Ideas to improve the Guru system

[Jellby]

They keep making me a guru in Castle Combo because I play this game the most, but the reason for that is because I'm the worst at it so I need to put out more games to get close to my objectives. So this is actually contradictory with the idea of being a guru.

In contrast, in Harmonies I've never played more than 100 games in a season, so I stand no chance of being selected when there's people who play hundreds of games, even though that's the game where I'd be most fit to be a guru.

You seem to think you should be a top player in a game in order to be a guru. That's not the case, and I don't think that was the intent. I believe they wanted to select the players who care most about the game and who would know best about the different game options. Sure, plain number of games played is not the definitive measure of that, but being good or bad at a game does not need to have any influence in being a guru.

[RazorOz]

You seem to think you should be a top player in a game in order to be a guru. That's not the case, and I don't think that was the intent. I believe they wanted to select the players who care most about the game and who would know best about the different game options. Sure, plain number of games played is not the definitive measure of that, but being good or bad at a game does not need to have any influence in being a guru.

Tbf there has to be a strong link between top players and people "who care most about the game and would know best about the different game options". I think one of the weaknesses to the current system is 30 days isn't a long enough time frame to look at, it should look at a longer period like 90 days. Because 30 days it's too easy for someone to come in mass play a game for a few weeks and never play it again, who has no real interest in gurus or Arena for that game. If it looked at 90 days instead I think you'd get a far higher % of players who fit your description.

I also think they should put some kind of weight towards playing higher player counts, not to slant it in favour of playing higher player counts, but just to acknowledge that if you measure purely on games played there's invariably a bias towards 2 player which plays significantly faster most of the time.

[tbhp]

You seem to think you should be a top player in a game in order to be a guru.

Maybe not necessarily being a top player, but it remains the question of what it is they are trying to gauge by number of games played exactly. If someone is so bad at a game that they are desperate to put out more games, I'm pretty sure this doesn't fall under the sorts of things they had in mind.

I think the idea was more like you say to gauge how passionate someone may be about a game, but in my case, this clearly doesn't work as intended, as my reasons for playing have nothing to do with that.

I still think the guru thing should be a simple question asked to users, where the ones who think they should be gurus decide to be gurus and that's it. That seems like it would have better chances of fitting what they are looking for, than simply looking how much someone plays a game.

[tbhp]

Tbf there has to be a strong link between top players and people "who care most about the game and would know best about the different game options".

Yeah, if the goal is to select people who "know best" about the game, it seems absurd to include people who play it a lot but still don't have a high Elo, as there is clearly a few things they are not understanding about the game that is preventing them from having a higher Elo.

The problem is that it remains unclear what are the qualities that they or we want a guru to have. Like, no one actually seems to know what a guru should be in their mind. Until we can define this clearly, it's obviously going to be hard to settle on a method that best selects those people.