Season 7: New Season & New Features!

[sourisdudesert]

Congratulations to all of the winners of Season 6!

Better matchmaking experiment

During season 6, we did a 2 week experiment to try matching you with opponents from the same league (or not so far off).

There is no magic here: having better opponents always means waiting longer, so it created longer waiting delays.

The objective was successful in that the vast majority of the tables gathered people from the same league. We got some very interesting feedback from you during these weeks. It seems that the longer delay discouraged a lot of you, and that this experiment had to stop. Since then, the Arena has been just like it was before.

However, we are still not satisfied with the Arena matchmaking, and we plan to do another experiment during a future Arena season. Again, there is no magic: it will mean that you will be able to play less games, but with more appropriate opponents. However, contrary to this experiment and following your feedback, we will try to make sure the waiting time is predictable, so that the wait is less painful.

(to be continued...)


Arena Formats & Gurus

At the beginning of the latest season, we introduced a new way to handle the Arena formats (the settings for each Arena game).

Now Arena formats are decided by a group of experimented players for each games: the Gurus.

This is a great success and we would like to thank all Gurus for their participation, suggestions, and votes!

With over 333 games in the Arena, the Gurus chose:
- to keep the current arena format for 235 games.
- to set a new format for 82 games.

The 11 other games unfortunately have invalid winning suggestions.

Important: Arena suggestions must clearly write which game options must be set (ex: "Expansion X: Yes"), and they must be options that already exist. Otherwise we are forced to set the suggestion as "invalid" and the current format will be kept for the next Season. If a suggestion is not clear enough, we recommend all Gurus to downvote it so it is not selected.

If the format changes for your game, you should see it in your newsfeed soon.

Thanks to the Gurus, we wish that the new Arena settings will be appreciated by most of you!


Arena Reputation Limit

A lot of you suggested that we limit the Arena to players with a good reputation to avoid "quitters" n the Arena.

This is an excellent suggestion, as in the Arena you cannot choose your opponents.

Starting this season, Arena is reserved to players with a Karma higher than 60.

We hope that this will contribute to making the Arena more enjoyable for everyone.


Important Reminder: Recent Games Are Not Included in the End of This Season.

All games published (= out of Beta) less than 1 month before the end of a season are not included in the end of the season (no trophies, no relegations).


Season 7 is NOW Launched.

The new Arena is going to be opened in a few hours.


Some Explanation About: Relegations

At the end of each season, after winners have been awarded, you are relegated.

Some custom relegation rules may have been applied to a game for some reason (ex: we decided to reduce the number of leagues), but in general here is what happens:

• For games with 6 or 5 different leagues, all players are decreased by 3 leagues.
• For games with 4 different leagues, all players are decreased by 2 leagues.
• For games with 2 or 3 different leagues, all players are decreased by 1 league.
• For all games and all leagues, your number of Arena points is reset to 1, and your AES ("Arena Elo") is reset to 1500.

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


May the odds be ever in your favor!

[giggas2]

Changes to Ice Cold Ice Hockey was unfortunately one of those invalid winning suggestions. When writing that suggestion, I was unaware of how strict the need for game options to be explicit, and it seemed like that continued on to the rest of the Gurus. Since it is that way, why is a free-form field? It would make more sense that it would be the same panel of existing options that you see when creating a game. That way there can be no invalid entries, and remove that level of frustration.

[Wonderful Plays]

I get this error when trying to launch arena now:

Unexpected error: This right does not exists: play_arena

[ureloch]

Yep, me too!

I get this error when trying to launch arena now:

Unexpected error: This right does not exists: play_arena

[DrClick]

Will be open tonight 20:00 UTC, as stated

[Vandaley]

Is there a list of the games that changed? I see Happy City is now a 2 player for Arena, which really surprises me as I think 2 player in these sorts of drawing games are far less fun.


Also, will Guru's be updated? I have won Thurn and Taxis 2 seasons in a row and was 2nd place the previous season but am not listed as a Guru. I also played a couple other games a ton (St Pete and Happy City) and figure I probably played enough to be able to discuss the format.

[Ranior]

However, we are still not satisfied with the Arena matchmaking, and we plan to do another experiment during a future Arena season. Again, there is no magic: it will mean that you will be able to play less games, but with more appropriate opponents. However, contrary to this experiment and following your feedback, we will try to make sure the waiting time is predictable, so that the wait is less painful.

(to be continued...)

I still am totally behind an improvement to the matchmaking process, but perhaps think through it a bit more and really listen to the feedback you've gotten this time around. Much of the issues were predictable. I'd encourage you to perhaps run it past some of the very thoughtful individuals in the forums (I think Sprockitz in particular understands well how the system works and how it could be improved to work, etc). I feel like you have some great resources available to help give advice and avoid the pitfalls and unintended and unforeseen consequences of the past (since I think some users could help you foresee these things through a good forum discussion).


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

As for things like Agricola just rolling their season forward, I agree that's a good step. Please though, stop doing this and then also changing the arena settings. Agricola got updated to including the extra action spaces which is fair enough if that's what people voted for, but you can't make a change in the middle of an arena season which is what is happening for Agricola given you didn't close it out. You would obviously never update arena settings mid season for any other game, so I hope that can get fixed.

Which as another aside, I'm less convinced the guru system is ideal. If you're just basically going to have players voting on what formats they like, why restrict it to only the most active players for a game? For Agricola in particular my experience from afar is that more overall players choose to create and play tables without the extra action spaces, while there is a portion of the most active players that do quite like them. If you only poll those users you get a result different from what I think you'd get if you polled all users....so I'm not sure that's a good thing.

[Patrick of the Isles]

Thanks for all your good work Souris and team!

You probably have heard this already, but just in case: I think an issue with trying to balance the good opponents vs. waiting time is the need for different filters for different games!

For example, two games I play in arena are Russian Railroads and 7 Wonders Duel. In RR, there are about 20 elite league players, while in 7WD, there are over 1,000. So only being able to filter by league leads to much different experiences of waiting times and opponent strength in the two games. If I filter by same league, the strictest setting, I am limiting it to the best 20 in RR, but only limiting it to the top 1,000 in 7WD. I would suggest that the ability to filter within elite league, perhaps by "+/- 100 AES" for the games with large user bases would lead to better matches.

Just something to consider

[Ranior]

Oh, did just want to call out though, thanks much for listening to users and finally putting a reputation restriction on arena. Personally I'd still like to see it be even stricter, it's not hard to maintain a very good reputation, but at least excluding the very worst reputation players is a very good step forward.

[Zothi]

Better matchmaking experiment

During season 6, we did a 2 week experiment to try matching you with opponents from the same league (or not so far off).

There is no magic here: having better opponents always means waiting longer, so it created longer waiting delays.

The objective was successful in that the vast majority of the tables gathered people from the same league. We got some very interesting feedback from you during these weeks. It seems that the longer delay discouraged a lot of you, and that this experiment had to stop. Since then, the Arena has been just like it was before.

However, we are still not satisfied with the Arena matchmaking, and we plan to do another experiment during a future Arena season. Again, there is no magic: it will mean that you will be able to play less games, but with more appropriate opponents. However, contrary to this experiment and following your feedback, we will try to make sure the waiting time is predictable, so that the wait is less painful.

(to be continued...)

I'm happy of those tests. I think it just needs some small improvements. For instance, you could adjust the matching range based on the number of current players in Arena (both queued and playing) for that specific game.

[...] in the Arena you cannot choose your opponents.

This is not true as long as you can give red thumbs to people and exclude them from your Arena matches. This should be fixed as I suggested here.