Board Game Arena

Today is the final day for sprinting in the arena. It was announced earlier this week that we have a couple of days to climb. I am a long time player of a certain game and have stayed atop the leaderboard for a couple of years. So I held 1st in arena for more than a month, leading the 2nd player by 80~100 EAS. Then he started getting closer, so I played a few games, dropping a game or two along the way. At a certain point he overtook me, so I got curious and decided to check out how well he's doing. I realized he was purposely delaying 2 or 3 of his losing games to end after the deadline, and racing the games he was winning. I don't know if this is prevalent in many games since I don't climb that many ladders, but I find this unsportsmanlike behavior really annoying, and in my opinion, contradicts with the original purpose of rating reset. Arguing on this kind of topic seems like ranting, but I did invest quite some time over the past three months to keep my trophy, and this end result was disappointing and discourages me to tryhard in the future. Anyone who's got thoughts on this?

Yes, similar issues were raised at the end of the first arena season and should definitely be addressed in my opinion. At that time, sprockitz suggested the following solution, which I found interesting :

"I'd promote disallowing starting turn based games in the latter parts of a season. This would be complex though as it'd have to be a function of player count and average moves per game, and you'd want to disallow different base playing speeds at different points (for most game 1 move per 2 days shouldn't even be an option for most arena mode games...and for a lot of games 2 moves per day is a more realistic standard people need to meet to finish a game than the baseline 1 move per day). The other option is to go with the tournament style timer for all these games, or at least for games started in the last month...give each player 1/n of the remaining time in the season, where n is the games player count, as each player's time for the game and nobody gets any time added...popup a warning with they click play now in turn based mode that you will have x total amount of time to complete all moves, failure to do so will result in you losing the game."

There are further unsportmanslike behaviours, and even confirmed cheating, going on that the mods dont care about.

I am in a pretty similar situation like you, just for Nine Men‘s Morris, where I was at the top of the leaderboard for a long time, which took lots of efforts. Yes, I could and should have stopped at some point, but I went on as I like to play, and since this is the point of the arena. Then, within a few days, one of the other high ranked arena players pulled out 7 or more unclassified alts, with which he aimed to pull down the other high ranks on purpose. Since Nine Men‘s Morris is a draw game, he already can succeed without me making a mistake. I reported it, but it was closed, he would have been punished for this before, and nobody gets sanctioned for the same misbehaviour twice. On top of that his main‘ score remained unchanged, and i didnt get back the 200 points he stole me with his alts.

End of the story, I‘ll not finish 1st, neither 2nd, but even behind the cheater. Luckily, he didnt catch 1st too with his faulty behaviour.

Conclusion: Nothing is done here against faulty winning strategies, cheaters don‘t get sanctionised and go out with the stolen rewards. Finally, it‘s not worth to have any competitive ambitions here, as it easily can be wasted by cheaters. One big sad point with BGA and how they don‘t care about this.

I feel like they're trying to do too much, but not having enough time/people to work on stuff. It would be great if those criticisms were even acknowledged instead of just being ignored though.

there are several arena leagues won by players who have been confirmed as cheating using multiple accounts and yet they weren't removed from the leaderboard. I had a report in and the response was the player was already punished, but yet they were not removed and reaped the rewards of winning multiple leagues. It's bad enough that this results in the overall leaderboard getting littered with phony players but it also is taking away titles that honest players should have rightfully earned.

In another case (The Boss) the 1 account was perma-banned but the second account they were using to team play wasn't banned and actually won the competition.

Yet another issue, not arena related, is other players win top Elo rankings and even though the multiple accounts are obvious and found guilty the Elo isn't reset and they get to keep all their ill-gotten trophies.

As this was the first league I was seriously playing in, I was wondering about this behavior too.

I think the tournament style timer is a nice solution (dividing the amount of time remaining in the season by the number of players and giving each player that much playing time).

I also agree that it feels like the developers for bga are maybe overly ambitious and don't have the dev power to combat a lot of the negative behaviors introduced by the new tournaments. I'm hoping it's going to improve over time and that cheaters will be removed from the rankings.