Ideas to improve the Guru system

[tbhp]

I can pretty much tell you that is how Arena works. I have won Heat Arena 11 seasons in a row, it's not because I am going on a lucky streak every season. Heat is a game with some luck, but still a lot more skill-based than high luck games. If you have the highest win rate at a game like that, you will win in Arena pretty much as long as you play enough games to reach your level, that's why a lot of the same players repeatedly win in Arena. I know from experience when I have tried playing significantly more games to try and increase my Arena ranking it doesn't work, I just end up going round in circles.

See the part I added to my last post. Your case is very specific, because if you won Arena so many times it clearly suggests you are in a different category from everyone else. So in your personal case, you don't need to extend your luck, you just need to reach your expected score. Then it's others who have to extend their luck to catch up to you. But given the gap may be quite large, the odds of getting enough consecutive wins for them to do so may be very low, which is why it has never happened.

In most games though, it's going to be unlikely that someone is clearly better than everyone else. Usually it's more like there's a group of top players who are roughly the same level, so the number of games played and the streaks achieved will have a large influence on which one of those players will win.

[tbhp]

I know from experience when I have tried playing significantly more games to try and increase my Arena ranking it doesn't work, I just end up going round in circles.

Regarding that part, what I mean is that if your true level is say at 2000 points, any game you win starting from that number is going to add more points. If you win one more game, maybe you'll be at 2010. If you win 20 more games in a row, maybe you'll be at 2100.

To you it probably doesn't matter, because other players have always been behind you, so you've never had to extend your luck to try to get much higher than your normal number.

But now imagine there is another player who is just as good as you. You'd both be around 2000, so you'd both be trying to play a ton more games to try to increase this number as high as you can. At some point one of you may manage to get to a number that seems unrealistic for the other to ever reach, and so they decide to stop playing.

That's what Arena is like for most people. For everyone who is not so far above everyone that they just need to reach their expected score, the final race is all about putting out games and hoping for win streaks.

Your perspective is as if Magnus Carlsen said "being the world Elo leader is not about luck streak, you just need to be at your normal level". That statement only holds true for him, since he is notably better than every other player. For everyone else, reaching the world top Elo would require a major win streak to surpass Carlsen's Elo.

[ChiefPointThief]

I used to be wary about playing real time, because I thought it wouldn't give me the necessary time to really be sure about my moves. I basically went for the quality over quantity approach. But as it turns out, players in general may not be as strong in real time, so there is actually no guarantee I would get a better winrate playing turn based.

Are you saying players in a specific game who play turn based are better or overall? & this is just one reason why the idea of arena competitively is flawed. There are actually 3 different player pools within each game (real time, slow turn based, fast turn based). Then people’s ratings for each season are being compared to entirely different player bases.

As you mentioned in a specific game 70% of the top players can be turn based players and that can be flipped for another game. So depending on the mode you play the pool can be less challenging. This makes me want to go back and post in that thread about how tournaments should have more importance

[tbhp]

I used to be wary about playing real time, because I thought it wouldn't give me the necessary time to really be sure about my moves. I basically went for the quality over quantity approach. But as it turns out, players in general may not be as strong in real time, so there is actually no guarantee I would get a better winrate playing turn based.

Are you saying players in a specific game who play turn based are better or overall? & this is just one reason why the idea of arena competitively is flawed. There are actually 3 different player pools within each game (real time, slow turn based, fast turn based). Then people’s ratings for each season are being compared to entirely different player bases.

As you mentioned in a specific game 70% of the top players can be turn based players and that can be flipped for another game. So depending on the mode you play the pool can be less challenging. This makes me want to go back and post in that thread about how tournaments should have more importance

It is flawed, it doesn't make much sense to compare players who play different speeds within the same competition. That's why I think it might be good if the time setting was decided by the gurus too. But then some people might complain that it's not inclusive of people who only play real time, or only play turn based. But picking an Arena setting is not inclusive in the first place, as you are alienating all the people who don't like the picked format.

I wonder what should be the takeaway from it though. I mean, would the people who do best in real time do equally as well in turn based? Or are those just totally incomparable things? I know players who do great in real time Arena but don't have the same success rate in tournaments. It seems confusing to me because if they can do so well with little time to think, why aren't they able to do better in tournaments where they have days to think?

Then again, there's also people who are able to get to the top playing Arena in turn based, but don't do that well in tournaments despite them being turn based too. So, I guess there is no consistent logic to those things, and some settings may be better adapted to certain players for reasons that are hard to pinpoint.