Arena Season 3: let's go!

[sourisdudesert]

Congratulations to every winners of the first official season!

Season 3 is NOW launched.

For this new season, we introduced 3 new rules to take into account your feedback on previous Arena seasons. We know that there are still things to improve but please be patient: we are slowly improving the competition mode season after season.

Arena is now realtime only (UPDATED: this is no more the case)

It was way to easy to cheat the Arena system using turn based tables, and we have to conclude first that Arena is not suited for turn based.

Thanks for your feedback and help, we managed to change the turn-based Arena rules to prevent such player to exploit the turn-based Arena weakness.

The new rules are:
New rules:

• For Arena turn-based game, for a given game, you are now forced to play on the table where it's your turn for the longest time. Example: if you have 2 Carcassonne games, you can't play on the game where it's you turn for 5 minutes before playing on the other one it's your turn for 5 hours.
• You cannot start a Arena realtime game if you have a turn based game with the same game in progress where it is your turn to play.
• At the end of the season, all turn based games will be stopped, and the player who consumed the most time will lost the game (all the opponents will be winners).

We hope that this will solve most of the cheating issue there are with the Arena.

Speaking about turn based: our intention is to propose something else in the future to those of you who like turn based competitions. Obviously, it will be based on "organized play" (ie: tournaments), which is a perfect fit for turn based.

No more point lose when someone quits a game

There were situations where an opponent can quit a game and make the other players lose Arena points. This has been fixed and is no more the case.

Recent games are not concerned by the end of this season

All games published less than 1 month before the end of a season are not concerned by the end of the season (no trophies, no relegation). This is for example the case for 7 Wonders Duel, Kingdom Builders or Marco Polo.



It's up to you to find the way of the elite!


TO YOUR MOUSE!

[lincoln9818]

I want to see if there are any solutions to the games that are really not popular. I tried waiting them in real-time for like 30 minutes still cannot get a table. I think these games would have to disappear on arena as nobody can be playing it now.

[sourisdudesert]

I want to see if there are any solutions to the games that are really not popular. I tried waiting them in real-time for like 30 minutes still cannot get a table. I think these games would have to disappear on arena as nobody can be playing it now.

For games with not many players, the only possible solution for competition is organized games (ie: tournaments). Arena turn-based was not a really good solution according to our statistics (they were not played at all, even in turn based).

[lincoln9818]

If the trophies of those less popular games are still kept, I anticipate that maybe only 10 or fewer players can reach elite and the trophies will become meaningless, to those who are luckier to get a table in the coming season.

[sourisdudesert]

If the trophies of those less popular games are still kept, I anticipate that maybe only 10 or fewer players can reach elite and the trophies will become meaningless, to those who are luckier to get a table in the coming season.

This is already the case at now, and one of the problem we must solve for the next season.

[Kallsup]

I want to see if there are any solutions to the games that are really not popular. I tried waiting them in real-time for like 30 minutes still cannot get a table. I think these games would have to disappear on arena as nobody can be playing it now.

For games with not many players, the only possible solution for competition is organized games (ie: tournaments). Arena turn-based was not a really good solution according to our statistics (they were not played at all, even in turn based).

Can you you comment on how the stats differ in Tokaido between season 1 and 2? My friend list has a lot of hard core tokaido players who completely ditched arena this season (myself included) because of the crossroads setting.

[nmego]

I also know of some top players who don't mind crossroads. From a strategic standpoint, what do you dislike about crossroads?

[pabula]

This is really a sad news for me.
I liked playing several games at once on Arena.
sometimes finding a player took few days for games that are not popular and that I like.
They will not be played any longer on Arena as finding a player will be impossible.
But that's something minor.
The biggest problem I see are games that takes in real life longer then 90 minutes.
I just won't be playing them.
You took some joy today from me.

[Slyythe]

Thank you for taking into account this issue with the system, however this is a very poor fix. You are basically doing away with the problem instead of tackling it and, as mentioned in prior comments, preventing the Arena system from working for a slew of games (this will for instance destroy the Arena for Kahuna, which was otherwise working).

It was only "easy" to game the system (at the end of the season) because of the way the Arena games are fixed up for the turn base basis.

Instead of destroying Arena for a lot of players (who cannot unfortunately find the time to fit in lots of real time games in their schedule - and we all know getting to the top requires a grind), a much better fix would be to do the following :
- Harmonize the time per player for an Arena game (depending on the game obviously) instead of allowing players to state their preferences on the number of turns per day
- Put the timer as a fixed time per player (ie fixed maximum time for the match) instead of a resetting counter
- Close the Arena to new turn based tables in advance of the deadline, so as to ensure that all games MUST finish prior to that deadline
- Automatically attribute a loss to the player whose time has run out when the deadline for the full match has expired
- Disable the "holiday" grace period on Arena (this is competitive, people shouldn't start games if they are going to be offline).

Since Arena ranks only matter at the end of the season (no one cares who is at the top during the season), this would completely address the turn base gaming.

You could also chose to ban/punish players who have abused this to inflate their ranks.

In addition, a nice QOL improvement to Arena, for games where there are enough players, would be to have an arena "decay". Because given how punishing the system is when you reach the top ranks in terms of losses per game, the ideal stance to take when you reach the top is to stop playing. This is a poor incentive to keep the competition going.

[sbryantf]

I fully understand the problems associated with turn-based games in Arena mode, but I was hoping for a more sophisticated solution than simply disabling them completely. I'm rarely in a position where I can be sure of having enough time to sit through a full game without being interrupted by work, family, etc. I love turn-based games because I am free to play a few turns whenever I have a bit of time, and I don't have to worry if something suddenly pulls me away. I also love Arena mode, and have been almost exclusively playing Arena mode games since they were introduced. I'm very disappointed that I will no longer be able to participate in Arena mode, and I strongly urge you to come up with a solution to address the problem while also allowing players like myself to continue enjoying Arena mode.