Ideas to improve the Guru system

[Ceaseless]

The whole guru system just overly complicates things. Just make it "anyone who has played at least X arena games during the current season can vote on the settings for next season." 'X' can vary based on the length/popularity of the game.

People who aren't playing arena don't need to vote on arena settings, but there are reasons not to limit the voting to the people who are just trying to complete as many games as they can as fast as possible.

That doesn't seem a good idea. If you do this, get a bad format, you'd never get out of it as players will just not play it, while the people playing will just keep voting for the same thing.

That's already what happens: the players that want to grind the arena ranks by playing a high volume of games vote for settings that allow for the fastest possible games (such as 2 players at the table), and then they are the only ones who get to keep voting on the arena settings due to the volume of games they are playing.

I'm not suggesting a high threshold to be able to vote. For most games I'd think 3 to 5 games would be enough to establish "I like this game enough to want to play it, I've given the current arena settings a reasonable try and would like to vote for something different". For very fast games like Can't Stop you might want a higher threshold, for something like Twilight Imperium I could see that being no higher than 2 or 3.

You can grind in Arena, but other players can grind outside of Arena. That's the difference between what happens now and what you were suggesting. As the best format for the majority of games, 2 player is the clear choice, though the unusual games where this isn't the case aren't finding themselves just going for the minimum player count, such as Bang.

[tbhp]

As the best format for the majority of games, 2 player is the clear choice, though the unusual games where this isn't the case aren't finding themselves just going for the minimum player count, such as Bang.

Games like Harmonies and Castle Combo are arguably more complete and more balanced at high player counts, yet gurus always heavily vote for 2 player.

It seems that people just want to be able to put out a lot of games. With multiplayer, they might take much longer to complete and you never know if they are not going to end prematurely and you won't get the points you should have gotten.

Can't exactly hold it against people for having those reasons, I like being able to climb fast too, but it's a bit of a shame. I'm surprised you haven't heard of any games where multiplayer is better and where that's also not picked for Arena.