Board Game Arena

Congratulations, I think you took the best decision for cheating issue!

I'd only like to inform you that I recieved my first "Play the other table first!" advice!
It's a very good thing, except that the other game was NOT an Arena game. Are you extending the principle to the entire competitive play (i.e. ELO Rating)?

Fair decisions and changes, thanks for caring about the issue and fixing it so quickly.
An issue that remains is that the order of wins&losses still can be manipulated by giving up games that look like a loss, before the ones that are a win are ended.

ureloch wrote: ↑06 October 2020, 15:55 It's a very good thing, except that the other game was NOT an Arena game. Are you extending the principle to the entire competitive play (i.e. ELO Rating)?

I‘d actually support that it is applied to both.

ureloch wrote: ↑06 October 2020, 15:55 I'd only like to inform you that I recieved my first "Play the other table first!" advice!
It's a very good thing, except that the other game was NOT an Arena game.

This one has been fixed one minute ago and should be okay now.

aesche wrote: ↑06 October 2020, 16:16 Fair decisions and changes, thanks for caring about the issue and fixing it so quickly.
An issue that remains is that the order of wins&losses still can be manipulated by giving up games that look like a loss, before the ones that are a win are ended.

Even though I see your point, I dont think resigning when a game is lost can really be seen as a way to cheat... Actually, I would really like a lot of my opponents to do it more often

Thanks to the team for the quick reponse and for giving us back sth that we cared about !

P. S. : It's also naturally self-balancing. If a lot of people do it, then they will also win games given-up by their opponent earloer than they'd like. No way to cheat that..

sourisdudesert wrote: ↑06 October 2020, 15:03
New rules:
[*] At the end of the season, all turn based games will be stopped, and the player who consumed the most time will lost the game (all the opponents will be winners).
[/list]

Sounds great on the whole, but I'm not sure about the rule above.

Firstly it seems a bit mean to cancel games mid-game. I'm also not sure why it exists, the other time keeping methods seem to suffice,

And also might this rule potentially might be abused, by starting as many games as possible near the dead-line against unsuspecting victims knowing they are unlikely to finish and simply make all your moves as quickly as possible.

You don't really want to introduce players have to manage the decision of, 'is there enough time to finish this game' thought before starting.

RicardoRix wrote: ↑06 October 2020, 17:00 And also might this rule potentially might be abused, by starting as many games as possible near the dead-line against unsuspecting victims knowing they are unlikely to finish and simply make all your moves as quickly as possible.

The rules may evolve (we are still learning), but yes we may forbid the creation of new turn-based tables near the end of Arena so we can make sure there are no "innocent victims".

aesche wrote: ↑06 October 2020, 16:16
An issue that remains is that the order of wins&losses still can be manipulated by giving up games that look like a loss, before the ones that are a win are ended.

Ah, I hadn't considered that (I play too many things at 4p where you often can't resign). This does create a small issue where players could exploit this a bit to rank up and impact their elo a bit by ordering their wins/losses. I think it's probably alright to not worry too much about this though, since I suspect it's pretty tough to exploit this small edge to any substantive gains.

RicardoRix wrote: ↑06 October 2020, 17:00 Sounds great on the whole, but I'm not sure about the rule above.

Firstly it seems a bit mean to cancel games mid-game. I'm also not sure why it exists, the other time keeping methods seem to suffice,

And also might this rule potentially might be abused, by starting as many games as possible near the dead-line against unsuspecting victims knowing they are unlikely to finish and simply make all your moves as quickly as possible.

You don't really want to introduce players have to manage the decision of, 'is there enough time to finish this game' thought before starting.

The reason this rule exists is so that players cannot purposefully stall out a lost game at the end of the season just so it won't count. Now admittedly this was a much bigger issue when someone could stall out dozens of games, whereas now the other rules do seem to keep it at just one game where someone could realistically do this. And truthfully it is possible to do this to some extent in a real time game if you start your final game just at the right time before the end of the season (still really tough to pull off in real time though).

I do agree it does seem a bit dangerous though to allow players to start games so near the end of the season such that they might not be able to complete them. Warnings may need to go up near the end of the season so players realize the potential risks of joining a turn based arena game and not completing it on time (and for some of the longer games like Terra Mystica this could well need to be put out a month or more before the end of the season).

I'm curious if some other idea could be developed to avoid this situation. It's not clear to me there is any other good answer though. (This is part of why I still do feel turn based arena potentially should be scrapped, an expansion of the tournament based system just makes more sense for turn based competitions. Most of the architecture around arena only makes much sense from a real time perspective)

sourisdudesert wrote: ↑06 October 2020, 15:03 Dear everyone.

Thanks a lot for your feedback and discussions on the dedicated discussion (viewtopic.php?f=3&t=17703), which help us a lot to identify solutions to make the turn-based Arena back.

Good news: based on your ideas, we managed to add some rules to turn turn-based Arena to - hopefully - prevent the cheaters to abuse Arena ranking system. The new rules are already in place, and the turn-based Arena is back.

Thank you so much for this. It's so refreshing to see an organisation actually listen to the feedback and react to it quickly and sensibly. This makes me really pleased to be a premium member and to have contributed. These new rules are completely fair and make a great solution.

You guys are great, keep up the good work!

Thank you so much for taking into account the community's feedback and addressing this issue in such a rapid fashion!

I have still an open not fully filled turn-based Arena game open: https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=115662549
Already filed a bug for that: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=25850

Seems that when the last season ended, the not yet started game was not converted to "normal" game and now the game is stuck. I cannot leave and the game will never start as we will never get enough players due to the change to realtime arena.

Can someone end that table?