I think having solid requirements for being a guru is a good thing, and don't see an incentive for trying to make an empty increase in the number of gurus. Your claim that competitive players are somehow limited to only playing in Arena is nonsense. I have personally played many of the top players in games outside of Area in more different games than you even have on your entire account as of this moment.tbhp wrote: ↑15 October 2026, 15:04Some people are here to be competitive and don't find it fulfilling to grind regular games even if it's a format they enjoy.Ceaseless wrote: ↑15 October 2026, 01:27 This is BGA, a site for playing games. Playing the format you want to play shouldn't be a chore to begin with. Expecting them to want to play their format as much as their fellow voters isn't so wild. Having the voters be players that actually play the format they're voting for is reasonable. There's no need to have them play a setting they don't want to just to get a vote either.
There is no disadvantage to what Cile suggests. It only opens the door to more people to be gurus and makes the requirements less. Having to play a format you don't like 3 to 5 times seems a lot more reasonable than having to play a format you like a hundred times in a context you get no satisfaction from.
There is no reason to be against the suggestion unless you believe there should be strict requirements for being a guru, such as playing a lot of games.
Sure, ideally it would be best to just be able to select the people who are most interested in Arena, based on how many games they play. But that idea is not workable in reality, because people who are competitive are generally not the kind to go grind regular games, and they probably aren't going to play competitively a format they don't enjoy either. So what we get instead is a self reinforcing circle where the format that gets picked has an advantage in future votes because the people who can vote are likely those who enjoy it in the first place.
Given the problem this poses, I think settling for just giving guru status to those who show some interest in Arena is the best compromise, and it has the added advantage of being more democratic, since the requirement is almost nonexistent.
At some point yes, someone is going to get fed up and concede to not have to deal with this nonsense or have their internet crash. You could add other trolling elements if you wanted to speed up the process, but the point is that 100 is such a pathetically low bar the act of playing the game isn't even an actual requirement. It doesn't matter if you get kicked 100 times when none of the losses count against you, the wins inevitably get there because they never get cancelled out by the losses. My point isn't about someone actually doing this, but rather how pathetic such a standard is to begin with. BGA mostly has those for things they just let anyone do, like entering Arena or tournaments, where the 100 rating isn't a quality test but just a way to have players do a few games before jumping in. (As an aside players that mass quit hundreds of games at the same time won't fail the 100-rating requirement for this same reason, the thing those accounts had to do to get back in was deal with the reputation issues.)Cile wrote: ↑15 October 2026, 16:14Do you actually think someone would do that? Let's think about the reality of that for a minute:Ceaseless wrote: ↑15 October 2026, 01:27 100 rating is nothing, you don't even have to know the rules, you could just join games and sit until your opponents quit or kick you and you'd get to 100 eventually, that's how low a standard 100 rating is when you can't even lose rating until you're above it. A player could make 100 alts at 100 rating.
Even among "regular" voters a flood of them don't even have to care about what happens, they could just vote randomly for giggles, someone on some social media site wants to make a joke and a bunch of people decided to jump in on it.
Yes, 100 is not difficult, my point is it's a low bar. How exactly do you get to 100 by joining games an idling? You think eventually opponents are going to concede instead of booting you? And how long would that take to get one vote?
So let's scrap the "idle your way to 100" idea. Getting 100 could take 2 or 3 games if you're skilled at the game. In order to make 100 alts that's 200 to 300 games, which is a significant investment, and the pay off is... a less than ideal arena settings? I don't see where the giggles come in. Is there a game where a specific combination of settings makes the game bad?
You're suggesting someone would invest the time and skill to win 200-300 games of a game they don't like, just so they can have 100 votes to make the next Arena season for Heat 2 players (Only game I could think of with a 'bad' option)? I don't know how to check how many active players there are for a game but there are 327 users with 400+ ELO in Heat, I don't think those 100 fake accounts would move the needle voting for a setting nobody wants. Meanwhile the person trying to do so has provided another player in an extra 200 to 300 games.
200 games is nothing, I rack up 200 games on random side games on BGA, and that was just casual legitimate play with no real effort on my part. A player could do it the honest way, beat up on weak players at the bottom rungs, which is where that account is at the time anyways, and easily snap 2-3 wins per account that way. It's a sandbagger's dream job; some players intentionally lose games for the chance to do stuff like this in places with stricter pairing standards than BGA. They could do it the dishonest route too, have the alts face each other, accelerated even further with more than 2 player games, but either way, racking up wins is easy, especially since the accounts in question can't lose rating unless they've already hit the quota. A few games apiece is much harder to catch than the blatant nonsense players pull trying to get their accounts high rated. Not to mention the social media meme examples where a bunch of people can throw their votes in for giggles.
I'm also not sure where you're going on "is there a setting that makes the game bad?" If there were no such settings, and all of them were fine, you could already say the current system is fine, there are no bad options, after all. Better than that even, given the select setting seems to have a beloved group that actively plays it as it is.
Adding voters isn't some net positive. Having voters that can just say "eh, whatever, I don't have to deal with a bad format anyways, I don't even play this game" is not something I see worth adding. The guru system sets voters up that actively deal with what they voted for, and on top of that helps avoid getting the same system by letting gurus exist for formats outside of the current Arena. Some games do rotate, and others won't. Both are great possibilities. Some games work better rotating through different options, and others have a best system without a real rival.
