Is there player matching for Arena games?

[katmk]

I was wondering whether there is any form of player matching in Arena, or is it just whoever is available at the given time?

I ask because in one game that I have now played a total of 34 times in Arena mode, eight of them have been against the same player and we have two more on the go. (At this point we have won an equal number of games, so we do seem to have a similar skill level!)

Is this just about how big the pool of players is? These have all been turn-based, which I have played 20 of. My real-time games have almost all been against different people.

[mikkashar]

You can set some parameters for Arena games that affect who you'll be matched with. If you go to the lobby page and set the Arena option, each game will have a gear icon next to it. Click that & the advanced settings, and you can request a minimum reputation, proximity to your level, game speed, and playing hours with degrees of preference. (You can set some different parameters if you request a match on the game page.) I believe arena matching also honors red thumbs.

That said, how busy is the Arena for the game you're playing? If you look at the "current season" ratings and thumb through a few pages, are there lots of elites, or do you get to platinum/gold/silver/bronze quickly? If there aren't many players, and/or you and your frequently matched opponent look for games around the same time of day and with similar speed & play time parameters, you'll see each other a lot. Also, how many of the same game are you and/or your opponent willing to play at the same time? Someone who's open to playing dozens of games at once & requests a new one every time a match is made will show up at your table a lot more often than someone who only plays one or a few games at a time.

I suspect what you're seeing is entirely about the size & preferences of the game's player base, not a deliberate attempt to match players by any unstated heuristic.

[nik592]

I agree with the previous post on factors affecting who you get matched with. That said, I do wish there was a way to not be matched to the same person you just finished playing - I'm happy enough to wait even a day or two (I play mostly turn-based, this is obviously different for real-time games) for another opponent to appear, rather than playing back to back to back games with the same person. I understand that when a pool of players is small, I'm likely to see the same person at several points in the season, but immediately over and over gets tiring.

I do only tend to play one game at a time, and mostly I start a new one as soon as my old one finishes. However, where I've had the same opponent a lot, I have left it a few hours before starting my next game to see if they can get matched to someone else first. But in a small pool of players, this often doesn't work, and I don't generally like to leave starting another game too long, as I often forget to do so and then 3-4 days later wonder where my regularly running game of [xyz] is.

[katmk]

Thank you for your responses, that's helped me understand better how Arena works.

[Panthergirl]

You can set some parameters for Arena games that affect who you'll be matched with. If you go to the lobby page and set the Arena option, each game will have a gear icon next to it. Click that & the advanced settings, and you can request a minimum reputation, proximity to your level, game speed, and playing hours with degrees of preference. (You can set some different parameters if you request a match on the game page.) I believe arena matching also honors red thumbs.

I set mine to "Never want to play someone far from my level" in Obsession. I have an ELO of 135 and I am currently in an Arena game with the third highest person in the game overall, with an ELO of over 500.

[nik592]

I set mine to "Never want to play someone far from my level" in Obsession. I have an ELO of 135 and I am currently in an Arena game with the third highest person in the game overall, with an ELO of over 500.

Arena matching isn't based on ELO, it's based on the leagues. In Obsession there's only Bronze, Silver, Gold, Elite. The level below "Far from my level" is "Around my Level (+/- 2)", which means within 2 leagues. And Silver is within 2 leagues of Elite, so...

I've been caught by this myself. You have to look at how many leagues there are, and sometimes set it to Never for "Around my Level" as well. And then you find the games where there's only a Bronze level before Elite.

I figured it used ELO for matching in non-Arena play, but I notice the settings page for this still has the "(+/- 2)" so I'm not sure if that does have some bearing on simple game matching (don't see how), or it's just there because people had trouble understanding how the matching worked in Arena.

[mikkashar]

For simple games you can also limit the table to a range of levels, those being beginner, apprentice, average, good, strong, expert, and master. For that you pick from a list (I think they have to be a contiguous set) rather than relative to your level. (On the table page reached from the lobby, that's under "restrict table access" which is in tiny type on the right. There's a similar menu behind the door-and-people icon on the game page.)

And what nik592 said -- arena leagues don't line up with ELO.