Arena Season 5: let's go!

[DrClick]

Congratulations to every winners of Season 4!


Yet another improvement for turn-based Arena

Following your feedback on the last season, we improved again the end of the Arena Turn-based.

Some reminder: At the end of a season, for turn based games that did not "finish in time", the player who consumed the most time will lose the game (all the opponents will be winners).

At the end of Season 3, we stopped all turn-based games in progress, and a lot of you were frustrated by this. For the end of Season 4, we did things differently:

• The rule remains the same: player who consumed the most time during the whole game (= player who is the most reponsible of the delay) is losing the game, and his/her Arena rank will be modified accordingly.
• However, the game itself can continue in training mode. It means that you can finish the game if you want to, or leave it without penalty if you don't want to.

Thanks to the players who suggested this solution that we found to be the best compromise.



Important reminder: recent games are not concerned by the end of this season

All games published (= out of Beta) less than 1 month before the end of a season are not concerned by the end of the season (no trophies, no relegation).


Season 5 is NOW launched.

The new Arena is going to be opened in few hours.

Some Arena configuration has been updated:

_ Takenoko: Switch to new edition (this is now the official version of the game)
_ Terra Mystica: Loon Lakes + landscape ON
_ RFTG: Alien artifact without orb (thanks for organizing a poll on RFTG forum about this)
_ Stone Age: 2 players (odd season)
_ 7 Wonders: 3 players (odd season)
_ Kalah: 5 stones (odd season)
_ Tokaido: No Crossroads (odd season)
_ French Tarot: 4 players (odd season)
_ Clans of Caledonia: Auction starting player order based on auction results (for this season and all further seasons)
_ Tash-kalar: Nethervoid and Eherweave extensions are ON (for this season and all further seasons)
_ Unconditional Surrender: France 1944
_ NXS: Random start position (for this season and all further seasons)
_ Dungeon Twister: Full Random Intelligent (as ask for you in the DT forum)
_ Potion explosion: 2 players (this is a test for this season)
_ Toc: see last post of this thread: https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... 22&t=20257
_ Letter Tycoon: Automatic challenges + 1 retry + 1 doubling ability maximum + 3 players (according to polls on Letter Tycoon forums)
_ Draftosaurus: Summer/Winter


We try to follow everything and to catch all your suggestions / polls: sorry if we miss something. If you create a poll in a game specific forum that clearly show that players prefer another Arena setting, please post it there.



It's up to you to find the way of the elite!


May the odds be ever in your favor!

[The Luggage]

Great improvements and I love Arena Mode, thank you!

[Wonderful Plays]

Still TODO IMO:
1. Keep players interested in arena. Number of players playing for the top games are constantly declining. This season 7 Wonders got a couple more than season 3, but there were so many smurf accounts that this is probably it.
2. Clear tiebreaker rules: at this point in time whoever played a game last (doesn't even have to be arena game) is higher on the leaderboard. This is of course really bad. Either make it last player who played arena, tie the players properly or another solution.
3. Content creators still have harder time playing multiplayer games with interactions, I made 2 suggestions for improvements already:

https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=30119
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=30059

4. I think it is really worth considering for shorter games (under 10 minutes) to make matches best of 3. You could use the tournament development to throw people into a short tourney with the same players each round.

[Ursula1972]

Good changes.

Question, after 14:00 I finished a few Areanagames (win and loose) and I still got points and my place in arena changed. How is that possible?

[Iguana]

I agree with Wonderful Plays, counting the peak ELO score instead of the current one would really be a huge improvement to the arena system imo.

Another improvement to add to the TODO list I think is :
Limit the number of times you can play with the same player, especially for 2 player games. There are many games (especially 2-players games with a low total number of players) where the winner of the season just kept playing against a friend to reach the top, which doesn't seem correct to me.

[ChisaiNinja]

Another improvement to add to the TODO list I think is :
Limit the number of times you can play with the same player, especially for 2 player games. There are many games (especially 2-players games with a low total number of players) where the winner of the season just kept playing against a friend to reach the top, which doesn't seem correct to me.

I agree with this, and for those wanting to add to it there is a bug report for it here: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=38062

ElerCant appeared to be pretty prolific at it this round of arena matches

[Ursula1972]

Good changes.

Question, after 14:00 I finished a few Areanagames (win and loose) and I still got points and my place in arena changed. How is that possible?

For example: i went from fourth place Toc to 30th after 14:00

[twenty9oh7]

The changes here are great, but the habitual "time spenders" in my arena games have been people with 100+ asynchronous games going on at once. Has there been any thought in limiting the number of asynchronous arena matches that someone can be playing at one time? I do like that you're limited to only play the arena game with the longest wait time, so maybe that's the only buffer necessary, just throwing it out there.


Another side note is that "turbo mode" should be default on Haiclue arena matches to expedite games.

[PrinceParsnips]

Still TODO IMO:
1. Keep players interested in arena. Number of players playing for the top games are constantly declining. This season 7 Wonders got a couple more than season 3, but there were so many smurf accounts that this is probably it.
2. Clear tiebreaker rules: at this point in time whoever played a game last (doesn't even have to be arena game) is higher on the leaderboard. This is of course really bad. Either make it last player who played arena, tie the players properly or another solution.
3. Content creators still have harder time playing multiplayer games with interactions, I made 2 suggestions for improvements already:

https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=30119
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=30059

4. I think it is really worth considering for shorter games (under 10 minutes) to make matches best of 3. You could use the tournament development to throw people into a short tourney with the same players each round.

For tiebreakers solutions I would think any of the following would be better than the current or even who played last arena game;

Peak ELO
Games played
Games Won
Win %

obviously there should be multiple tiebreakers incase the top tiebreaker is also tied.

[Ursula1972]

The changes here are great, but the habitual "time wasters" in my arena games have been people with 100+ asynchronous games going on at once. Has there been any thought in limiting the number of asynchronous arena matches that someone can be playing at one time? I do like that you're limited to only play the arena game with the longest wait time, so maybe that's the only buffer necessary, just throwing it out there.


Another side note is that "turbo mode" should be default on Haiclue arena matches to expedite games.

I usually have around 80 playable games but i'm not the one people are waiting for. You can't say that. I play multiple times a day and only in the morning i have more than 20 games to play.