Why is the Arena separate?

[yfimc]

You can only wait for a game EITHER in Arena OR on the regular site. Why can’t I just take the first available? Why should I care if it’s in the Arena or not?

Related question is why does the Arena exist? I assume this has been asked before but searching “arena” in forums produces no results. It seems like it just splits the site in half, and everything would be easier and faster if we were all together instead of split into two different places?

[Meeplelowda]

Related question is why does the Arena exist? I assume this has been asked before but searching “arena” in forums produces no results. It seems like it just splits the site in half, and everything would be easier and faster if we were all together instead of split into two different places?

"Arena" is a "stop word" in the BGA search because it's it used so often that it is meaningless as a term to narrow down results. For example, "yarn" might be a stop word on a knitting website.

Arena provides a way to rank players based on identical settings across an entire season. If you just used Elo, you'd be comparing people who strictly played a game with two players and no expansions with someone who adds all the expansions and likes playing with 4 players. Arena is an apples to apples comparison.

Yes, Arena does divide the player pool to a certain extent. Yet it is extremely popular for some games. So you are advocating for taking away something people like just because you personally don't care about it.

[JimBut]

I think they just scratch different itches. Arena is the competitive mode with a fixed format and the regular matches are playing regular games with whatever rules you fancy configuring

[Ceaseless]

I'm not sure why you can't double host.

The main perks of arena are stopping players from being able to cancel when seeing their opponent and by locking the format to one setting. Arena's cyclical nature prevents inactive players from staying at the top, forcing them to become active again if they wish to reclimb.

Unfortunately, the league system is a joke, getting the top league is laughable, even 100 rated (where you can't fall any lower) players can enter the "elite league". Since arena level-restrictions are based on league rather than rating class, this makes those restrictions much worse than their elo-based counterparts.

Arena isn't necessarily more competitive than regular play, it's likely a game-by-game thing, depending on the playerbase and which issues are messing with skill representation.

[yfimc]

you are advocating for taking away something people like just because you personally don't care about it.

actually, i’m not. i just asked a couple of questions

I'm not sure why you can't double host.

The main perks of arena are stopping players from being able to cancel when seeing their opponent and by locking the format to one setting. Arena's cyclical nature prevents inactive players from staying at the top, forcing them to become active again if they wish to reclimb.

thank you for explaining