BETA: Arena mode (Season 0 - BETA)

[Lofery]

@sourisdudesert Can we know why you disable it? I personnaly loved it, and it made me come back to Boardgamearena. Please give us a reason when you do something like this, we know it's beta but it was working fine...

[Justine Henin]

The purpose for which Arena mode was created is to have fair competition and to make sure there are no “ghost” rankings due to the inactivity of top players.

It shouldn’t be abandoned, I would suggest the following:

Two formats, training mode and Arena/competitive mode. Let players create tables like it was before but limit the Arena mode to the base game setup, unless some games have “tournament formats” like Seasons.

Think about this, the designer of a game creates a product which works for a certain nr. of players, the better ones for me are the ones who are able to master all player counts.

This is not true for advanced modes when expansions are added, a lot of players are fine with the base design and don’t feel the need to expand, so I don’t expect ‘em to be good at advanced modes, if they don’t feel like spending money for an expansion that is their right.

But if you have the base game and refuse to play all player counts you miss the essence of the game. Yes, of course there are a small % of games where certain player counts are flawed, we can agree on which ones by vote and eliminate those for Arena mode.

So, in ranking terms, I would calculate elo based on how much games you have under your belt for all player counts. A player who plays a lot 2p should gradually gain less elo for that player count or viceversa the ones who like multiplayer need to show they are also good at 2p.

And if you really like some kind of automatic matchup you could play a final tournament of the season where the top 8 plays for the world championship. That will lead for sure to best vs best, let them make elo playing lower ranked guys…than the finale will tell…

Also, having only one elo ranking would be better, ok for the arena points and all the rest how you created is ok for me.

Expansions could still be enjoyed in training mode.

[CB Droege]

I feel like the freeze is because a few very vocal "top players" just could not stop complaining about every aspect of the new mode. It was n't letting them win in exactly the same way they are used to always winning, so it was bad, and needed to either change to suit them personally or die. It's impossible to please all of these people.

It's a shame, but honestly, no matter what you try to do to change or replace the ranking system, there will always be people who feel like it's unfair to them because they don't win as well anymore, and they will complain loudly.

[sourisdudesert]

@sourisdudesert Can we know why you disable it? I personnaly loved it, and it made me come back to Boardgamearena. Please give us a reason when you do something like this, we know it's beta but it was working fine...

Thanks for your nice comment.

We received a lot of negative feedback about some specific points we want to improve (or at least try to). We'd like to:

• Decrease waiting time (surprisingly, the waiting times are not so big, but a lot of you felt that so there are certainly room for improvement).
• Provide you opponents with the same level / league than you.
• Improve the situation for less-popular games.
• Reduce the number of games that does not start because some player is away when it starts.

When we launched the Beta, we warned that it might be possible that we pause/stop/reset the Arena during the Beta phase. We definitively want a good competition mode for BGA so we'll be back soon, but we need some re-work and a pause was needed.

[Evilpotatoe]

While I think a lot of thing could be improved, people have to understand it is a BETA.

Btw, I didn't try to play any regular game since Arena mode was launched, so if the regular lobbies & games are affected in some way, that's a bad thing.
But if it is really 100% optionnal, the flaws are a normal thing for a bêta, and I think people are just overreacting.

Maybe to much communication has been made to incite to play this mode ?
Since it is a bêta, I assume having only enthusiasts participating would have been a good thing. The player sample might be a bit small... but I suppose it would have been more than enough to try the system out.

My personal feeling about rankings (ELO, Arena...) is that we should have 3 modes :


Fully casual :
Unranked

NOT competitive :
Pseudo-Ranked with the ELO. This is a bit flawed, but does a rather good job, at least of non "fully random" games.
IMO, It works well as long as people don't care much about their ELO variations, and understand it's not an exact "skill" metric.
Removing "rewards" like "Top 10 players" & other competition related stuff might be a great idea here

Also, I love transparency, but making ELO less visible (like, needing several clicks to check) might help having people focus on more important things.
What does really matter about a player's "level" ? Global rating (Average/good/expert player), number of games, and % wins.
Anything else ?

Ranked :
Using some well thought matchmaking & ranking system (I have none to propose), so that top players play between top players, with real challenge, and can't grind points by stacking games or aiming for specific opponents.
Inspiration could probably come from some sports, (e.g. tennis)
I'm afraid it would only be good for 2P games... but does "competitive play" with more than 2P, or with 2P on games like 6Nimmt make any sense anyway ?
I think 3+P games like "For sale" or 7Wonders deserve to have player "roughly ranked", but not to have some designated "champion", and would probably better be excluded from this.

Btw, there has to be constraints : fixed rules, as in current's Arena mode, maybe a qualification condition to fullfill (like getting 200/300 ELO, or a % of wins of your X last games), and probably some other annoying constraints, like limited time to play games. (I HATE limited time, but objectively, competition is NOT focused on comfort).

