Ideas to improve the Guru system

[Ceaseless]

I actually agree with the principles written here that gurus shouldn't be based off Arena itself, because then Arena becomes self-fulfilling that players will keep voting for the same format, but having mostly players who don't care about Arena is not ideal either, when the main purpose of being a guru is to be able to vote on the Arena format. The solo games counting for example is silly, because say the site ended up with even more solo players, you could get 80-90% of gurus end up being solo, who have no interest in Arena, and have Arena formats being decided by a handful of people, because most players get no say.

I sometimes wonder, if BGA ist trying to funnel more people into arena by making non arena players Gurus.
I get, that they cannot just ask high level arena players for the Arena format, but why can't they just open voting to everyone that is interested and has played the game x times (5-10 maybe)? They already have the voting system in place, so I assume it wouldn't take that much to open it to everyone.

Players who have only played 5-10 games barely know anything yet and don't have to care much if they choose a bad format, it's not like they really have to deal with it. Also, if someone wants to troll, they can just play a few games and pick a bad option for giggles. They can even make 10 accounts, 25-50 games is nothing, and throw them at what they want. Or maybe some Youtuber wants to mess with the vote, ask their viewers to play a few and things get out of hand.

[RazorOz]

I sometimes wonder, if BGA ist trying to funnel more people into arena by making non arena players Gurus.
I get, that they cannot just ask high level arena players for the Arena format, but why can't they just open voting to everyone that is interested and has played the game x times (5-10 maybe)? They already have the voting system in place, so I assume it wouldn't take that much to open it to everyone.

If that's the idea, then allowing solo players in isn't a good idea, because I would guess the majority do not care about Arena. The thing is you can basically ignore guru status if you don't care about Arena, you receive notifications, but you can probably even turn them off somewhere, so you don't actually need to interact with it at all.

You would definitely need to set the requirements higher than that. Part of the issue with gurus I think is I think the time frame is too short. It's too easy for someone to binge play a game for 30 days and have moved on before they're even thrown out of gurus. The end result of this is the majority of gurus are players with less than 200 games, while most the players with 1000s of games are not in it. I also think the 30 day system heavily biases against turn based players who consistently play, to qualify under this system someone who plays exclusively turn based has to play an absurd number of games simultaneously. The end result is you end up getting something that I don't think really resembles what most people think when they hear the term gurus, eg. when you hear the term gurus you'd expect all the top players constantly at the top of Arena, ELO etc. to be in it, the reality is though, at least for the game I can see, that is not true.

Imo a system that looked at # of games over a longer period would be better, it would be fairer for turn-based players, and end all the players that qualify just because they played heavily for a few weeks a month ago. I suspect this would lead to a better discussion. I imagine one of the reasons it's like it is now is because BGA quite like the idea of incentivising binge playing to qualify for gurus, but firstly, I don't think anyone is binge playing a game so they qualify for gurus, because secondly these are the players that don't interact with the system, I know this because I have been in gurus for a long time, the players who post, put up suggestions are nearly all names I recognise, yet half the members aren't.

[Hervor]

Players who have only played 5-10 games barely know anything yet and don't have to care much if they choose a bad format, it's not like they really have to deal with it. Also, if someone wants to troll, they can just play a few games and pick a bad option for giggles. They can even make 10 accounts, 25-50 games is nothing, and throw them at what they want. Or maybe some Youtuber wants to mess with the vote, ask their viewers to play a few and things get out of hand.

I don't think any system is really abuse-proof. Currently the Gurus can abuse the system much more easily.
I have been a Guru several times for Macchiavelli and I have no interest in Arena. I could have abused the system easily by voting for ridiculous settings in Arena so that there are more players available to play with me in normal mode. I didn't of course, I just didn't vote on anything at all and I am pretty sure, that the vast majority of players who don't care for Arena won't go to the trouble of going to the voting page to vote for arena settings, if the vote was open to the entire player base.
By having a lot more people voting, a couple of trolls don't matter.

But then again, I don't play arena, so I don't really care what the setting are. I just don't want to be made a Guru every other month

[Ceaseless]

Players who have only played 5-10 games barely know anything yet and don't have to care much if they choose a bad format, it's not like they really have to deal with it. Also, if someone wants to troll, they can just play a few games and pick a bad option for giggles. They can even make 10 accounts, 25-50 games is nothing, and throw them at what they want. Or maybe some Youtuber wants to mess with the vote, ask their viewers to play a few and things get out of hand.

