Board Game Arena

Some players are starting with more than 1 point in their opening leagues, is this random?

PLEASE do not do anything that makes the wait time for Arena games longer! I come on BGA to *play*, not to mess around on my computer waiting for ages for a game to trigger. The wait times for some of the less-frequently-played games such as Blaze and Love Letter were absolutely excruciating this Arena season - and the longer you make people wait the more likely that by the time the game does actually start, one of the people in it has been waiting so long they have stepped away from their computer and forgot to cancel their request to start the game.

Congratulations! this time is very cool!

I've seen a few comments about the problems with gurus & just canvassing the most active players. Personally I would rather a site-wide vote for Arena options. The most active players probably already like the existing options and so keep being active. People who don't like those options won't play as much. Site-wide polls will encourage anyone who has an interest in that game to vote & may lead to more variety in the options season-to-season.

What happens with no options defined ?

I agree that I won't play with most option setups.
They would also have to have the rating be at least Good in the options.

Are they still matching experts with average at the start?

giggas2 wrote: ↑05 October 2021, 16:04 Changes to Ice Cold Ice Hockey was unfortunately one of those invalid winning suggestions. When writing that suggestion, I was unaware of how strict the need for game options to be explicit, and it seemed like that continued on to the rest of the Gurus. Since it is that way, why is a free-form field? It would make more sense that it would be the same panel of existing options that you see when creating a game. That way there can be no invalid entries, and remove that level of frustration.

Free form allow you to propose complex options strategies, like the gurus of Saint Petersburg or 7 Wonders did (ex: different options for even or odd seasons).

bananasplay wrote: ↑05 October 2021, 17:49 I agree that it should be obvious, but it's not so for BGA—they totally changed the parameters for Saint Petersburg midway through a previous season, moving from 2-player to 4-player tables, thus giving a huge advantage to players who'd already climbed the ladder (because winning against 3 opponents is much harder than against 1). I was thoroughly disgusted and quit the season then and there.

Disappointed but not surprised to see that no lessons have been learned with respect to running a competitive environment.

We do have a problem with games that have been released less than 1 month before the end of the Season. Ignoring the advice of the Gurus would cause some other issues, so we preferred to listen to their opinion and change the settings even it is in the "middle" (actually, the start) of the season.

But to answer directly: the "lessons" have been learned and except in this kind of extreme cases, there is no settings change in the middle of seasons.

flolem wrote: ↑05 October 2021, 19:10 Please change the format for rallyman : GT.

The suggestion was maybe not clear enough.
But when we were talking about random track, it was to change the Track length too to random.
Random track = both track and length is random.

This will be done, thanks for clearing this up.

VitelNet wrote: ↑05 October 2021, 19:46 "Arena" mode
"For sale" & "No thanks!"

Too much players required.
Waiting time is awful!
Please, go back to 4 players-game.

Well, obviously the Gurus is not a magical feature, and despite these settings changes was voted by a majority of players, we do not expect them to be 100% perfect for each game.

However, on the mid/long term, we are 100% sure that the confidence we placed in the community will bring the best possible Arena settings for each game.

frogstar_A wrote: ↑05 October 2021, 21:00 The relegation hasn’t worked correctly for Draftosaurus - Platinum players from last season have dropped down only one league and kept their shields!

I’m not complaining but maybe check your code for next season

True. We changed our procedures to have a number of league more adapted to each game, and unfortunately this happens for few games and we did not notice it early enough to fix it

If is too late now to fix it, but we will improve the procedure. Sorry about this.