Board Game Arena

Again it doesn't have to be a dead end. If you had some open discussions with a few individuals here (Sprockitz in particular seems to understand what is going on and needs to change), I think you could really get somewhere. There's plenty of players here that want to help make the queueing in arena better, and there are ways it can be done.

However most changes on BGA seem to just get put in without much thought for the side effects--I'm sure you do all discuss it some, but I think you'd benefit from trying to get some more feedback from your mega users that are very familiar with the game playing experience side of things, and work with their feedback and thoughts on how to improve stuff. I think there are plenty of solid ideas around, even the ideas you've tried to implement I think are solid, but Sprockitz and others have pointed out the problems in practice that are caused by the current issues with the queueing algorithm. If you could fix the problem he lays out above, this change maybe could work, but as is, indeed this way is a dead end.

The problem is also that the current leagues reflect skill level only partially. It is also a measure of how much time you already invested. So even if you manage to find a system to match people in close leagues more often, matchings between unequal skill will still happen frequently.

I said it before and I'll say it again: This is not too big of an issue for short games. However, it is very annoying in complex and long games where playing against equal skilled opponents does enhance the play experience extremely.

I know already that I will probably never play Agricola Arena because I will have to invest 8 -15 hours each season against opponents below my skill level before I would be able to restrict to a high league.

I'm not convinced the current extreme waiting issue is entirely explained by the level of league filters. Are the admins sure nothing else was changed?

Previously, I always had my 7 Wonders Duel filters set to only match with same level (elite league). I almost always matched within a minute, given how popular that game is and how many hundreds of players are in the elite league. The past few weeks, I've noticed that I wait over fifteen minutes for the arena to find a match in 7WD.

So could it be that something is off beyond just the strict matching filter, because my filters were previously set at the most strict setting and never had an issue finding a game?

I suppose it's possible that nearly all of the 7WD elite league players suddenly stopped playing the game, but it seems odd that it happened at the precise same time as the arena matching changes?

I think something is broken, yes. It took me 40 minutes to find an opponent for Can't Stop with turn-based default settings. And I don't get where the "medium and less" filter comes from for the Insert game:

"Average and less" "Arena"... Uhh... You can't have less than average in arena. Also, that filter doesn't make sense at all since you are "good" which would mean you couldn't have that filter if you set yourself...

The "Average and less" in arena translates to leagues (e.g. "Bronze", "Bronze and Silver" or whatever). Go into the table and you'll see.

Something looks still strange, even in turn based for popular games like 7W I have to wait multiple hours or days (!)

They've said the whole configuration will be rolled back this Tuesday, so hopefully that will fix it.

I maybe have a great idea, if they found no one in their leagues or any set options, it could give random bot that are programed for a game, (of course it a bit hard to code that, but at least people wouldn't give up in games that almost everyone online in the big timestamp are in the highests leagues) would need as many player that the game accept normally whit the settings selected in arena and i think they could have random names, so they never seem to play whit the same people.

I know no one would be fine whit that, but at least, we wont waste our time on searching a game that are filtred by the options you want.

With the reset coming in Tuesday, do I get back my old settings I had on certain games?

There are some games I still want these style settings on.

Although the settings still need to be made as said for people to join tables if they agree will all requirements of people currently sitting at a table.

Like if you have only your level set in Can't Stop or likewise popular premium games as a non premium user, you basically can't get a game because someone with your exact settings needs to open a table.