Season 3 Arena Settings

[Ranior]

Hello,

In the past it seemed to be mentioned that the settings would alternate between seasons for Terra Mystica for landscapes on and off.

I personally do enjoy the game a bit more without them, but we did just have a season of that. I know quite a few fans were hoping to see them return. I'd be happy to see them return for this season and to continue alternating.

Additionally I know some of us would like to have an arena season on a different map than the standard base game map. I think using the Fire and Ice board, or the Loon Lakes map for an arena season would be a cool option. Adding those to the rotation along with landscapes on/off I think would go over fairly well with the community.

I'm hoping we can see at least a mild change for this upcoming arena season, it is kind of nice to have slight changes each season to explore the various options for Terra Mystica. It would be a bit of a shame if every season returned to the exact same settings.

[ChristopherHo]

Agreed with all of the above!

[r_ikiri]

Agree as well.

How do you upvote this?

[nerdcube]

Agreed with all of this, I'd love to see some of the different options explored more for competitive play!

[Ginooo]

Also agreed with all of the above. Also would love to see some of the different options explored more for competitive play.

[Een]

Indeed, there was a mistake in our file for changes between seasons. Landscape should have been set to ON for this season, it's now been fixed.

About maps, if the community would like maps to rotate, it is a possibility, but it would probably be best if the map rotation occurred on seasons with landscape OFF.

[Myoblast]

I agree too with the map rotation proposal. Thanks!

[zoulou_99]

I will add my voice to all those saying a map rotation would be great between seasons. I think that would be great to make people better all around players and rewarding those who are able to achieve that, and not just specialists of the base map who know the good strategies on this map but can't get good results as soon as they get out of their comfort zone. I think it's fair that if you aspire to become a top player in a competitive environment, you should be able to get good results whatever the settings are (mini exp on/off, landscapes on/off, any maps, etc.). I think that's why landscape rotation is great too, because in the long run Arena will reward players who are able to get good results overall, not players that are good only if it's off or if it's on.

[Ranior]

I've been talking this through with several other very strong players, and understandably it has been hard to get a consensus. Many of us have played hundreds or thousands of times and are quite happy to explore other maps, but I/we also understand a lot of players are relatively inexperienced and are just seeking the experience they would get of playing Terra Mystica at home which would be on the base map.

Still, broadly it seems there is support for having some seasons with a different map. I therefore would encourage arena season 4 to be played with Landscapes OFF but the map set to FIRE AND ICE. The following season could cycle back to base map no landscape, or possibly landscapes again to satisfy the fans of landscapes and keep every other season having them.

Mostly though I think the community would respond well to having a bit of map rotation in arena seasons. I think it should be tried, and then evaluated to see if it negatively impacted player count or anything. As long as it works well though, it would be nice to have some seasons with alternate maps.

My suggestion for the long term future would be one of two things. Right now landscapes cycle ON and OFF every other season and I think we can maintain that. I think the three main options for maps would be these:

Option A:
Base Map is played 50% of seasons, alternate maps are played 50% of seasons. The tough part with this option is figuring out how the cycle would work--it would be nice to have base map every other season, but then would you have to switch the landscapes cycle? Basically the timing doesn't work great, you'd probably have to run a cycle of:
Base Map Landscapes ON
Base Map Landscapes OFF
Alternate Map Landscapes ON
Alternate Map Landscapes OFF

Option B:
Base Map is played in 2/3 of the seasons, with alternate maps every third season. This cycles nicely with the landscapes. The overall cycle would be:
Base Map Landscapes ON
Base Map Landscapes OFF
Alternate Map Landscapes ON
Base Map Landscapes OFF
Base Map Landscapes ON
Alternate Map Landscapes OFF

Option C:
Allow multiple maps during an Arena season. I'm don't play Stone Age arena, but it looks like many of the mini expansions are potentially enabled to on/off at each players preference. If it is possible, allowing all the maps in arena mode and just having each game start with a random map would be quite enjoyable for many of us. Players could set if they do/don't want to play on each map. The obvious downside here is that queue times could increase far too much if everyone is looking for a game of Terra Mystica on a different map. So perhaps everyone can be forced to just play whatever random map for each game. The cycle would look like this:
Any Map Landscapes ON
Any Map Landscapes OFF
(An alternative would be to have some seasons base map only still, and so you could run a cycle like:
Base Map Landscapes ON
Any Map Landscapes OFF
Any Map Landscapes ON
Base Map Landscapes OFF
Any Map Landscapes ON
Any Map Landscapes OFF)

*********************************************************************************************

Personally I'd love to see Option C in some iteration, allowing multiple maps during a season would really interest me. I get however that many may find that too much variability and prefer to really learn one map well. In that case I like Option B a good bit, even though we would only be on an alternate map 1/3 of the time, I really like how the cycle works. Option A is nice in that we get more time on alternative maps, but the cycle is a bit messy.

[Calmon70]

The landscape tiles should be visible when we bet on stuff because

a) Only poeple browsing forum regulary know this option is turned on for Arena Season 3
b) You need to look into external documents to find out what they do

I found this in bug section https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=13061&vote but it was sadly never implemented.