Board Game Arena

About players who refuse to play turn based game near the end of the season (in order not losing them), we could:

_ stop new turn based X days before the end of Arena.
_ finish these games at the end of Arena + gives victory based on remaining time to play or total time taken to think since the beginning of the game (to punish the player who stopped playing).

These are both good ideas, especially the second one. Unfair attitude should be discouraged. Thank you.

sourisdudesert wrote: ↑03 October 2020, 10:01 About players who refuse to play turn based game near the end of the season (in order not losing them), we could:

_ stop new turn based X days before the end of Arena.
_ finish these games at the end of Arena + gives victory based on remaining time to play or total time taken to think since the beginning of the game (to punish the player who stopped playing).

This is not just a problem for Arena, you also have the same behaviour for forcing a huge ELO boost: Save up all your wins, all the loses can't go below 100 and then catapult your ELO rating into 1st place by caching in all your wins.

sourisdudesert wrote: ↑03 October 2020, 10:01 About players who refuse to play turn based game near the end of the season (in order not losing them), we could:

_ stop new turn based X days before the end of Arena.
_ finish these games at the end of Arena + gives victory based on remaining time to play or total time taken to think since the beginning of the game (to punish the player who stopped playing).

The problem will still be games that feature more than two players.

Oh Hell being the worst offender of the games I play. (I still have two tables of it from season 1), but I guess it would solve some of it.

It can’t be done for this season but for future seasons turn basement should really be changed in terms of the time allotment to be more similar to tournaments where everyone has a fixed total amount of time for the game. This could be set fairly friendly early on in the season add 10 to 15 days per player depending on the number of players so that the total time cannot go over the allotted time for the season. As the season goes on this time we have to change so that all games are guaranteed to be finished on time. For example in a two player games there’s only seven days left in the season he would have a max 3 1/2 day timer for both players.

Being able to select the order games finish in her basement it is also a problem with how the current Elo system works that highly takes into account the more recent games. This is a factor for both Elo and arena EAS. It can also be used in arena to move up levels even if you are not a very good player you can store up three or four wins in a row after losing 10 or 20 straight in order to jump up a level.

I agree with @sprockitz suggestion, but I think it should only take effect like 30 days before the season ends, so every player gets 15d max time, and when someone goes out of time, they get disqualified. I think this would solve this issue with minimum disadvantages.

But, it should, by no means, affect the other 3 months of the season, because:
(A) This issue does not present itself yet.
(B) I absolutely, despise the timing system for turn-based tournaments. I prefer joining games where I know that, everyday I'll play a move in that game. But, being restricted to a specific deadline, with the possibility of the opponent having a suboptimal timezone for my play-times. Is just a no-go for me.

Honestly, the way turn based currently works with the arena rating system makes for a pretty big joke, anyone who really cared to exploit things could gain a huge advantage on their opponents by starting a ton of games near the end of a season, and playing faster in the ones where they are winning and just slowly (but not obviously) stall in the bad ones. There's also the manipulation that the ordering of your results matters. Someone utilizing these "hacks" in turn based mode has a huge advantage compared to real time players.

I'd really like to see turn based and real time arena ranks be separate anyhow, as the player pools in many games are completely different, making the rankings between them somewhat suspect. For example in Terra Mystica there is almost completely different groups of players playing real time and turn based which makes it pretty questionable to be trying to compare arena rankings between the two.

If changes would be made, I'd really like to see it so that turn based and real time were separated for each game, and so that all arena games had to complete by season end, so you just couldn't start a turn based arena game during the last few weeks of a season or whatever the timer would be for each game. That still leaves the smaller edge case where turn based players could try to manipulate the order their results finish, but I don't see any way to go about changing that without completely changing the rating system.

Ranior wrote: ↑03 October 2020, 21:07

If changes would be made, I'd really like to see it so that turn based and real time were separated for each game, and so that all arena games had to complete by season end, so you just couldn't start a turn based arena game during the last few weeks of a season or whatever the timer would be for each game. That still leaves the smaller edge case where turn based players could try to manipulate the order their results finish, but I don't see any way to go about changing that without completely changing the rating system.

I think a rating system change would be good, but absent that they could force ppl to play turn based games in order..at least for all your arena mode games of a given game.


I also think once they come out with something good for turn based...like leagues you sign up for to play a fixed amount of games they should make that the default competitive mode for turn based and make arena real time. I still think playoffs for arena would be good but hard to say hoe that works if play times don’t overlap...maybe announce finals times at start of each season so you can know ahead of time if youcould participate.

Thanks for your great feedback.

If the turnbased arena "order results cheating" is a real thing, I'm afraid that the only possible solution is to make Arena realtime only.

Making 2 separare arenas per game (realtime + turnbased) would not make any sense since turn based arena would have the same problem.

sourisdudesert wrote: ↑04 October 2020, 09:00
If the turnbased arena "order results cheating" is a real thing, I'm afraid that the only possible solution is to make Arena realtime only.

Hope you will do it. Arena is a competition... It has to be fair. And it will probably be easier to find opponents in some games : some of those who play turnplay will come in live.

Have a try at beginning of season 3?