Cile wrote: ↑01 August 2026, 06:07
I agree. Unfortunately I don't think there's a way to allow people to red-thumb in arena for legitimate reasons, but stop people using them to avoid opponents they cannot beat. My personal preference is to allow people to avoid users that behave in ways that impact their enjoyment, but that's because I don't personally care who's ranked #1 at the end of the season (It seems to largely be who can play more games). Other people do care, neither preference is more valid but it's impossible to please both groups. Possibly you could limit the number of active red thumbs a player can have, but that still doesn't prevent them from just blocking the top X players.
One way is to make it so you can't red thumb players with 100% karma, maybe this would have other effects, but I suspect most the time someone red thumbs someone it's because they did something like quit a game to annoy them, and thus they won't have 100% karma, whereas it would stop most the red thumbs to avoid certain players.
There are issues around red thumbs and not allowing them for Arena.
#1 Is it's just asinine to play players who quit at the end of the game, I know from experience how bad this can be until the rules were changed so all Heat games play to conclusion, that people would just quit on the last turn all the time and you'd have wasted an hour for nothing. Unless more games are going to implement that, it's a big problem I would have with making a system so you can't avoid these players, because some players just ruin the game. Another side is the punishments for quitting could be made far higher, because it's ridiculous that you can quit an Arena game and hop straight back in the queue.
#2 The ELO reducer is encouraging red thumb usage, it's annoying to play games where you can't win ELO and keep getting paired with players you can't win ELO from. I don't use red thumbs this way, but I can see why people do, because it's just annoying to play a game where you can only lose ELO, not gain it, and is more of a problem the smaller the player base is. The ELO reducer should just be scrapped, it's always seemed despised by players, but even if they aren't going to scrap it there are far better ways to implement it than it currently is. Eg. link it to games played rather than time, having it reset every 30 games rather than 30 days would be better for example.
