Board Game Arena

Cile wrote: ↑31 July 2026, 17:54 I don't think red thumbs prevent you from matching with someone in arena. Otherwise players could use them to avoid playing against opponents who are stronger than them.

Not only do red thumbs affect Arena, as others have pointed out, but BGA has ACKNOWLEDGED that using it in the manner you described is "abuse" and publicly announced that they were going to remove the affect of red thumbs on Arena:

→ Red Thumbs for competitive play
One last thing that is going to be changed in a few weeks will be the impact of the Red Thumbs.
You can currently give a Red Thumb to any player with which you had a bad game experience. This prevents you from competing against them in ranked games or the Arena, but not in Tournaments.
This system can, and unfortunately is, used to prevent some players from competing against the best players. Considering that the Red Thumb system is being abused this way, on purpose or not, we will update the way Red Thumbs are impacting the matchmaking for the next season.

They then walked away from that decision with zero explanation.

Meeplelowda wrote: ↑01 August 2026, 01:44

Cile wrote: ↑31 July 2026, 17:54 I don't think red thumbs prevent you from matching with someone in arena. Otherwise players could use them to avoid playing against opponents who are stronger than them.

Not only do red thumbs affect Arena, as others have pointed out, but BGA has ACKNOWLEDGED that using it in the manner you described is "abuse" and publicly announced that they were going to remove the affect of red thumbs on Arena:

→ Red Thumbs for competitive play
One last thing that is going to be changed in a few weeks will be the impact of the Red Thumbs.
You can currently give a Red Thumb to any player with which you had a bad game experience. This prevents you from competing against them in ranked games or the Arena, but not in Tournaments.
This system can, and unfortunately is, used to prevent some players from competing against the best players. Considering that the Red Thumb system is being abused this way, on purpose or not, we will update the way Red Thumbs are impacting the matchmaking for the next season.

They then walked away from that decision with zero explanation.

Ah, I guess I remember reading that and didn't realize it never got implemented. Considering I'm currently in an arena game with someone who was last seen an hour ago but hasn't taken their turn for 33 hours I'm personally glad to know I can avoid having the be paired with them again in the future.

Cile wrote: ↑01 August 2026, 03:40

Meeplelowda wrote: ↑01 August 2026, 01:44

Cile wrote: ↑31 July 2026, 17:54 I don't think red thumbs prevent you from matching with someone in arena. Otherwise players could use them to avoid playing against opponents who are stronger than them.

Not only do red thumbs affect Arena, as others have pointed out, but BGA has ACKNOWLEDGED that using it in the manner you described is "abuse" and publicly announced that they were going to remove the affect of red thumbs on Arena:

→ Red Thumbs for competitive play
One last thing that is going to be changed in a few weeks will be the impact of the Red Thumbs.
You can currently give a Red Thumb to any player with which you had a bad game experience. This prevents you from competing against them in ranked games or the Arena, but not in Tournaments.
This system can, and unfortunately is, used to prevent some players from competing against the best players. Considering that the Red Thumb system is being abused this way, on purpose or not, we will update the way Red Thumbs are impacting the matchmaking for the next season.

They then walked away from that decision with zero explanation.

Ah, I guess I remember reading that and didn't realize it never got implemented. Considering I'm currently in an arena game with someone who was last seen an hour ago but hasn't taken their turn for 33 hours I'm personally glad to know I can avoid having the be paired with them again in the future.

But that's because you want to avoid that okayer for a legitimate reason.

It's not cool that many players use the red thumb technique to try to get cheap arena wins by dodging the players they know they cannot win against.

FrankJones wrote: ↑01 August 2026, 05:38

Cile wrote: ↑01 August 2026, 03:40

Meeplelowda wrote: ↑01 August 2026, 01:44
Not only do red thumbs affect Arena, as others have pointed out, but BGA has ACKNOWLEDGED that using it in the manner you described is "abuse" and publicly announced that they were going to remove the affect of red thumbs on Arena:

They then walked away from that decision with zero explanation.

Ah, I guess I remember reading that and didn't realize it never got implemented. Considering I'm currently in an arena game with someone who was last seen an hour ago but hasn't taken their turn for 33 hours I'm personally glad to know I can avoid having the be paired with them again in the future.

But that's because you want to avoid that okayer for a legitimate reason.

It's not cool that many players use the red thumb technique to try to get cheap arena wins by dodging the players they know they cannot win against.

I agree. Unfortunately I don't think there's a way to allow people to red-thumb in arena for legitimate reasons, but stop people using them to avoid opponents they cannot beat. My personal preference is to allow people to avoid users that behave in ways that impact their enjoyment, but that's because I don't personally care who's ranked #1 at the end of the season (It seems to largely be who can play more games). Other people do care, neither preference is more valid but it's impossible to please both groups. Possibly you could limit the number of active red thumbs a player can have, but that still doesn't prevent them from just blocking the top X players.

Note that avoiding top players is not necessarily a way to improve your Arena ranking. You increase your win rate, yes, but you also get smaller rewards for your wins. You want to play against overrated players, because then you get more points than you would actually deserve... but then you'd become overrated yourself and lose more points than you'd deserve when you lose

Jellby wrote: ↑01 August 2026, 07:24 Note that avoiding top players is not necessarily a way to improve your Arena ranking. You increase your win rate, yes, but you also get smaller rewards for your wins. You want to play against overrated players, because then you get more points than you would actually deserve... but then you'd become overrated yourself and lose more points than you'd deserve when you lose

Well, as I said, a very undeserving player was one win away from winning an arena season against two of the best players in the game simply by avoiding a matchup against those two players.

