Messages

Does this mean that all games are unrated, or that rated games will update sometime in the future?

wyxxyr (4) vs. Cardinal87 (2)

games:
7532001
7532213
7532550
7532742
7532934
7533188

yed (1) vs. wyxxyr (4)

games:
7304974
7305473
7305829
7306211
7306458

wyxxyr vs. shaun417

wyxxyr wins 4-2

games:
7017350
7017828
7018512
7018824
7019133
7019576

In!

This was far and away the biggest reason I stopped playing on the other site. It was worse than having no ratings system at all, really.

*Makes ratings perpetually inaccurate as long as players' activity levels vary. (and thus uneven -- matches are more about active player vs. active, inactive vs. inactive than about skill).
*Difficult to want to resume playing after a break.
*Generally frustrating to have a measure of skill tied to a variable unrelated to skill.

The way to do this is to not change a rating, but simply remove inactive players from being displayed on leaderboards.

Third, it provides motivation not to abandon games or otherwise waste someone else's time. For problem users, it also means there's a form of penalty that doesn't require restricting access to the game.

I always get a little rankled at the "wasting someone's time" argument. In many cases one player refusing to scoop results in a greater waste of time than if they simply conceded the game and moved on.

Scoop? As in click end turn? Don't know if there's an easy fix to that, other than to maybe pop up a message if there's still a buy left but only 0-2 coins or somesuch. Or, obviously, a per-turn or per-action/per-buy time limit. Regardless, by "wasting someone's time" I mean people who just abandon the game, play while doing something else (which I've been guilty of), etc. A rating system, especially in combination with some time limit, would require that people actually care that they're playing with another human (or at least, would help that).

Ratings systems serve multiple purposes. First, it allows one to determine how good they are at something (relative to others, and relative to oneself). When not playing with friends (i.e. as a social activity), the competitive aspect is the persistent thread throughout the games, keeping it from falling into "casual game" territory (obviously lots of people like casual games, granted).

Second, it provides a means to match users of similar skill. The rating system on Goko (or whatever it wound up being called) was the reason I stopped using the site (as I recall, it was wildly inaccurate, in part due to falling automatically without logging in -- a bizarre mechanic from anything but a pay-to-win perspective).

Third, it provides motivation not to abandon games or otherwise waste someone else's time. For problem users, it also means there's a form of penalty that doesn't require restricting access to the game.

As there isn't a score, rating, or ranking system, people frequently leave games (sometimes on purpose, without actually resigning, as an abusive user just did after complaining about luck and whatnot throughout the game), and I find the games to get kind of mindless. Call me a millennial, I guess (I think I make the cutoff to be called that...).