Arena and matchmaking ELO huge gap.

[Mal Ganis]

I keep being paired with a player at ELO 100 while I'm above 700.
What is the point ?
A few games like that is good, but now I decided to redthumb this player.
Which is not really fair to him, although I could specify that this is just a personnal opinion,
not a wish to ban him from BGA.

We need some option to avoid this situation to be recurrent.
Please, think about it.

One possible way it to set some threshold on the difference of ELO (say diff <= 300).
Another way is to let player check such an option.

You might consider that no restriction is better for maximizing the chance to find a partner.
But actually, the real consequence of no restrictiion possible on ELO for Arena mode,
is that some good players do not play arena at all, and if this is not fixed, I will just
stop playing and giving any credit to Arena for my favorite game (tzolk'in).

I'll just play simple game with other master players.

A simpler interpretation of the situation is that Arena is not suited for games with low size population of players.
Well, that's the conlusion I might raise.

You must realize that one option for friend players is to "meet" on arena,
that is to launch it together, with very hogh chance to be matched together.

Anyhow,
Greetings,
BGA is very good.
I'm criticizing it because it works well and it's worth contiuous improvement.

[Mal Ganis]

Another advantage of using bounds on the difference of ELO is to allow players with ELO > 20 say, to play with players with ELO <= 200-ish.
Thus increasing the total number of contenders and makig it more interesting for players with 100 <ELO <200.

Indeed, putting (only) a minimum limit on EL0 >=100 is rather arbitrary and has sevral drawbacks that can be improved upon rather easily.

[dschingis27]

When in Arena lobby, by clicking on the cogwheel next to the Tzolkin Icon, you go to the settings -> Extended Settings -> Opponent Level.

So you can already restrict opponents to be from the same league like you. If you are Elite, there shouldn't be Elo 100 players around.

Still the system is bad in that it enforces me as Elo>700 player to play al lot of games at bronze/silver/(gold) level before I can restrict to players of higher level.
I hope they will introduce pre-classification in the future so that Expert players already start at Gold level in the Arena. For games like Tzolin it makes total sense because matches between players who have a huge skill gap are no fun for anyone.

[jimshorts72]

Agree with this. I’m working my way up in Backgammon but find it frustrating when I match with higher level players and they just quit the game.

I can understand that if they lose against a lower rated player there’s a pretty big deduction in points but the continuous match/quit cycle is annoying.

Alternative would be to have a personal ‘blacklist’ of players which would avoid matching you with people on it, that are never going to opt to play against you anyway.

[Mal Ganis]

When in Arena lobby, by clicking on the cogwheel next to the Tzolkin Icon, you go to the settings -> Extended Settings -> Opponent Level.

So you can already restrict opponents to be from the same league like you. If you are Elite, there shouldn't be Elo 100 players around.

Great ! Thanks a lot, I didn't see the wheel