Question for those who've ranked high on final arena standings

[charliec247]

I'm trying arena for the first time (yay 2P!) and I want to ask players who've ranked high on final standings or have been champs: how often do you play, and how many games have you logged?

Just wanted to get some information and determine whether I should shoot for the top of the standings.

Also, how does the pairing algorithm work? Is it just whoever's in the queue, or do you have a higher chance of getting paired with others who have similar ELO/Arena Ranking as you do?

Thanks in advance.

[PotatOS]

I played a total of 108 games in season 20. My arena rating peaked at 1990 after 98 games. So this is an average of about 1 game a day over the season. It should be possible to win a season with less games if you are very consistent. I had a 1st place win rate in 3p games of about 90% over the season.

Winning is more about consistency than number of games (but I think you need at least 50 games over the season to top the leaderboard). In 3p, when you reach 1900 points you gain about 2-10 points per first place finish and lose about 12-18 per 2nd place finish, and lose 30-40 per 3rd place finish. I don't know how this changes for 2p.

In terms of the algorithm, you can actually set this yourself. You can restrict matchmaking to only players within your current league (or current minus n). So when you reach elite league you can choose to only play against other elite players. But the matchmaking would take a LOONG time in the previous season when I did this. So I left the matchmaking open to all leagues. This means the algorithm will try to match you with similar level players, but will default to lower leagues if no high league players are queuing. This is a tradeoff in terms of arena points, since winning over lower league players give you very little points, and a potential loss is devastating to your rating. But of course you will have a much higher win rate against lower league players.

I suspect with 2p matchmaking will be much easier, as the algorithm will not have to match you with 2 similar rated players when you queue. So restricting matchmaking to higher leagues should not take ages to find a game, and this will allow you to get more points per game, and thus top the leaderboard in less games. Of course this requires that you can consistently beat your opposition.

[charliec247]

I played a total of 108 games in season 20. My arena rating peaked at 1990 after 98 games. So this is an average of about 1 game a day over the season. It should be possible to win a season with less games if you are very consistent. I had a 1st place win rate in 3p games of about 90% over the season.

Winning is more about consistency than number of games (but I think you need at least 50 games over the season to top the leaderboard). In 3p, when you reach 1900 points you gain about 2-10 points per first place finish and lose about 12-18 per 2nd place finish, and lose 30-40 per 3rd place finish. I don't know how this changes for 2p.

In terms of the algorithm, you can actually set this yourself. You can restrict matchmaking to only players within your current league (or current minus n). So when you reach elite league you can choose to only play against other elite players. But the matchmaking would take a LOONG time in the previous season when I did this. So I left the matchmaking open to all leagues. This means the algorithm will try to match you with similar level players, but will default to lower leagues if no high league players are queuing. This is a tradeoff in terms of arena points, since winning over lower league players give you very little points, and a potential loss is devastating to your rating. But of course you will have a much higher win rate against lower league players.

I suspect with 2p matchmaking will be much easier, as the algorithm will not have to match you with 2 similar rated players when you queue. So restricting matchmaking to higher leagues should not take ages to find a game, and this will allow you to get more points per game, and thus top the leaderboard in less games. Of course this requires that you can consistently beat your opposition.

Thanks for replying! It's assuring to know that I don't need to start grinding games double time in order to place high. By comparison, several top players in Magic: the Gathering online leagues have told me that they play professionally and will log in 40+ matches a day. I was really hoping that that wasn't the case here. I woke up this morning to a new arena season and by the time I logged in the top players were already getting ready to promote from gold and that's a...9-0 record at least? Kinda shocked me a bit since I can only log in about 10 games a week without really messing up my schedule.

I agree with the consistency part. I am pretty sure I will not finish 1st. I know what I'm doing, but I don't know the game as inside out as some of the top players do and my win pct against 500+ ELO players is atrocious, especially on Tharsis where they have way more experience than I do. But at least it's good to know that I don't need to go full-time in order to land in the top 100 or whatever.

[AllTimeSpace]

Great question and response! I was also curious about this.

In terms of the algorithm, you can actually set this yourself. You can restrict matchmaking to only players within your current league (or current minus n)

I’m curious to try this out but only see the option to restrict table access by elo level and not by arena league level. Am I missing something?

[Jellby]

When you restrict by level in Arena, it is by Arena league.
When you restrict by level outside Arena, it is by elo rank.

[RoyalRook]

I played 123 game to win Season 18, but instead of open to all, I restricted my match to only Experts + and/or Never with Players that are too Far from my Level. It took a long time for me to queue up games, but since I mainly played turn based I didn't mind. Occasionally, match making breaks and match me up with two low ranked opponents, but mostly there was at least one high ranked opponent in my game.

You have to find your own game to win Arena. Instead of spending a lot time and carefully craft your line for each game like how Potato won this season, I mostly won Season 18 by playing as much game as I can with the limited time I have, it averaged out about 1.37 games per day. I did have to use all my skills to finish out the season though, I stopped joining more games in the end, and squeezed out some pretty insane comebacks as everyone was trying to king make against me, it was really something, and Terraforming Mars became truly beautiful when you really tries to win every single game, everyone need to experience that at least once, you don't have to win, but just really tries while you are in position to win a season, the game is different at that point.

Finally we have 2p Arena, the level of play are going to be extremely high, way easier to be matched with top players and we will see some amazing games at the top, no more king making and skill imbalance over the table is going to feel fantastic after 4 seasons of 3p Arena. It's a new age.

[FrankJones]

Yes, 2-player is where it's at.

I AM COMING OR ALL OF YOU. I WILL WIN THIS SEASON.

(I probably will not. But I'll try! )

[Joost1987]

Last season I ended 7th. I played 174 games, most realtime, some turn-based. I think I was 7th in the standings very early in the season as well: playing more game made me go up and down the rankings a bit, but didn't change a whole lot. You don't need to play a very large number of games make it to the top 10, as long as you win percentage is high enough.

[ice wizard]

I am not a good player.I played 44 turn-based games last season and got 15th but it is much harder for me to get better rating. Maybe you don't need to play too many games.

[Endar999]

In terms of the algorithm, you can actually set this yourself. You can restrict matchmaking to only players within your current league (or current minus n).

in my case it never worked well, it happened to me several times to be associated with players from the bronze league, even if I had restricted (never play with.. etc), It seems that if the algorithm doesn't find a matching after a long time, it decides to do what it wants