TM Arena

[bballrace]

Why was another league suddenly added mid-season for Terra Mystica? TM for many seasons now has only had Elite, Silver, and Bronze league, yet now in the middle of the season Gold is added? Surely this is an error.

[Lumin_S]

It looks like extra league tiers were added to many different Arenas.

I agree during season is not a great time for it, but it is overall sorely needed for popular games where there can be extremely wide spread of skill for "Elite".

[ChiefPointThief]

It looks like extra league tiers were added to many different Arenas.

I agree during season is not a great time for it, but it is overall sorely needed for popular games where there can be extremely wide spread of skill for "Elite".

What is the benefit for having more leagues?

[Lumin_S]

What is the benefit for having more leagues?

So that the existing Arena matchmaking preference for skill level will actually have some utility. It's not difficult for low-Elo players (I'm talking 100-200 rating here) to reach the 2nd and 3rd tiers of Arena if they play enough and get a winning streak or two. Then once they reach "Elite", it becomes impossible for the top players to avoid them with matchmaking, even with AES score differences over 500.

The large-AES-differential games were frequent in Ark Nova and Wingspan "Elite" tier. As the site's most popular games, those two games have huge numbers of Arena players - but mysteriously, they didn't have the maximum number of Arena tiers or even close until this update, whenever it happened.

[ChiefPointThief]

What is the benefit for having more leagues?

So that the existing Arena matchmaking preference for skill level will actually have some utility. It's not difficult for low-Elo players (I'm talking 100-200 rating here) to reach the 2nd and 3rd tiers of Arena if they play enough and get a winning streak or two. Then once they reach "Elite", it becomes impossible for the top players to avoid them with matchmaking, even with AES score differences over 500.

The large-AES-differential games were frequent in Ark Nova and Wingspan "Elite" tier. As the site's most popular games, those two games have huge numbers of Arena players - but mysteriously, they didn't have the maximum number of Arena tiers or even close until this update, whenever it happened.

So then why not change matchmaking to consider pts instead of adding more leagues?

[Lumin_S]

That would also work, but good luck getting the BGA Admins to internally change their matchmaking algorithms rather than just changing the number of leagues...

[Patrick of the Isles]

I agree during season is not a great time for it, but it is overall sorely needed for popular games where there can be extremely wide spread of skill for "Elite".

I don't know if adding additional intermediate leagues will do much to improve that though? Since being moved to a lower league is impossible, league placement seems to correlate with number of games played more closely than it does with skill level.