Turn-based Arena: proposed solution to get it back

[j0nas]

Bonjour,

Je souhaite compléter la solution proposé par Jason.
1 partie a la fois, soit en turn-based soit en Real time pour chaque jeux est une bonne solution.
Et pour éviter les parties trop longues, en nombres de semaines pour le turn based, il peut y avoir une limite de temps, pareil que dans le real time, au dela duquel le joueur ayant utiliser le plus de temps perd la partie, ce qui le stimulera a jouer plus régulièrement.
Cette decision peut se justifier dans un mode competitif et reglera le problème des joueurs qui jouent avec ce temps pour tricher.
Une partie peut avoir une limite de temps variable en fonction des jeux, 2 jours pour un Kingdomino par exemple, et 10 jours pour un The boss.

Je prie pour qu'une solution soit trouvée

[agila13]

Hi,
1. What is the % of cheaters? It would be nice to know.
2. Are they using their whole thinking time? We can all use it. Maybe you could make them/us lose the game if our clocks turn red.
3. Is not there a possibility of knowing wether they are playing in other tables and "forgetting" to play in the problematic one? I think that all tables in a game could be tracked and when the system detects he is not playing in a specific table, he may be expelled or something (and this whole process can be done automatically).
I never played as much as in the arena turn-based times and I would not like to miss the opportunity of keeping doing so.

[aesche]

I dont really have a solution, but your cheating techique B is described too specifically (leading to some suggestions recently that arent solving the broader issue. This generally is an issue of turn based games, that one can order his losses (ending first) and wins (ending afterwards), because losing -> winning leaves you with more points than winning -> losing. For a directly competitive mode as arena this is more of an issue than just for ELO. The only solution i‘d see for this is only 1 turn based arena game / game at a time, but i dont think that actually satisfies ppl that miss turn based arena now.

[Jerry_Kacmar]

Suggested solution is implementation of three changes at the same time.

1) Get rid of the leagues (bronze, silver, gold) and just keep season points (i.e. same points as there are in Elite)
+
2) Assign the points based on the order the games started (already considered as potential but not full solution)
+
3) At the end of the season evaluate all the turn-based games at the position they are, similar to what is done when somebody is kicked out because he runs out of time (with warning showing up if somebody starts the game e.g. 2-3 weeks before end of the season)

2+3 deal with problem A
1+2 deal with problem B
1+2 deal with problem C

More elaborate comment on the suggestion of 1, as other two suggestions were already discussed before.
To be honest, I don't see a problem with if somebody "cheats" their way into the higher league. In the end, what really matters is the final standing in the Elite league. So if somebody cheats their way at the end of the season to be in higher league (even Elite), he will definitely not get into Top 20 of elite. Nevertheless, the simple solution is to get rid of leagues and replace it with season point/ELO.
I assume the leagues are there to match people in the same league, but my personal experience is that I was matched with people from all leagues (where the loas hurts the most ).
Matching of people in the same league can be replaced by matching of people having similar season point band (e.g. 100 or 200 point band, whatever is the most appropriate.

Also, if somebody is in Gold league and loses e.g. 10 games in a row, maybe he should not be there (but currently he can't be relegated, which is theoretically big issue), which the season points would elegantly solve.

Regarding technique 2, I'm not sure that many people are that interested in their immediate ranking. If the leagues ar canceled, than this needs dissapears (as currently you might have been wanting to get into higher league) as the points count only at the end of season.

Regarding technique 3, if people are made aware of that, they will either not start the game close to the end of season or they risk they will get negative points if mid-game they are not winning.

I might have thought everything through but I think it's worth having turn-based Arena with these relatively small changes/impacts to rules.

[Slyythe]

Lots of good suggestions in this thread! Hopefully this can help get turn-based arena back online!

Regarding A
A very elegant solution has been proposed above, which is to force a player to first play on games where he has been awaited the longest (ie his remaining time is shortest). Thus, you can't choose which games you finish first.
I would suggest to also implement a fixed time system (like in tournaments), with "time-out" zones that a player has to define at the begining of the Arena season. This takes care of the concern regarding your fixed time being discounted during your sleep. This way, BGA can ensure that all games have an overall total timer and block the Arena for new turn based games towards the end of the season.

I also second the idea put foward above that no real-time game can be started until a player has played on all his turn based tables (however NOT that a player needs to FINISH all his turn based tables before starting real-time - again if I'm up to date on all my tables and I want to play more games, why should the system limit me ?)

I want to highlight that a solution that would limit to 1 turn based game at a time is not a solution at all, because this tremendously limits the number of games you can play throughout the season on the Arena and this is not the idea of a competitive environment.

Regarding B
B is addressed through the above solution for A.
But I would still like to comment on the fact that B isn't such a large issue in the system as well.
Because of the nature of the Arena, what matters is only your ranking at the end of season, therefore artifically inflating your ranking (when in elite) is useless if A is taken care of. If you aren't in elite, then you are just gaming yourself to get a league badge, and this is also not really an issue (see reasoning for C below).

Regarding C
C is actually a non-issue. People are playing Arena, either to reach the top (ie top of elite) or to see how high they can go (ie reach the best division they can get).
In the first case, whatever happens in lower leagues is irrelevant, only A&B create issues with the ranking in elite.
In the second case, it is also irrelevant : it doesn't matter to you if someone else games the system to reach gold, because you aren't playing for rank (otherwise only elite would matter to you and we go back to the first case), you are playing to prove to yourself that you can get to that gold/elite rank.
If this is still considered an important issue for BGA, then the best solution (implemented accross various other competitive games) is to have promotion & demotion both existing in the system. I personally don't see how this would affect Arena ratings (people who want to reach a certain league would still retain that shiny badge even if they fall back down).

[lanzi]

ADMIN UPDATE: not a solution
______________________________________________________________________

In this way you punish all the people (99%?) who played correctly and the championship ist nothing worth because you exclude a lot of players who are not able to join now - the huge amount of the Arena-games are turn-by-turn and not live, so championship is no longer an important title.
For me - everytime-champion in Kahuna - this ist the end because I am not able to play live very often - and this because other people behave wrong. That does not feel good.

[alexisslay]

Hello,

I do love the arena mode and i am most playing in turn-based due to lack of time for real-time games.

If you do not want to limit number of games in arena per player, you can put in place a system based on the reputation.
If a player is having lot of delays, his reputation will decrease and then he would be able to start less games in the same arena or in all arena.
( i can imagine they can cheat by playing fast outside the arena to increase the reputation and avoid this, but you can put a specific arena reputation which is recovered only by the time : for example, player is out of time for 1 day on a game, he can loose 10% of arena reputation. And it could be 1 days to recover 1% and during this time, he could start les number of game like only 1 ). If a player is reaching 0%, he won't be able to open any new game in arena.
To avoid to put penalty on people who were just to busy to play, we can add an abandon button on the game or send a warning message per mail.
Of course you would have to establish a scale of penalties, but this will apply only on Arena

I hope my proposal will help you to recover Arena turn based games.

[MarcondesBe]

For A, B and C

It could limit number of games a player can join in turn-based matches simultaneously up to 1 or 2 in arena

[lanzi]

Sorry, did not copy the rest of my execution.

It is so easy, very simple: You are forced to play that Arena-game with the lowest time. You can not avoid this (only in the Arena-modus). On other side that works.

[Micadia]

Leave it as it was. As you wrote 93% are realtime games. Then it shouldn't be that big influence for most of the people when only a few of the 7% turn based players are cheating. I guess turn based players would rather play with the low risk of being cheated than don't can play Arena at all.