As you know, players in Elite can be very weak. By avoiding the top two players and beating up on low-skill players who nevertheless had high Arena points, this player, who had no chance of beating the top two players, nearly won the arena season. Whereas, by actually competing against those top two player, this player had no chance of winning (which is why this player red-thumbed them to begin with).

A player can rack up a lot of arena points by dodging the top 2 players and beating up on low-skill but high arena-points Elite players.

FrankJones wrote: ↑01 August 2026, 05:38 But that's because you want to avoid that okayer for a legitimate reason.

It doesn't matter if it's a "legitimate" reason. The effect on the fairness of the competition is the same. What if all the players you have a problem with are the best rated in the game? Then you are avoiding all the top players in Arena, whether that's intentional or not.

Even if it's randomly ranked players being ignored, is it normal that different people have different lists of people they can play against? It should be the same competition for everyone.

Jellby wrote: ↑01 August 2026, 07:24 Note that avoiding top players is not necessarily a way to improve your Arena ranking. You increase your win rate, yes, but you also get smaller rewards for your wins.

Like I wrote a while ago, it all depends on what a player's personal distribution looks like. It's possible that a player has a winrate against low rated players that is on par with the best players of the game, but their winrate against other top rated players is not as good as what you'd expect. Some people tend to perform better against weaker opposition while for some other people it's the opposite. So, the way Elo calculations works doesn't uniformly apply to all players, it's only a general principle from which each individual player slightly diverges in their own way.

Then it's a matter of determining whether we want to judge players on their results against other top players, or against randomly selected players. But in any case, the selecting needs to be consistent across all players. You can't just have one player only play against top players, and another only play against low rated players, and expect that to give you a meaningful comparison.

It's a problem inherent to all tournament structures: they are a meta-game with different rules and priorities than the game itself. Trying to win the tournament game (Arena season) is not the same as trying to win the game itself (see Barbados purposely scoring an own goal against Grenada in order to win a tournament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmDuoZQINHI).

We're all board gamers here, if there's a way squeeze out a slight advantage we're going to find it. If you are playing the tournament game over the actual game you'll red thumb players if it gives you an advantage because it's allowed by the rules. The 'top' players in most Arenas are in over a dozen games at a time. I have to imagine that impacts the quality of their play, but prioritizing the tournament game means quantity is more important than quality. I have been able to beat top ranked players in arena, but I'm only playing 1 game at a time, making it easier to plan ahead and remember small specifics of this game to squeeze out some advantage versus someone who's in 15 games at once.

If you disallow red thumbs in Arena then you are saying the tournament game is more important than the actual game, because you are interfering with the integrity of the actual game (allowing players to avoid opponents who are taking technically legal moves but stalling the game in order to delay the loss hitting their arena ranking) in order to preserve the integrity of the tournament game (not allowing players to avoid people who can beat them).
There is an argument for this: If you don't want to play the tournament game why are you in Arena? Just play at regular tables. Personally I like the slightly more competitive atmosphere because players are less likely to time out (in the past I have found Beyond the Sun almost unplayable outside of Arena because I was constantly being matched with players who couldn't keep up with their timer even at 1 move / day), and more likely to understand at least the basic strategy of the game (I've played Evolution against players who have created a body size 1 Carnivore with no additional traits. If you know anything about how to play Evolution you know it is impossible for this creature to eat anything and it can only starve to death at the end of the round. I've seen a player do this twice in the same game).

Back to the original post: if someone playing the tournament game believes they can gain an advantage by idling in the game queue and then not accepting the game, because it prevents other players from starting games and gaining points, they will do that. I'm not saying that's actually what's happening here, it is more likely the case that if queues are 10 minutes long the player has simply forgotten, gotten distracted, or temporarily stepped away. Either way this does impact both the integrity of the tournament game and the actual game by preventing games from being started, so I agree that measures should be put in place to prevent it if it is a common occurrence. Either some penalty if a player is repeatedly missing the start of a game in a short time period, or a way for players to avoid users that are routinely doing it.

Cile wrote: ↑01 August 2026, 17:42 We're all board gamers here, if there's a way squeeze out a slight advantage we're going to find it. If you are playing the tournament game over the actual game you'll red thumb players if it gives you an advantage because it's allowed by the rules.

There is a difference between playing the tournament itself and taking advantages of things that are external to it.

If I'm playing a round robin tournament and I only need one draw to secure the tournament win, then sure I may decide to secure a draw rather than attempt the win and risk getting a loss. That's fair because I'm legitimate to get a draw, and every player is justified to get the results that personally benefit them.

Now, if a player deliberately delays a game in order to get a win from a game they should have lost, or they artificially remove players from their pool because they think they can't win against them, that's not a matter of handling your games in a way that benefits you, that's using external tools to avoid playing the actual game and getting a result on your own terms.

Cile wrote: ↑01 August 2026, 17:42 Confusingly referring to Arena as tournament play.

Tournaments on BGA are already a thing, and they're called tournaments. Arena is not a tournament.

I prefer BGA's tournaments to Arena, and thankfully, red thumbs have no effect in them.