Arena needs rating decay

[Wonderful Plays]

Top players are "parking" and not playing.
If arena wants to remain competitive, you need serious rating decay to keep them playing, or reconstruct elo gains so it rewards playing more in games with more than 2 players

[cosmosis]

That's the point of having arena seasons. They'll get reset and will need to climb the ranks again next season if they want to stay at the top.

[sprockitz]

the season is already only 3 months long, decay would only hurt the mode. If they got to that rating why do you think they shouldn't stay at that rating if they aren't playing. If someone gets to the top and stops playing then they are leaving the door open for you to go pass them as they aren't continuing to improve their rating.

[Wonderful Plays]

3 months is crazy long if the seasons are like one month then I understand.
And you cannot "go past them", in 7 wonders arena there was no movement at the top for TWO MONTHS.
In 3p if you are at the top you get:
7 points for a win
-10 points for a 2nd place
-40 for 3rd place

because noone at the top is playing, if the top players are playing for 2 initial weeks and only one last day of an arena, it's a terrible system.

[cosmosis]

If you believe this to be the case, then play more at the start of the season?

My opinion is that rating decay is an extremely negative experience. Rating decay disadvantages anyone who isn't focusing solely on a single game (since they'd have to keep up with all games they're competing in). It disadvantages anyone who does not have the time to continually play games. Without decay, someone who might just have holidays free has a chance to be competitive in the season, which I think is nice. Rating decay also just feels bad.

To me, the idea of a champion for a game is the person who is most consistent in winning. If they do that by beating the best players consistently in the 2 weeks at the start, then that seems fair (at the start they also have the disadvantage that everyone they're playing agains is low ELO). No matter what, you have to play and win quite a few games to get to the top ranking in a season, I don't think it's necessary to decay ratings to make people play more.

The counterpart is that scores might stagnate at times, but I think the season reset is a reasonable solve for that. I saw that there was some stagnation at the end for the games I competed in, but there were still top players playing within the last few weeks of the tournament. I don't know if 7 wonders was just different, but there is still incentive for top players to try to pass each other at the end.

Overall, there are pros and cons to these different approaches. To me, the cons of rating decay outweigh the pros.

[sprockitz]

If you believe this to be the case, then play more at the start of the season?

My opinion is that rating decay is an extremely negative experience. Rating decay disadvantages anyone who isn't focusing solely on a single game (since they'd have to keep up with all games they're competing in). It disadvantages anyone who does not have the time to continually play games. Without decay, someone who might just have holidays free has a chance to be competitive in the season, which I think is nice. Rating decay also just feels bad.

To me, the idea of a champion for a game is the person who is most consistent in winning. If they do that by beating the best players consistently in the 2 weeks at the start, then that seems fair (at the start they also have the disadvantage that everyone they're playing agains is low ELO). No matter what, you have to play and win quite a few games to get to the top ranking in a season, I don't think it's necessary to decay ratings to make people play more.

The counterpart is that scores might stagnate at times, but I think the season reset is a reasonable solve for that. I saw that there was some stagnation at the end for the games I competed in, but there were still top players playing within the last few weeks of the tournament. I don't know if 7 wonders was just different, but there is still incentive for top players to try to pass each other at the end.

Overall, there are pros and cons to these different approaches. To me, the cons of rating decay outweigh the pros.

the player who won 7 wonders completed the last game 3 minutes prior to the end of the season to take the title!

[Wonderful Plays]

Yeah not playing for 2 months and just pushing in the last minute (you can actually set up a lot of correspondence games and push the "right" ones at the end of the season). This feels like winning the sniping auction instead of pushing the best players to the top.

You can have a soft decay of -10 points every week or do it depending on game length. In a game like 7 wonders where it takes 10 minutes, top player not playing for 2 months is not healthy at all. Arena was supposed to be the best competitive experience and rules that discourage people from playing and instead force them to "snipe" are not good.

[cosmosis]

I do consider the sniping problem you mention to be a serious problem and there's another thread talking about that.

I agree that the seasonal arena has issues. But it has encouraged more game play than the previous state of the site.

Personally, I wouldn't want to see rating decay be a solution here.

In my experience, it is still possible to reach the top players even if you play lower-level players at the end of the season. I managed to do it this season with Sushi Go, which is a fairly random game. I never played the top players, since I think a lot of them were doing real-time games and I was doing turn-based. I managed to get up to 1st placed for a few weeks fairly late in the season, but was overtaken by 2 people at the end.

[Chauff]

Yeah not playing for 2 months and just pushing in the last minute (you can actually set up a lot of correspondence games and push the "right" ones at the end of the season). This feels like winning the sniping auction instead of pushing the best players to the top.

I agree with that, it's a huge flaw. You can also climb by alterning winning and losing streaks. And it's very hard to detect.

An easy solution would be a simple rule: a player should only play one game (for each game) in Arena mode at a time.

[sprockitz]

Yeah not playing for 2 months and just pushing in the last minute (you can actually set up a lot of correspondence games and push the "right" ones at the end of the season). This feels like winning the sniping auction instead of pushing the best players to the top.

I agree with that, it's a huge flaw. You can also climb by alterning winning and losing streaks. And it's very hard to detect.

An easy solution would be a simple rule: a player should only play one game (for each game) in Arena mode at a time.

That solution is saying you can’t play turn based. Turn based games often take a month plus and when you need 50 games to be competitive you’ve eliminated all turn based players.