Arena mode and standard/premium accounts

[OwnerOfTheIronThrone]

Yeah lol. Weird stuff. I meant to say that it is preferable to play against high rated opponents when you try to reach 1st place on arena in random games. If you are really good, then there isn't gonna be that much of a difference in win rate, but your elo gains from each game will way bigger. Also your losses won't hurt your rating as much as losing to randomness with a lower rated player would. Think about it this way. If you lose 30 points from losing a game and gain 2 from winning, then you need more than 93% win rate to make any progress at all. If you stand to win 10 and to lose 20, then you need only 67% win rate. In some games it is impossible to have 93% win rate consistently even against noobs.

[teallite]

The only reason I started looking into details of game modes in BGA (especially like this "feature" with premium) - I wanted to make sure that arena is a real "competitive" mode, as many times mentioned in rules of this mode. And this situation with segregation of premium accounts and possibility to avoid meeting another power player with standard account by just stopping own premium subscription makes me think about stop playing arena mode altogether.

And perhaps only tournaments mode can give real competitive game.

If you want something competitive rules-wise play tournaments. Arena is competitive compared to common play tables and you can find a lot of great opponents there, but rules-wise it has many flaws.

[indvd00m]

The only reason I started looking into details of game modes in BGA (especially like this "feature" with premium) - I wanted to make sure that arena is a real "competitive" mode, as many times mentioned in rules of this mode. And this situation with segregation of premium accounts and possibility to avoid meeting another power player with standard account by just stopping own premium subscription makes me think about stop playing arena mode altogether.

And perhaps only tournaments mode can give real competitive game.

You are right, but just a note that there are several more ways that Arena players can be segregated. Some may play only real-time, some only turn-based. Or they play at different times of day. Feels like this is unavoidable in a ladder system where you still get to play whenever and however and how much or little you want. The alternative would be that BGA just paired you up and told you when to play, like "you have a match tonight at 04:00, better play or it'll count as a loss!" But... Doing that sounds like it's becoming similar to a tournament, so yes, if you want to be sure about fair pairings, probably look at tournaments.

This is true, but segregating by times of day, real-taim/turn-based and other things like this, all of this is something that player can choose according to his choice, unlike to artificial restriction with premium/standard accounts. At least that's what it looks like from the my viewpoint as usual player.

[Ceaseless]

Yeah lol. Weird stuff. I meant to say that it is preferable to play against high rated opponents when you try to reach 1st place on arena in random games. If you are really good, then there isn't gonna be that much of a difference in win rate, but your elo gains from each game will way bigger. Also your losses won't hurt your rating as much as losing to randomness with a lower rated player would. Think about it this way. If you lose 30 points from losing a game and gain 2 from winning, then you need more than 93% win rate to make any progress at all. If you stand to win 10 and to lose 20, then you need only 67% win rate. In some games it is impossible to have 93% win rate consistently even against noobs.

Depends on the game, but what you're describing just sounds like a way to get you where you belong more efficiently as far as the majority of the rating gains go. There is some evasion for large gaps that will help with rating, though I'd say that's more of a fairness thing with respect to elo getting worse at reasonable predictions as the gap gets larger, with a game's increasing variance unfairly favoring worse players, and less variance unfairly favoring better players. BGA already has a rating filter you can use though, which would achieve similar results even more accurately for the games you seem to be thinking of where those high win rates aren't realistic.