of anyone, the person just needs to play more games to enter the tournament.

The fact that the site calls it Average is a bit misleading, because that's not what average actually means in any sense.

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Amanda 58 wrote: ↑03 November 2026, 18:26 I should have actually changed the topic heading to "Better or Improved News Page with More Features". This isn't actually about the ELO entry for tournaments, it's about getting more useful info, tips, etc. out to people!

And I should've maybe put it in the Discussions forum.....

There's probably only about 50 people who regularly make tournaments across the site. I'm sure that most of those who've made a few tournaments have spotted it. As has been discussed above - most people don't feel like having a minimum 100 ELO is much of a barrier - it just means the player has won at least 1 game, which isn't much of a high price to be able to partake in a tournament.

Amanda 58 wrote: ↑03 November 2026, 23:08 I deleted my posts about this you guys. Relax! This wasn't about allowing everyone into tournaments!! It was about creating a more informative news page for everyone!! Like I said before, I should have changed the title to this and put this in the Discussions.

Why delete the post content, but leave the thread up? Now it's just completely confusing for anyone who opens the thread as half the posts are empty so people looking have no idea what everyone else was replying to.