Players sitting out in Arena to preserve ranking

[nmego]

Thanks for the elaborate response! Looking forward to the upcoming turn-based competitive system.

[Curling]

Hi


_ 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.

À solution could be to show how many players are waiting a live arena game for each game. If someone sees there is already 2 players waiting for ho he'll, for example, he will probably click to be the 3rd one.

[Incentive]

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 ).

This seems like overkill to me. If it is really a concern that players are slowing down in games they are losing and playing faster in games they are winning, then make it so that you have to first make a move in an older game before you can make a move in a newer game. That is, if you have two pending Arena turn-based games, one where it was your turn to move 1 day ago and the other where it was your turn to move 1 hour ago, then you have to move in the one from 1 day ago before you can move on the one from 1 hour ago. This plus limiting available time at the end of the season should help alleviate any concern with gaming the Arena system.

[nairobiny]

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.

Yet we already entrust moderators to adjudicate on cases of verbal abuse, and there are just as many edge cases there. We don't complain that it requires "far too much manual effort": the ambition to create a nice, fair playing environment for all is such an important objective that it makes the effort worthwhile. And it should be the same with cheaters exploiting the system.

In the cases I looked at, it was pretty obvious that one player was stalling. It's unlikely to be a single game, so you may have several games to look at to form a judgement. You don't have to 'find' them, as you can rely upon the other player(s) to report them. If you did want to try and find them, I expect it would be very easy: you analyse for players who have used a holiday joker, yet have continued to make moves in some Arena games but not others.

The very idea that BGA admins take this kind of cheating seriously - seriously enough to ban players who do it - should discourage many from even trying to cheat in this way.

[N_Faker]

The very idea that BGA admins take this kind of cheating seriously - seriously enough to ban players who do it - should discourage many from even trying to cheat in this way.

Moderation here on BGA is too opaque for there to be any significant discouragement by punishment by those not moderated. Many forum posts also complain about it being pointless to report multiaccount/ranking/ELO cheaters due to non-actions.

Verifying if cheating actually occurred is very work intensive. You cannot expect moderation to handle it if the site mechanics allow it without interference.

[Ranior]

Verifying if cheating actually occurred is very work intensive. You cannot expect moderation to handle it if the site mechanics allow it without interference.

Completely agreed. Again the issue is many cheaters will simply get harder to detect also. I'm quite confident that I could start 2-3 dozen Terra Mystica games about a month before the end of a season, and I will know pretty early on which ones are good for me and which are going poorly. I can start playing slowly in some of them just after like a week--you'd have a very hard time proving that I wasn't just thinking harder/longer in tougher games, while playing faster in "easier" positions, yet I'd still be abusing the system to make sure I score my wins and stall out my losses. There will be the issue that everyone will complain at the end of the season if some opponent starts playing slowly, when many non-cheaters will get accused or look like they are cheating. Who is to say someone just didn't go on vacation and is now being slow on moves? Or something happened to them?

That is partially just the problems of actually detecting who is cheating. The main issue though is that reviewing these cases is quite labor intensive, and I imagine there could be a good lot of them. I don't think this would be an effective use of BGA's resources. Furthermore I think continuing this is only going to lead to more forum posts and other complaints about perceived cheaters, and when that is all that is being discussed, it doesn't look good for our community or for others starting to wander in here. Basically the whole site atmosphere could get a good bit more ugly if you allow this stuff to continue, and I for one don't want to see the forums descending in to accusations of what players are doing what.

Finally, as to the suggestion of forcing players to take their turn in their longest waiting game--that does help prevent this sort of manipulation, and is a potential solution. That does create some issues though with general speed of play--if I have a tough move that I want to think about in a game, now all my other games get delayed until I make my decision, and that can lead to a real slow down in the pace of play, which impacts the fun of playing also. It might be worth that tradeoff, but I'm not convinced just scrapping turn based arena isn't the cleaner solution. I'm still convinced doing something with tournaments makes far more sense anyhow, one of the big benefits of turn based games is that you can actually force players together, which allows for the top players to ensure they face off and lead to a more fair competition anyhow. I feel like much of the way arena works really only makes sense in the context of the real time environment anyhow.

[N_Faker]

Disconnecting turn-based from arena isn't ideal. But it is probably the best solution overall, instead of endlessly tweaking how turn-based arena functions while possibly still being flawed or exploitable.

[Calmon70]

Wait what? There will no turnbased arena for new season?

That what I basically play mainly.

How is this a solution? Make something more intelligent or at least let us create turbased arena games for the first month so they will be ended by end of season.

[sourisdudesert]

How is this a solution?

Please take the time to read all the contributions, and feel free to post here a solution if you find one, but no one found a good solution and there are probably none.

[Calmon70]

How is this a solution?

Please take the time to read all the contributions, and feel free to post here a solution if you find one, but no one found a good solution and there are probably none.

Well I just did. I fully understand the problem but just cancel it is way worse than exploiting the system. I would just let it go for another season and find a solution for turnbased players.

Other than this how about my suggestion to limit creating games until certain time of season? For faster 2 player games this could be later and for others it could mean creating games is only possible for first month of season.