Add Bidding for Turn Order to Arena?

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Patrick of the Isles
Posts: 107
Joined: 30 August 2020, 13:20

Add Bidding for Turn Order to Arena?

Post by Patrick of the Isles »

I'm sure there will be a lot of different opinions about what the idea arena settings for GWT are. For my part, I was happy to see that the arena settings for GWT are 2 player, 2nd Edition, and without Simmental variant. While I have played a lot at all player counts, my preference right now when playing online is 2 player. However, I was disappointed to see that bidding for turn order was not activated for arena.

At first, this may seem sensible, since bidding is a variant not in the official rules. However, for competitive play I would estimate about a quarter of games based on the particular setup conditions (in 2nd edition - more than 25% in 1st edition) have a pretty clear advantage to going first. In those games, it can feel a bit sad not to be able to bid, as you are just starting off from a significant deficit.

I probably will not play much arena as it is, since it feels a lot better to me to play with bidding. So if there is general consensus, perhaps we can urge the BGA admins to add bidding? Normally we would wait until the next season to suggest changes, but if it happens that everyone mostly agrees this should be added, waiting two months seems silly. So comment below if you agree!

Happy gaming fellow GWT enthusiasts!
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Ranior
Posts: 212
Joined: 30 September 2011, 19:39

Re: Add Bidding for Turn Order to Arena?

Post by Ranior »

I firmly agree that bidding for turn order should be turned on for arena mode.

Every large tournament that I know of bids for turn order in the semifinals and finals at the very least, so the competitive community is familiar with this. Terra Mystica added a variant faction auction that has become standard practice on BGA.

I agree that GWT does not adequately compensate someone for being later in the turn order. The bidding generally should be pretty fast for GWT so it won't take up much time.

As for the rest of the arena settings, personally I'm not a fan, but I doubt there was ever going to be an easy consensus. There's too many editions, good player counts, and optional rules to get a clear cut consensus on what the best mode is going to be. Unfortunately for me I doubt we'll ever see a 4p GWT arena season because they'll likely let the guru's run it, and like most games on this site you can play a lot more 2p games rapidly and so hit guru status easier, so there's some bias in the way the gurus vote (not that I think they have a ton better system, but I do really wish they'd either greatly expand the number of gurus OR at least dramatically increase the number of users that can vote for settings instead of only allowing a very small group decide for the larger playing field).

Regardless though that's not really the point of this thread. I'm a firm YES for adding bidding for turn order to all arena games. I'm generally not for changing settings mid season, but given GWT just got added to arena mode when it hit full release yesterday, I agree this should be changed. Other games have had similar quick changes after getting released. (Heck, some games have much bigger changes--I still think it's absurd that Space Base ran for about a month on 3p standard, and then because it wasn't out that long the leaderboard wasn't reset at the start of this season but the settings changed to 4p light speed)
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docthib
Posts: 73
Joined: 10 August 2015, 14:05

Re: Add Bidding for Turn Order to Arena?

Post by docthib »

Hey Patrick, Ranior, and fellow GWT players :)

Sorry for that, Arena mode has been released with all options disabled by default.
I saw with BGA team to enable the bidding for turn order option for this season.

You can make suggestion for the next Arena season setup here:
https://boardgamearena.com/arenasuggestions?game=1432
(not sure everyone can see this page but well ^^).

Thanks for bringing this to my attention and have fun :)
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WithLove
Posts: 5
Joined: 27 February 2021, 17:00

Re: Add Bidding for Turn Order to Arena?

Post by WithLove »

Hello,

Is the process for the turn order auction written down anywhere? I'm playing in my first game with the setting turned on and I have to confess I don't understand exactly how it worked.
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