Well, from what I saw in other games it mostly brings those things:

• Raging - about the "bad matchmaking" or "broken game" whenever the opponent seems significant stronger in a match than it is expected (based on their ELO or whatever)
• Frustration - because suddenly the result of a game matters long term, this makes losing psychologically way more depressing and infuriating (which is NOT really compensated by victories gaining significance).
• Cheating - because some people with ego-problems have the illusion that having a high rating will make other people look up to them.
• Circumvention - people will try (and succeed) to find ways to quit a game without it being rated, when they are about to lose. Effectively screwing over the opponent.
• Trolling - as in making life hard for those who care to raise their ELO by wasting their time. Like hiding forever, always using full turn time etc.
• Smurfing - experienced players will create new accounts to stomp sincere new players. Leading to Raging/Frustration for their victims.
• ELO-Boosting - E.g. using multiple accounts in order to lose against oneself and to boost the main account's ELO.

Sure there are solutions (with their own problems) to some of those issues - but either way it would be a big administrative burden on us developers. We'd lack the time to properly do that IMO.

So yeah... it probably only makes sense in a private club of people that trust each other.

Somebody could make a simple website where that private club would submit all their fight results and the site would calculate their ELO/ranking.

  sheepluva <- me  my code stats -> 
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Hello sheepluva,

thank you for sharing your point of view on this.

Actually after reading your message, I see there might be, indeed, a lot of issues and I agree for most of them.

Though, rating games has its good sides too. For instance:

• Players will have an idea on the game difficulty before matching someone;
• Low rated players can play together, and so can highly rated players. It may be really frustrating for newbies to lose really fast against skilled players;
• It brings new "intensity" to the game. Bringing more players, and making them more regular (no I'm not trying to make addicts);
• Players have an objective (raise their elo). Thus, the overall HW skills increase;
• You can know if you are making any progress or not;
• Keeping track of number of games played/lost/won (player history) would be nice too;
• Of course, unrated games may still be possible;

Now regarding: trolls, cheaters etc appropriate actions will be taken. And if necessary you could add more mods as the community grows.