[Zoras]

I think overall arena is a real good feature with a lot of potential; I also think we need to give it a little time so the better players get sorted out to see really how it works.

I do have one suggestion though that would improve things a lot imo.

It would be very good to be able to create some kind of 'premium games', where you can sort opponent by their league or rating, and show these games in the lobby.

For example, I could create a 'silver and elite league only game' or 'elite 1650+ only' and people would see that such a game is available (without knowing who created it and who joined it). I know I would be much more prone to join one of these premium game when they showed.

This way, we fix 2 important problems with arena: playing against better player, and also playing against more reliable players (since better players are more reliable).

Thanks for you efforts for improving your system and your attentiveness to the demands of the community, it is very appreciated! Keep up the good work!

[sprockitz]

-Allow multiple player counts. I voted against this bc it gives an unfair edge to 2p, but if you factor player count into elo (see suggestion 1. Here https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... =9&t=14422) you can equalize that out.

Ppl could set preferences to allow playing w less players if a certain time goes by wo a game.

-Cross level games should only be looked for after a certain wait time. Maybe 2 min for +/- 1 level and 5 min for 2 levels

-the 3/3 2/4 1/5 exchanges for same level +/- 1 & 2 don’t correlate to skill difference between levels. This assumes 50 67 and 83% win rates for 0,1,2 level delta. In luck games you will never have an 83% win rate. Using the EAS which you eventually go to once elite could just be used to determine pts gained or lost by level. Then you can display a % to next level instead of the 0-10 rounded scale.

[Incentive]

sourisdudesert - thanks for all your hard work. I enjoyed Arena mode and I hope you bring it back. Below are my comments for potential improvements. I only played 7 Wonders on Arena mode, so that is the basis for my comments.

1. I did not encounter long wait time for 7 Wonders as long as I did not restrict my opponent level preference. Once I did restrict that preference to only play opponents of a certain level I encountered significant delays. I guess this is to be somewhat expected but I have generally not experienced the same delays in simple mode.

2. It would be nice if the elo or level of opponents was displayed during the game, just like it is now in simple mode for Premium members.

3. I did not play RftG because I don't typically play the expansion selected for Arena mode. It would be nice if there was some rotation between the expansions for different seasons for RftG.

Thanks!

[turtler7]

League mismatches:
Just like the problem with ELO, top players lose their incentive to keep playing once they are at the top and if they match up against someone lower they potentially lose more. When I was trying to get out of gold in takenoko I played 5 games in a row where I matched against all bronze players. I won the first 4 and gained 1 star of progress each time. Then when I lost the 5th (by a final lucky top deck objective draw got me by 1 point) I lost 5 stars and with an 80% winrate in that series was further from the next league than before.

Fix: Don't make the top players get penalized more for losing to a lower ranked opponent. Feel free to let the lower ranked players get a slight boost in progress by beating people at the top. That is fair. But don't make it so the top players want to go into isolation or attempt to avoid these matchups. It will likely lead to a score creep based on how much playing happens but that just means an even bigger boost to those beating those playing more will equalize. Give that a try anyway since more games played is the overall goal anyway.


Is arena being successful?
Are more games being played since the beta launched? I suspect yes but cannot confirm this. As it becomes a main mode of play and goes live you might even add a thing to the simple lobby encouraging people to search in arena instead. Even casual players might not mind that, especially if it means more people queued up means less mismatched games and more games played for everyone.
I know that since it got frozen, I haven't started any new random games. But when it comes back I will keep playing more.

[dschingis27]

I think it was a good decision to have a break and take a poll. I have to add two things that seem very important to me:

1. There should be some pre-classification into leagues based on ELO at the beginning of the season. That way the leagues would be already populated with appropriate players from the start. The current system produced a lot of boring games because of unequal skill level of opponents (by design - b/c everyone starts at bronze). For strong players there is a huge entry barrier to start an "Arena career" because first you have to invest hours against low-level players. This is a particular problem in time-consuming games. Example: I noticed that almost all of strong Tzolkin players used Arena mode at most once or twice whereas there were very competitive games in simple mode. This is probably because it doesn't feel very competetive at all as an ELO 500 player to play against ELO 200 who was just unlucky to get matched.

So if the Arena mode was intended for competetive players, make sure that the gameplay in Arena is usually competetive (by matching skill level of opponents as often as possible).

2. I noticed that EAS points won or lost is based on the EAS points of your opponent. I think the EAS that one collects should be based on the ELO of the opponent because that reflects the true performance achieved from a win or loose. The EAS is a very noisy measure of seasonal performance and seasonal activity. the ELO is a quite reliable measure of skill. The EAS points I collect should match the effort and sense of achievement I have at the end of a game which usually depends on the true skill of my opponent and not on its noisy seasonal performance. That way the EAS as a rating of seasonal performance would improve drastically.