Quitting playing In the Arena because It's unfair.

[FrankJones]

Irony, you said you were quitting arena spades and going to another site

Where?

I don't really care too much one way or the other, but the title of your post literally said you were quitting playing Arena spades here, and yet, as memphl pointed out, you've been playing a lot of Arena spades here.

[SirRhyno]

I’ve noticed that you tend to mysteriously disappear after game start if you don’t like the matchup.

[DazaB]

Jorgito likes to cry about something within about 30 seconds of a game starting usually.

Ignore.

[BabyBlueSedan]

I don't know if you are specifically talking about yourself but in my opinion anyone has a right to play arena and their rank/winrate will more or less show their skill level. Yeah it sucks sometimes matchmaking is very imbalanced but it evens out. It's a team game so people may get frustrated, depends how thick your skin is. I think I played maybe 20 normal games before playing arena. People used to give me shit too but I also learned a lot from the advice I was given.

For reference, I’m merely suggesting that it’s a really skilled subset of players. I’m rusty, having played a LOT of spades but virtually none in the past 8-10 years. I was a very good duplicate bridge player, and now I’m a below average Arena Spades player. If, like you say, one has the willingness to take some flak (I do, thankfully), it’s a great crucible to learn the game. But there are conventions here that people expect (probably for good reason), and learning the atmosphere and how people bid and play is going to require some learning by losing at times.

There’s no shallow end of the pool, and that’s fine.

That's odd.

Compared to Duplicate Bridge, Spades is kind of a joke of a game. But, as you said, you are rusty.

Do you know a good place to play bridge online? I'm interested in learning

[tcarlaw]

Do you know a good place to play bridge online? I'm interested in learning

bridge-now.com lets you play with bots and declare your conventions. When you hover over your bid it gives a brief summary of what you are signalling with your bid. It is all bots, but it is duplicate bridge and gives you a weekly ranking.

[Tuut Tuut tis Luut]

While very frustrating, it's not unfair per se. This will happen to every player, and for every game you get the low elo partner, there's two on average where you get an easy win against the low elo player.
So it should even out over enough games played.


Problem is that there's not enough active players for spades. Stricter matchmaking would mean even longer waiting times. And since it feels the majority of active spades arena players are elite. It would also make it very difficult for new players, even skilled ones, to join the arena playerbase. Cause they won't be able to find any matches.

Playing on peak times helps a lot though. Bga does try to match based on your level if possible. So the more players are in the queue, the more likely you'll match within your rank.

[tcarlaw]

It shouldn't be that people should quit Arena, but Arena should not match people with large differences in ranking and elo. Ideally, you could go into the matching process by flagging an interest in either social and/or arena. If you are paired with a 'beginner,' it should default to social. There is too much chance in spades, and for a reliable ranking, you need to play a lot of games against similarly ranked players for valid results, and taking a huge hit because of a partner mismatch or cheating defeats the purpose of Arena and leads to a lot of animosity.

A high-ranked player, playing with a low-ranked player, should be social. The current system rewards players for not being social. If you are lucky, you sprint to the top of the rankings, and then you stop playing while the people just below you end up churning. Trying to overtake you before a bad hand or partner drags you down the rankings.

Ideally, a very well-written program and ranking system would function like duplicate bridge, with your result based on how you score on a hand compared to the average. Players who cannot defend against a nil would be punished, and players who optimized their score would be rewarded. Things could be weighted to combine the total score and the distribution of bags. The complexity of this kind of system would not make it very transparent for beginners, though.