Arena guidelines + player block question

[nik592]

A simple potential solution would be allowing you to mute players, but not block them as arena opponents.

If someone is griefing in a game in other ways, that's just normally reportable behavior.

This doesn't cover situations where players run well over time, or quit games prematurely without explanation. I frequently use red thumbs for that, but that behaviour is not reportable. I believe this was one of the big complaints when they mentioned removing red thumbs from Arena. I get that there's an issue with blocking people in order to reach higher rankings, but there's also an issue with not being able to block players who ruin your experience (by ignoring time limits or just plain quitting).

But then you get the win, which is what you want if it's a competitive ladder.
See, this is the dilemma. Is arena for competitive play (winning, gaining points n climbing the ladder) or just for fun? BGA needs to set their foot down. If it's competitive you shouldn't be allowed to manipulate the match making, period, and people quitting isn't a huge problem unless it happens en masse, just more points to you. If it's just for fun, then it's good to have the option to tailor who you play with so you only meet those playing in a style you like.

I get where you're coming from with it being a competitive ladder, then a win is your goal. But it's supremely frustrating to put in most of a game and have someone quit at the last moment, even if you're playing competitively (the specific example given when it was discussed alongside the ELO updates was putting in 80min on a game of Agricola, for someone to just leave). And as Jellby mentions, there is more complexity in assigning ELO in multiplayer, which means you don't always gain ELO from a quitter (especially if you're a highly ranked player) - that's not my specific issue either but I know that also has been complained about.

[GTSchemer]

A simple potential solution would be allowing you to mute players, but not block them as arena opponents.

If someone is griefing in a game in other ways, that's just normally reportable behavior.

This doesn't cover situations where players run well over time, or quit games prematurely without explanation. I frequently use red thumbs for that, but that behaviour is not reportable. I believe this was one of the big complaints when they mentioned removing red thumbs from Arena. I get that there's an issue with blocking people in order to reach higher rankings, but there's also an issue with not being able to block players who ruin your experience (by ignoring time limits or just plain quitting).

If an Arena opponent goes over time, especially well over time, you simply kick them and get the win credit.

If someone repeatedly leaves Arena games, that should be reportable I assume, and will very clearly be on their record and profile, potentially getting them banned from Arena.

If someone leaves once and you want to always avoid them in Arena, that's not fair since there might have been an emergency. If you want to be able to avoid any arbitrary opponent that's also not fair, since anyone could simply argue that the top 200 players are (conveniently) "ruining" their play experience (e.g. players who argue that using the game rules in Catan to block an opponent is "cheating").

[Ceaseless]

One solution to the problem of players quitting to reduce their opponent's elo gains is to remove the absurd percentage completion feature. If a player quits, their opponent(s) win and get full credit for beating the quitter.