Board Game Arena

Origina Connect 4 (6x7) is "important" to me because it is one of the very few game which is both:

* Extremely well known and popular, with hundereds of players
* Deceptively complex (allow skills level up to 700 elo without solvers)

I would agree with most posters that if really we need to "punish" the game rather than the cheaters, it would be enough to remove the Arena seasons and the elo/trophies. Don't force everyone to play untimed (as in training mode).

Once again, this is just my opinion, in general I appreciate your effort to improve the abstract games implementations and to implement measures against cheaters.

OK, I received answers from admins.
Since both alternatives are impossible for now and setting the default mode as a training mode would cause a lot of confusion,
6x7 will stay as the normal mode default but it will be banned from Arena indefinitely. ELO will not be reset.
It will leave the solvers intact in normal mode, but guess we have to put up with it.

Thanks for your opinions and patience!

I can't imagine how anyone could derive any pleasure just using a cheat-thing to play loads of games of Connect-4. Where's the satisfaction? It'd be like using an anagram-solver for every turn at Scrabble!

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Gernot wrote: ↑27 September 2021, 18:53 This is nonsense. If players want to use solvers or other outside help, they'll find a way to do so in any game, whether it's completely solved or not.

Cheating at 9x9 and 10x10 would be impossible for most people and near-impossible in general. You can't cheat in real-time because a single position can take hours or days for a computer to solve. One would need to have already built a database of solved positions.

Say, it would be nice to have at least one more board size: one with an odd # of rows and an even # of columns. Using BGA's naming convention, it can be 9×10 / 9×8 / 7×8. Such board sizes are strategically unique in that they lack a feature that EVEN×ODD, EVEN×EVEN and ODD×ODD share in common. Just by 2c, but it's already neat that BGA has the sizes it does.

Thanks for your support to my attempts. Unfortunately, I won't add new board sizes.
New board sizes are for relatively few competitive players only (the stats say so), and they are not popular enough to be added further. Sorry.

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From what I can see, there are few, if any, cheaters even on the 6x7 board. I find myself regularly playing games where I blunder and still win, and I've broken the 600 mark. A 6x7 solver would not be very effective on larger boards.