Players sitting out in Arena to preserve ranking

[CaKtus]

Just a few thoughts as this thread turns global.

For sure, RT and turn based games should be separated. They usually reflect different skills. You can be a master at chess but be a poor blitz player.

As said, it's too easy to climb in arena just by seating out.At 7 wonders, hundreds of players are Elite. What is the value ? It has to be changed.

IMO tournaments should be promoted instead of arena. There should be OFFICIAL direct elimination tournaments (monthly or quarterly).Only these official tournaments would give trophies. Small RR groups could be set to qualify for the final phase.

[sourisdudesert]

Complete answer (based on the previous posts):

_ Arena + turn-based seems incompatible due to the possibility to slow down losing game while accelerating winning games. This is especially true at the end of the season where all turn based games in progress are removed from Arena.

_ Limiting available time on turn based games when season's end is approaching is not solving 100% of the problem, because players can still do the same to make sure to lose early and have a lot of win just before the end of the season. They can also manage to have "series of victories" to go to upper leagues during the season.

_ Based on all of this, Arena Season 3 will be realtime only. We are not forgetting competitive turn-based players, but we will propose something else than the Arena for them (spoiler: it will be based on tournaments, which are very well adapted to turn-based ).

[CaKtus]

Sounds good. Can't wait...

I would ask for adding a much slower real time option. Losing a winnng game just because of the clock sucks.

Also, just an idea because I didn't think about all the drawbacks, I believe there is a simple way to solve most of these delaying strategies. Why not calculate the rankings in a retroactive manner based on the time and date of the game creation ? I understand it will mean that your ranking will keep changing during weeks even if you don't play. But so what ?

[Cheery Dog]

Going real time only is going to be hard on some of the less popular games.

I hope there's still some turn based ones where getting enough people for a real time game just isn't going to happen.

Especially for something like Remember When that requires 6 people, and had people waiting for months before last week a game of it finally triggered on arena mode. (But that is a hard game to be competitive in)

[nairobiny]

If we can agree that...

• stalling at the end of the season to avoid a loss is cheating; and
• cheating should be punished

...then can we also punish the cheats, please? Stalling is already covered by the FAQ, so this isn't retrospective. Sure, there may be arguments about borderline cases, but there are an awful lot of examples of clearcut stalling that should be dealt with.

[aesche]

Complete answer (based on the previous posts):

_ Arena + turn-based seems incompatible due to the possibility to slow down losing game while accelerating winning games. This is especially true at the end of the season where all turn based games in progress are removed from Arena.

_ Limiting available time on turn based games when season's end is approaching is not solving 100% of the problem, because players can still do the same to make sure to lose early and have a lot of win just before the end of the season. They can also manage to have "series of victories" to go to upper leagues during the season.

_ Based on all of this, Arena Season 3 will be realtime only. We are not forgetting competitive turn-based players, but we will propose something else than the Arena for them (spoiler: it will be based on tournaments, which are very well adapted to turn-based ).

Great to have some feedback and reaction from devs about this finally, and I like your thoughts and plans.

[Bubamara5]

Complete answer (based on the previous posts):

_ Arena + turn-based seems incompatible due to the possibility to slow down losing game while accelerating winning games. This is especially true at the end of the season where all turn based games in progress are removed from Arena.

_ Limiting available time on turn based games when season's end is approaching is not solving 100% of the problem, because players can still do the same to make sure to lose early and have a lot of win just before the end of the season. They can also manage to have "series of victories" to go to upper leagues during the season.

_ Based on all of this, Arena Season 3 will be realtime only. We are not forgetting competitive turn-based players, but we will propose something else than the Arena for them (spoiler: it will be based on tournaments, which are very well adapted to turn-based ).

Arf, As a turn based arena player (very difficult for me to play real time game at this moment), I'm disapointed with the supression of turn based arena for few players who abuse of the system. Is not possible to punish (or ban) this few abusers, evidence are quite easy to find for most of them (waiting loosing game and other played), and it already indicate on site that is a inapropriate move. Other proposition is to restrain launch of new game if you have waiting turn on going, not solving the issue but can restraint some players to use this methods (Also can limits players with several hundreds of games which finaly can play less than one time a day on each game).

I'm curious to see what will be proposed for turn based players, but little spectical especially for more than 2 players games if the system is based on tournament.

[nmego]

How about just putting a limit? For example. You can only have two RaceFTG arena turnbased games going at the same time. I believe this will completely fix the problem without removing the turnbased option. Because removing turnbased will just create more problems imo. The number of arena players will decrease. And arena depends on the playercount. Furthermore, for some unpopular games you can only find matches turnbased. No one will bother searching for a real time arena game for nautilus for example. A lot of games will just have no elites in them I think

[sourisdudesert]

Hi

About limiting number of turn based game instead of disabling turn based:

_ It will no solve the problem, it will only limit the problem. If we limit to 1 or 2 games, then you can still play slowly at the end of the Arena season, and you can still don't play your turn based last move until it helps you to go to upper league.

_ However, it will make Arena+turn based hard to understand. Placing a message "Arena is a real-time competition" is simple to understand for everyone. Having a limit, in addition to the overall limit we have for all turn based games you have on BGA, is less easy to understand.

_ At the end, there is no good solutions for games with less players for the Arena. So I would prefer to find another solution for games with few players, and forget about the Arena for these games.

_ Statistics: less than 8% of the Arena games are turn-based, so it's not like it was 50%...

About punishing the one who cheat: we could let our homes open without locks, because it is forbidden to steal, but it's more easy to put locks. With a manual process to find cheaters we would make errors and it would take a loooooooong time. And with an automatic process to find cheaters... well, if the process is automatic it means adding additional rules to the Arena like "You must not play slowly when you are in loosing position". No idea how to make this.

[Ranior]

Thanks much for have an official response to this and solving this issue for future seasons. While I am a bit sad for turn based players who enjoyed arena, there simply is no good solution for them. Fundamentally the arena system really does not work with turn based games. The whole point of arena involves trying to rank up by streaking together wins, and in turn based mode you are too easily able to arrange the order of your results in many games to gain quite the advantage over real time players, destroying the basis for the system.

I hope some good competitive option can be developed (using the back of the tournament system would seem to make a lot of sense for this as many of those work reasonably well, just needs some tweaks and improvements and needs to handle more than 2p games). As is, arena and turn based just does not work or make much sense.

Trying to find the cheaters is obviously not a solution--as stated it would take far too much manual effort to expect, plus there will be edge cases. Cheaters will get harder to detect and will live in grey areas where you can't be sure if they are purposefully stalling or not, there will be baseless accusations, admins will have to take time reviewing many of these reports, and overall the community will not be good for it. Best to avoid all that drama and just not have turn based arena games and avoid this aspect.

Overall I'm very happy with this response, thanks BGA.