Lohoris wrote: ↑01 October 2021, 00:21
pabula wrote: ↑29 September 2021, 11:33
Why there is so many game for 4-5 players and in Arena you play it as 2-player?
Example: Caylus, Keyflower, Tzolkin, La Granja, Spyrium, Russian Railroads.
Honestly - I do not play them in Arena just because of that.
I prefer playing games with more players when we can.
And when I'm not playing it as 2-player I can't be a Guru of this game and I can't vote for it.
So players who like playing it 2-players will still vote to keep it as it is.
That's not fair.
"not fair" is definitely the wrong expression there.
You can say you do not like it, and that would be fine.
Personally I dislike competitive multiplayer boardgames: if I'm playing for fun ok, but in a tournament like an Arena, only 1vs1 makes sense
for me.
Different people like different things for different reasons.
It's not fair because the criteria for gurus favor 2p enthusiasts, who are playing a game they enjoy but not a game I want to play that often, and certainly not for competitive stakes. That makes it so that the conditions favor an endless 2p arena loop, with 2p enthusiasts voting for more 2p games, with the credentials that frequent, relatively rapid 2p games give them.
For instance, I play Carnegie regularly, and usually have many concurrent games at any given time. I suddenly lost my guru status, because that's not enough to keep up with the people who play 2p games, evidently, because their games finish much faster and are easier to set up. I readily concede they have more experience with one version of the game played at a very high level, but I also think that my experience and that of people like me is valuable.
This is separate from the conversation about what number games are "best" at, since in some ways that's a subjective thing. Some people really do enjoy min-maxing a primarily-multiplayer-designed experience in a 2p decision space, and I respect that. I just think that the Arena mode should allow participants to decide for themselves how many people they want to play with, and perhaps even break down outcomes by player number. This would help avoid the "barren lower levels of Arena" effect currently in play, where some of that is surely because multiplayer players don't want to participate to get sharked by someone with 200 1v1 games under their belts. Perhaps, in addition, guru status should cross-reference number of people you've played against with raw number of games, in order to provide input from all kinds of players.
This even reaches into beta and alpha status default access, where players are rewarded for degenerate exploits to build up their number of games (playing tons of very short 1v1 games) and normal use of the platform by dedicated players of heavy, multiplayer games is regarded as irrelevant experience if it's not accompanied by ten thousand plays of Bandido. It's the platform confusing engagement metrics for play experience and insights, and that's what I think they mean by "not fair".
