Please fix the Mahjong Rating System

[KiraRavens]

TL, DR: The rating system is frustrating as hell as is as it is based purely on RNG luck and not skill at all, and should therefore be changed to 1st and maybe 2nd place gaining points, while 3rd and 4th just don't get anything.


Longer version:
I just spent 6 or so hours playing Mahjong - came in 1st or 2nd for the first 4 hours with no exception. That was over a dozen wins.
Some 2nd places gave only +2 points, some +4, the highest I got for 2nd was +9 points and for first it was +29 I think. By the end of the streak I had gained around 60 points.

New person joins the group (I wanna make clear, I don't blame her at all), and she keeps winning almost every round for 4 full matches as she keeps starting with amazing hands. We spoke in chat, that's her telling us, not me speculating. She even started feeling bad about it. Great RNG. But that's actually beside the point.

The actual point is me coming in 4th place for the first time after my streak of luck was instantly -37 even though my actual hands weren't bad - I just got unlucky with Ron tiles. One loss, more than half the points gained over 12 wins and 4 hours gone. A couple more losses followed.

12+ wins and 4 or so losses and I left with fewer points than I had this morning. How does this make sense? How is that supposed to make people have fun?

If you wanna base the rating on RNG only, you gotta mitigate stuff like this.

As is, a player can be first for 90% of the game, then get unlucky enough to discard one Ron tile and come in 4th, losing 30+ points in one go. You can also have amazing hands every single round one tile away from winning 18k points, while someone else gets lucky with Tsumos, and keep losing. Your skill doesn't matter one bit. Your strategy doesn't matter one bit. It's pure RNG luck.

If everything that matters here is RNG, then the game should not punish us by making us lose points on top. Losing points should be a consequence of bad decisions, not bad RNG luck.

When farming mounts, you get totems for the achievement of killing the boss even if the mount doesn't drop. After a while you'll get the reward just for being persistent. Mahjong doesn't do that. You can play every day for months and not make any progress for sheer bad luck. You can even end up with less than you started with.

Please fix this.

[LunnerNorth]

How can it be a rating system if you can't go lower by losing? It's supposed to reflect your skill, not just the amount of games played.

And no it's not pure rng. Actually being good at mahjong means you always want to minimise your risk of losing, even if it often means you will have to abandon your chances of winning. You should be looking at every ron you give and look at what you couldve done to read the situation better to not discard that piece. This is especially important in ff since there arent enough players to constantly play with people of similar rank, which means youre getting less for winning and losing more for losing as you climb higher. But if you're a good player you'll still make consistent progress over time.

[Ilisidi]

Thing is, Mahjong doesn't have enough players on most data centers to allow for playing against people on your skill level, but calculates the points you loss and win on rating difference. So a high level player beating out a newbie gains them few points. But a newbie getting lucky costs the high level player tons of points.

It would be one thing if you were actually playing against people on your skill level, but you aren't, so luck has much higher influence than it does to begin with.

Mahjong is a luck based game (unlike chess which has no luck at all), the skill part is not in the winning, it's in mitigating the losses in a luck based game.