How are scores calculated?

In a field like this, where I am the lowest rated player by far, I arrived in second place. Yet I lost points, how's that possible?

The rating system chosen, i.e. how many wins and losses each place gets, is determined by the average rating of the 4 players. If you check the game text at the start you'll see it will say something like 1st: 3.41 wins, 2nd: -0.2, 3rd: -1, and 4th -2.21

If only someone had written an article about how the scoring system works.

...oh wait https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/how-the-rating-system-works-3

If only FFA stayed the way it was, instead of this confusing Solo system, thousands of players would still be playing. 

So, they morph the rating system as the rating gets higher. For say, a normal 1800 game, first and second both gain points, and 3rd and 4th loose points. In a game that is say, 2200(which was about that game, as per averages), 1st gains points, 2nd loses a small amount of points, and 3rd/4th lose points. In a 2500 rated game, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th all lose the same amount of points. This is because they want high rated players to play for first. hope this helps!

This may be what they want, but in practice, they drove 90% of high rated players away, and  made it pointless to play high rated FFA. 

Hopefully just dormant. So the problems as I understand it are A.face people who really aren't good enough to play solo yet B.no high rated players so lose rating.

In my opinion we should move back to the former rating system for the time being, until everything settles. If not I think the threshold for solo should be moved up to, perhaps, 2500.  2100s are just not good enough yet. 

An unpopular solution to the other problem would be to reduce everybodies ratings to 2700. That creates other issues, but in theory should take care of that problem. this would only be smart in the senario that 2700+ would agree to it, otherwise no. Alternativly, you could stagger it, like: move 2800 rating-2720 rating 2900-2760 3000-2850. I don't know, just thoughts.

High rated FFA is pretty much dead now.  Where are the hourly 2500+, 2600+ games being played? You'll be lucky to catch those once a week.

The Leaderboard now starts at 2645, we're down to 5162 Active FFA players.  Go through the archive for the top 20 FFA players, and see how many Rapid games they've played this past month.  The top 5 active FFA Players have played 20 FFA Rapid games combined these past 2 weeks, while Hest accounted for 9 of those games.  

I dislike the sarcasm, it’s not like everyone knows there has been an article about the rating system. 

There are many reasons most high rated players are not playing. 

1: The rating system is abysmal, even if in theory it sounds optimal in reality it only works if all the players in the game play near perfect and it doesn't deal with the fact that you are punished equally for other peoples mistakes which wasn't close to problematic with the prior system. If I was playing with Cha, Rojitto and Tiger then I wouldn't mind but funnily enough those games don't happen.

2: The best players already played for 1st, I don't understand the argument to encourage people at the top to play for 1st because if they don't they will never be at the top anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

3: The server issues make the game near unplayable 

4: The starting position was changed to something most no one asked for or wanted

5: The team in charge of these changes have shown a clear lack of respect for their most dedicated players and community members that make the game what it is, do you expect us to play much?

Nice and welcoming environment for new players right?

Fair enough

Okay snowflake.

Rudeness does absolutly nothing to help the community grow or thrive.

Does it hurt it? I would think so

Can't really control people's snarky remarks. 

I wasn't trying to control him, though I can see how you read it that way. I just strongly disagree with his underlying arguement

My bad, I could have worded it better. I don't know why people are rude, it makes them childish and drives people away from them. You get absolutely nothing from it. And that should be obvious enough not to do it, but Grable did it anyways. 

All good Often my wording isn't clear. I should note that I have nothing against Grable, I just strongly disagree with him on this issue

My apologies grable; there was no need for me to attack you for what you said. Thank you for giving us a link to that article.