Board Game Arena

As far as incentives for playing go I'd made a suggestion long ago, lots of upvotes, but still no response from admins:

https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=30059

This would also prevent smurfing to an extent, but again I'd just like an official stance on the topic.

I agree that BGA has a very clear and enforced policy that if you play against yourself with multiple accounts they will punish you if they can prove it.

I agree that the Terms of Service technically say they can ban you for having multiple accounts, but they don't seem to have ever enforced it, and indeed enforcing it seems pretty hard/impossible to prove most of the time. I personally don't think there is anything wrong with one having multiple accounts.

I do STRONGLY agree however that using multiple accounts during a single arena season is wrong. I will admit to having a smurf account that many in the Terra Mystica community know about being me, but I've been very particular about only playing arena seasons with either my main account (this Ranior one) or with the smurf account. I've never and will not play with both of my accounts during the same arena season. It leads to all sorts of issues that you've laid out. I think the biggest one is taking up multiple spots on the ladder, but other nefarious things pop up too if you're trying to do well with one account and can use other accounts to just try and target other top rated players, etc.

I also would like an official policy that players should only use one account in any given game for an arena season. I personally don't even mind if players choose to make a smurf account for an arena season as long as they use only that account for the season.

With all that said, I will admit this too is basically impossible to force or detect. Even if the official rules get updated, it basically will just change the incentive structure to lead to multi accounts/smurfers to be more creative with their usernames and patterns so they aren't detected. I see no good way around this. So ultimately I don't think it matters too much what BGA decides to do on this one as I don't think there's a great way to get around it. Perhaps it's a bit too idealistic, but I think the better hope is to simply encourage others to not engage in this behavior. Reaching out and explaining the situation to some players can work--I know at least one player in Terra Mystica played with multiple accounts one season but won't going forward once they understood that taking up multiple spots on the leaderboard is essentially denying other players their fair shot at top X placement, which wasn't something they had thought deeply about. I'm not saying all multi accounters will be so ethical, but I actually think many/most would. I think a decent number of games on BGA are starting to have communities form up around them and some top players are streaming games and becoming leaders of those communities, I think what they say and show to others can help form expected behaviors and help out....However, I will finally state that it may be too idealistic a viewpoint from me, and that it works better for the Terra Mystica world where I think it's a lot harder to move to high rankings rapidly and there is less advantages to smurfing. I suspect 7 Wonders may just always get plagued by smurfing as the benefits are too great to ignore for those that really want to win.

All very good points Ranior, hard to disagree with anything, but I still hope BGA will take some stance.

To challenge Ranior's impossible statement:

BGA do track your IP Address - you get a notice in the table lobby when playing with family.

They could enforce only unique IPaddresses per Arena Season.
This would unfortunately block say brothers trying to play in the same season, but they could lift the restriction for anyone with a premium account, and otherwise stop any 'smurfing'.

On the whole though I think if you're going to cheat, this is one of the lowest grade cheating mechanism available to you. If you want - it's quite easy to just start multiple Arena games with your friend(s) and they just let you win. Do this at the most opportune moments, like a timeout game at the end of the season, you can even do it with multiple games. This is how at the very last second, I just lost my #1 Arena ranking in Tablut (as did many otheres in different games), and after reporting it's not even considered cheating...

RicardoRix wrote: ↑04 June 2021, 10:11 To challenge Ranior's impossible statement:

BGA do track your IP Address - you get a notice in the table lobby when playing with family.

They could enforce only unique IPaddresses per Arena Season.
This would unfortunately block say brothers trying to play in the same season, but they could lift the restriction for anyone with a premium account, and otherwise stop any 'smurfing'.

On the whole though I think if you're going to cheat, this is one of the lowest grade cheating mechanism available to you. If you want - it's quite easy to just start multiple Arena games with your friend(s) and they just let you win. Do this at the most opportune moments, like a timeout game at the end of the season, you can even do it with multiple games. This is how at the very last second, I just lost my #1 Arena ranking in Tablut, and it's not even considered cheating...

ElerCant is cheater, he was penalized for this and for a lot of other game

Manassès I wrote: ↑04 June 2021, 12:29 he was penalized for this and for a lot of other game

Penalized how?
Still the 'Reigning Champion'
https://boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=tablut

Is there a restriction yet to the number of Arena games you can play with the same person?

RicardoRix wrote: ↑04 June 2021, 12:36

Manassès I wrote: ↑04 June 2021, 12:29 he was penalized for this and for a lot of other game

Penalized how?
Still the 'Reigning Champion'
https://boardgamearena.com/gamepanel?game=tablut

Is there a restriction yet to the number of Arena games you can play with the same person?

He loses Elo in all game he cheats, and forever forbidden discuss

Ranior wrote:I will admit to having a smurf account that many in the Terra Mystica community know about being me, but I've been very particular about only playing arena seasons with either my main account (this Ranior one) or with the smurf account.

Wonderful Plays wrote: ↑03 June 2021, 16:52 All very good points Ranior, hard to disagree with anything, but I still hope BGA will take some stance.

ELO also has a ladder and 'smurfing' will also deny people trophies / achievements because of this.

Why is it OK to do the smurfing with the ELO but not Arena?

I misspoken maybe - I don't think it is good (I never done it), but I have less of a problem with that.

I guess it depends a bit on why the smurf account is created. I'm not attempting to ladder with my smurf account or take up top spots. I will admit I think I have seen a game or two where one player has attempted to get like all of the top 10 elo spots, and that is pretty lame. I use my smurf account to basically play and experiment in Terra Mystica without hurting my main elo. Perhaps I should just suck it up and care less about my main account standing and do whatever experimentation I want to, but there are some nice benefits to getting to play under anonymity and do some other things. I guess the other option is to just try and play more games in training mode with my main account--that way there are no elo changes, etc. The downside there is that I can't put in timer controls on training mode games, which would be an upgrade in that sense.

The other reason I'm not particularly worried about smurfing though taking up the top elo spots is simply because for most games, reaching the top of the elo leaderboard involves doing dubious stuff anyhow. It often isn't too meaningful. For Terra Mystica for example, most serious competition happens at 4 players. I consider some of the best players in the world to be those that consistently prove themselves against the other strongest players in the world in 4 player games. The leaderboard has a decent number of those.

But the leaderboard for Terra Mystica at any given time also generally has some names of 2p or 3p specialists. Some of those players are clearly just elo grinders who also purposefully restrict who they'll play against. Some of us in the Terra Mystica community even occasionally try to join the games that these sort of elo grinders put up, only to find ourselves instantly booted form the table. So it's pretty annoying to see someone with the number one elo title in Terra Mystica who doesn't play 4p games, and who aggressively filters their opponents so they basically can't lose. If I really cared to reach the top of the leaderboard I also probably could just go spend a lot of time playing 2p games against low rated opponents and I'd essentially never lose--Terra Mystica doesn't have random elements, and a player actually playing at a 100-200 elo level truly doesn't stand a chance of winning.

I realize not all games are exactly like this. But overall most games have ways to manipulate the elo system to get edges. It's a lot harder to do anything in the arena system since everyone is playing under the same format and you can't really pick your players (you can try to abuse the red thumb system as a way to pick your opponents, but it's a lot harder to get games and do that to really climb to the top). Overall I guess my point is that I don't think the elo leaderboards for most games are actually a great way to tell who the best players are, and the system is rife with so many issues I consider bigger than worrying about smurf accounts sucking up multiple top spots--especially since for the most part I think smurf accounts goals aren't to get multiple top spots in a game. (Perhaps that is a bit hypocritical of me since I do think smurf accounts in arena often are attempting to get multiple top spots)