Why is Arena Mode 4 players?

[radicarian]

I'm curious how it was chosen for Arena mode to have 4 players - there's definitely a lot more luck involved with 4 players than with 2.

[Crispy23]

I prefer 4 players, but that’s just what I’m use to.

[Calmon70]

I also prefer 4 players but I would like to see some firstplayer advantage compensation. Its so bad to sit 4th in this game.

[paramesis]

I won my last 2 games from 4th position, and I didn’t feel at a disadvantage at all. In exchange for not getting the first shot at all the location tiles you want, you always know when it will be your last turn, and with Lords, you can get the last word on majorities, which can be huge.

[Calmon70]

First player gets higher chance of the special tile he wants, he gets higher chance to get most of them and he is also less limited to build stuff because its always less cubes around in total. Everybody knows exactly when the games end (really simple math)

So in normal game with only high skilled players your win chance is highest on first seat. This doesn‘t mean you can‘t win from 4th. Especially on groups with a lot of unexeperient people it doesn‘t matter much at all.

[TheGriggy]

I won my last 2 games from 4th position, and I didn’t feel at a disadvantage at all. In exchange for not getting the first shot at all the location tiles you want, you always know when it will be your last turn, and with Lords, you can get the last word on majorities, which can be huge.

Perhaps you were playing with bad players? This game is insanely unbalanced for player 4. Player 4 has a massive disadvantage, especially when Lords or Merchant scoring tile is active.


Edit: Decided to look through my 4 player game history and here are the results of it. This is obviously a statistically insignificant amount of games.

Out of 11, four player games I have played:
-The player to go first won 7
-The player to go fourth won 1.
-The player to go fourth wound up finishing in 4th place 7 out of 11 times.

Take it as you want.

[radicarian]

Skill certainly matters more, but turn order definitely is important, and matters more in 4P than 2P. Going later is better for lords, but that's the only benefit to going later, also much more pronounced in a 2P game (and if there's also farmers, the second player is going to win 95% of the time).

Overall, 4P is just a lot more chaotic.

[bananasplay]

It's beyond ridiculous that the express competitive format of this site is set to the least competitive player count.

I'll play at 3 or 4 with friends where I care less about the result, but if I'm to compete for the putative "world champion" title, then I want the only player count that makes sense for this game: 2.

[Tisaac]

It's beyond ridiculous that the express competitive format of this site is set to the least competitive player count.

I'll play at 3 or 4 with friends where I care less about the result, but if I'm to compete for the putative "world champion" title, then I want the only player count that makes sense for this game: 2.

Any official source from Donald confirming your claim about the best competitive option ?
I think I wasnt ask the setup for arena this time, so maybe BGA admin and publisher had an agreement on this, otherwise it can be changed

[CaKtus]

It's beyond ridiculous that the express competitive format of this site is set to the least competitive player count.

I'll play at 3 or 4 with friends where I care less about the result, but if I'm to compete for the putative "world champion" title, then I want the only player count that makes sense for this game: 2.

Any official source from Donald confirming your claim about the best competitive option ?
I think I wasnt ask the setup for arena this time, so maybe BGA admin and publisher had an agreement on this, otherwise it can be changed

It badly needs to get changed...

This choice is incomprehensible, and on top of it, the season is going to end in a week. What kind of value will this title have ? Makes no sense to me.