I don't think any system is really abuse-proof. Currently the Gurus can abuse the system much more easily.
I have been a Guru several times for Macchiavelli and I have no interest in Arena. I could have abused the system easily by voting for ridiculous settings in Arena so that there are more players available to play with me in normal mode. I didn't of course, I just didn't vote on anything at all and I am pretty sure, that the vast majority of players who don't care for Arena won't go to the trouble of going to the voting page to vote for arena settings, if the vote was open to the entire player base.
By having a lot more people voting, a couple of trolls don't matter.

But then again, I don't play arena, so I don't really care what the setting are. I just don't want to be made a Guru every other month

No system is completely abuse-proof, we're just talking about scales and trade-offs. You don't need the vast majority of players to troll the system, a small percentage would do, and it wouldn't take much effort. You say you can "easily" abuse the system as a guru, but you only have 1 vote, and you had to rack up the game count for that vote. More effort would be involved with the current system, and the number of players that even have a chance to do it is both smaller and on average more invested in the game right now than if it was opened up.

And as I also stated, trolls aside, we're dealing with a largely clueless group that doesn't have to deal with the game settings if they are bad. And there's nothing wrong with them being clueless, with only 5-10 games I wouldn't even say they have to know all of the rules of the game yet. They aren't in a position to have the knowledge or motivation to really care about the settings yet.

Now, you talk about trolling Arena to get more normal mode players as a non-Arena player, which is basically an argument about only having Arena players vote for Arena settings. There's a case for that, but the tradeoff is crippling the ability to overturn the current Arena settings if they're unpopular, as the system would always favor players active in the current season, a heavy bias towards those that like it. As opposed to active players that just avoid the current Arena system but are actively engaged in another BGA accepted variant of the game.

[RazorOz]

https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=214627

"Thanks for reporting this. Indeed gurus selection was counting friendly games as well while it wasn't supposed to. We have now fixed this and this rule will be active from the next release."

So that part should be fixed soon.

[ChiefPointThief]

Just got kicked from guru status in captain flip despite 137 games in the last month and one of my most active days being yesterday :p so for there to be more than 100 players w/ more games played I question. Not impossible though. The game roughly is avg 1 million total per yr. & the top 100 players would have to account for at least 19% of that. The most active arena players aren’t even playing at that rate.

[RazorOz]

Just got kicked from guru status in captain flip despite 137 games in the last month and one of my most active days being yesterday :p so for there to be more than 100 players w/ more games played I question. Not impossible though. The game roughly is avg 1 million total per yr. & the top 100 players would have to account for at least 19% of that. The most active arena players aren’t even playing at that rate.

We don't know exactly when it is measured, calendar months seems logical, but I don't know if we have proof it goes on calendar months.

Looking at your #'s, between Feb 1st - March 1st you played 500 games, I would assume this is what qualified you for guru status, and I guess 137 isn't enough. This makes a bit of sense to me, because for Heat it's low 60s I think roughly that was qualifying (though this is sure to go down given like I say 1/3 of the players qualifying were solo players), but the way most players are playing Heat takes 45-60 mins to play, Captain Flip you can play 10 games in that time.

Another thing I said we don't know is how long the decay is, other than I said I think it's over a month, and less than 3 months. It would appear likely you qualified for gurus after February, this would actually suggest it's roughly the last two months used, but then that actually seems lower than I'd expect given I can see gurus with > 200 players in (and there has to be some overlap of the same players being in the top 100 most played each month too).

[ChiefPointThief]

I played 500 games in the month of February?
(Exposing my addiction in forums )

But about your theory of the qualifying period. I checked dates to match that theory earlier on in the thread and the dates of when I was added or removed from guru had no patterns. As for games played to qualify for guru in this game I’m sure I’ll make it back one day and take a look at how much some others are playing.

Also to add to the discussion about wanting gurus who will contribute to the discussion of arena options I have no desire to play arena in this game. Mostly because the format used is dreadful for luck based ganes rather than what the settings are for the game.