(EXPERIMENTATION ENDED) Arena mode upgrade

[rlees]

I think this is a good idea to try.

[Daavids]

Update is good for those, who don't play often (like me) especially real-time.
But..

For both turnbased or realtime: start matches when reached exact number of full tables, popular games higher number of tables. And show it, count down, how many players needed.
It will eliminate situations, when players, who didn't had opponents, needed to wait another starting time.

[sourisdudesert]

For both turnbased or realtime: start matches when reached exact number of full tables,

This is exactly what we are doing in Simple mode. If you want this you should use it.

Arena goal is to provide you opponents which are better for you, so it need more time (or some meetings planned in advance) to work. This is what we've done here.

[sprockitz]

My games in progress still shows all my old (before the switchover) games waiting for an opponent and there is no way to get rid of them.

[FastPlayer]

hi

waiting for time fixed no good i no play !
no time fix better!

[Djebbo]

sorry, these 10 minute slots for carcassonne do not make too much sense.
before that we had to wait 30-60 secs in average (my personal impression / experience) - now it is up to 10 minutes and if you have bad luck you are not in because unequal number of players waiting? then again 10 minutes.

you should check, if this will lead to less people playing in arena mode. I in any case have played almost exlusively there, but of course if I have to wait that long I will go for normal mode as well again.

all the rest btw is great.
thank you.

[sourisdudesert]

Some statistics:

In the last hour, those of you who requested an Arena games got a table in 72% of the cases.

In we exclude Premium games, because obviously there are players naturally excluded from Premium games because they are not Premium, this percentage increase to 76%.

If we focus on the 24% who didn't get a table: the main reason, for 60% of them, was that there was not enough players to create a single table. It means that whatever the method used, there wouldn't be enough opponents for this game in Arena format anyway. The other 40% was excluded because the number of waiting players was not a multiple of the game format (ex: 9 players for a 4p game).

[Tatasmurf]

In that two minute window sure...but for hive where that two minute window is every hour it means I can get a game at most one per hour where as before 3-4 in an hour was doable...

[pipemazon]

sorry again, maybe that works for other games better, but for Carcassonne you have increased my completely not mentionable waiting-time of 30secs to in worst case 2 minutes or somthing in average to 5 minutes and if I am unlucky plus another 10 minutes.

I do understand that you are trying to get equally rated people together as well. This is great of course, but from time-perspecitve I am not really happy. This just as an hopefully constructive feedback. You are doing a great job anyway. Thank you.

[dschingis27]

In the few games I played so far, the matchmaking was so much better than before. Thanks so much for that!

One slight suggestion: Maybe there could be an alarm button I could activate (e.g. next to the scheduled time). So if I could set up an alarm for when the regisration phase starts, and a jingle goes of then, I don't need to worry so much to be there on time. (And I knew the alarm would be aligned with BGA clock.)

Every small event on BGA has some sound indication (game start, your turn, player joins table, player leaves table). So it feels weird that the registration phase start has no sound, not even optional.