[MShechSon]

I played in an ACBL Clubhouse robot tournament and did reasonably well (not amazing, but top half and enough for points). This happens occasionally when I happen to play well. For the first time yesterday, the summary of my standings had a nice, encouraging blurb about my performance. I wanted to say I really appreciated it! I assume this is a new feature? Certainly I've never seen it before. It had the intended effect of making me feel good about myself and not to beat myself up over some missed bid/trick after the tournament.

Quote

Impressive! Your score of 54.76% put you in the top 77% of the field. In stratum C, you ranked 4th out of 10 (top 70%), and your section finish at 2nd was incredible. Keep excelling!

[SteelWheel]

I would pay real money to see this feature removed. I find it very annoying.

At least give me the option to not see these messages displayed.

[diana_eva]

Thanks for the comments. This feature with a small blurb explaining to users how they did and encouraging them accordingly is indeed new. We're adjusting the tone and messages to ensure they are useful, and not annoying

Pilowsky was right to spot an error in the logic when showing how someone did against the rest of the field -- we corrected that.

We had a few other comments from players, raising a good point that some of the messages were a bit too enthusiastic for sub-par performance; we've made adjustments there as well.

We'll leave these small stats blurbs a couple more weeks while tweaking the wording used, as players express their preferences.

Thank you all for your comments.

[mycroft]

Heh. And this is why you can't please everybody, and anything BBO (and the ACBL, and me, and...) does is wrong.

I understand that people need encouragement. I also am very tired of corporate enforced happiness. "We hope you enjoyed playing" (from a different message). Who's we? How can anybody "hope you enjoyed playing" to 10 000 players every day? How can you expect anyone who averages 53% to "enjoy playing" their 42% game, or to be anything but irritated by the Happiness Patrol after? But it Has To Be Done, or other people also get irritated, or lose hope and stop playing.

I don't see this as much any more, but I remember all the "back in the day" posts grumbling when the C players got lauded (and masterpoints) for their 43% game (that was still first of several in C) or in response to "if there isn't a Gold Rush every day, the GR players won't come", or... "Back in my day, there was no stratification, no flighting; you played against the best players and lost. That's how you learned, and got better"(*). Sure - and "back in the day", we could afford to lose half the new players that didn't "learn" and didn't "git gud", and decided there were better ways to spend their time than being publicly humiliated again. Survivorship bias is a thing(**).

I think it's great that our newer players are being encouraged by pep talks, especially when they have an unusually (for them) good game. I think it's something that would wear on me like Harvest Gold, but compared to "we know you have options, and are so glad you chose to fly with us" and the other tens of Mandatory Corporate Cheer I have to live through every day, it's ignorable.

(*) Okay, I do have a *serious* issue with "everything has to be stratified" - it has cost me my favourite game of memory, the Saturday Open Qualifier and Final. You can't stratify a qualifier, and nobody will play it if they can't score in C, so "stratified two-session" it is. My first "real win" in bridge was the first time, after about 7 tries, I qualified for the Final. Sure, we had a 35%, and sure, I'd be disappointed *now* if I didn't qualify, but that was the first "trophy" on my (virtual) shelf, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. I wish our newer players had the option, at least sometimes, to aim for that trophy.

(**) Of course they're right. Of *course* they're right. Even I tell players they need to Play Up occasionally, or their game will deteriorate, even (especially?) in the 299er. But the goal of not all bridge players is to compete in the top events, and we just can't afford to have a game for the survivors any more. Frankly, even I don't want to play in the Shark Tank every day; and this winter in fact, I have succeeded in my 2 goals, one of which (learning 120 pages of system and playing it competently) was easy, and the other (finding and asking someone new to play with, every second Monday) frankly scared the willies out of me. (And yes, occasionally I have won, with both "competent system" and "new partner". Bonus. Not the goal.)

[pescetom]

mycroft, on 2025-February-02, 12:04, said:

I don't see this as much any more, but I remember all the "back in the day" posts grumbling when the C players got lauded (and masterpoints) for their 43% game (that was still first of several in C) or in response to "if there isn't a Gold Rush every day, the GR players won't come", or... "Back in my day, there was no stratification, no flighting; you played against the best players and lost. That's how you learned, and got better"(*). Sure - and "back in the day", we could afford to lose half the new players that didn't "learn" and didn't "git gud", and decided there were better ways to spend their time than being publicly humiliated again. Survivorship bias is a thing(**).

My jury is still out on stratification. Italy doesn't have it and I don't see any burning need to introduce it... but then Italy already had few players and suffered one of the most dramatic declines in the last decade. OTOH IIRC NL doesn't have it either, and they still hold an amazing number of players.

Quote

Impressive! Your score of 54.76% put you in the top 77% of the field.

Telling people who finish 24th percentile in the field that they are in the top 77% is a slight insult to their intelligence, IMO... but I think diana_eva already got that message

[Marba2]

I I really apprciated the oeo talk. It was nice to know how I did in my strata.. Might keep me going. I am an old once upon a time better player!!!!

[sseiler]

Simply stated, I don't like the "pep talk" and think it should be removed. For sure I assume it is generated by some computer program and I think it is very irritating. If I play in person and do well and some human congratulates me, that feels very nice. Whether I do good or bad online, a computer comment about my play is not appreciated.

[TylerE]

Dumbest feature ever. Needs to get axed ASAP. It's just infantilizing and insulting.

[mycroft]

...But despite your opinion, and mine, and..., the people it's aimed at think it's great! And might get them to play more!

I remember the club back East. One of the issues with it was that judgement rulings were made by the director/owner based on "who might not come back if {he} ruled against them". The addicted lovers of bridge were coming back anyway, even if they were irritated by blatantly biased rulings.

Made good business sense, for many years. And then something called BBO made the same bridge (frankly, usually better bridge) available. They didn't need to worry about bad director rulings (frankly, "director rulings" were "mark this person as an enemy, never allow them at your table again"), or paying the $5 for the biased game, having to play the people who wrote the contract in her scorecard after *she* made what was to be the last bid for their side, or sat South behind the post-mortemers and frequently preempted on garbage or very short suits, and never seemed to get punished for it (partner always had great support, somehow!), or played the [other country] defence against (at the time) Alerted weak NTs, or...

I was back in Alberta when it happened, but in the space of two months, the game cratered by 35%. And it was the strong players who left. The implementation was unLawful and wrong, but the idea wasn't.

This decision may be infantalizing or offensive or "corporate enforced happiness" to us regulars, but we're not going to stop playing because of it. We need new people, even bad players; we need to keep who we have. If a little Happiness Patrol means that we keep these people (and some become better! And maybe start thinking "why is someone congratulating me for a 53% game - that's expected!" And...) it delays the cliff just that much longer.

And that's good for *us*. And worth putting up with a bit of crap we can, in fact, ignore, ¿neh?

[pescetom]

 mycroft, on 2025-February-03, 10:48, said:

having to play the people who wrote the contract in her scorecard after *she* made what was to be the last bid for their side

thanks for finally clearing up why a personal scorecard was considered so necessary in US
Over here they just close their cards instead.
Any abuse tolerated quickly becomes perceived as a right.

[MShechSon]

I am still appreciating this. I understand the corporate happiness critique, and can see others hate it. Maybe we can just add a toggle? There's lots of things I find annoying on BBO that I've turned off via preferences.

[pigpenz]

It is ridiculous