Board Game Arena

Or even dislike them!

The situation I've come across is this: There is one player who seems to play every available table of one particular game such that if I start a game of that they will be there. Naturally, they are so very good at that game to the point that playing against them is a crushing misery that I'd rather avoid. With other games I don't have an issue with that player. I obviously have no dislike for them personally.

Unfortunately I've had to "red thumb" them just so I can have a decent game with players of my own level (I'm glad to see that this is now possible without affecting their karma).

Is there a trick I've missed here? The individual game filters seem to be insufficiently precise to avoid players with an elo of 450+ when my own is 150, so I can't seem to use that to avoid them on a single game basis. The red thumb seems to be overkill when their only "offence" is to be so keen on a game that they utterly dominate every single table.

Any thoughts or suggestions? Thanks in advance

When you create a table, you can restrict it based on the player's strength, so you could exclude masters / experts / strong players / whatever.

Nah, this sounds like a pretty clear reason why the red thumb system exists to avoid players you just personally don't want to play with exists. You don't hurt their karma/reputation but you get what you want.

The only other way really would be to set your table settings to not allow players above 300 elo to join, but you're correct there are no more precise settings. Some have argued/asked for a new ratings level to be injected between strong (300 elo) and expert (500 elo) since that is a pretty wide band and there is a level of good (200). If those thresholds don't work for the restrictions you want, there's not much you can do though then.

it's the player's ability rather than the player, so it seems perfectly reasonable just to use the game table filters. Has nothing to do with red thumbs.

Have you tried talking to them and told them that you'd rather enjoy this game without them?

I agree that the personal red thumbs are not a good fit in that situation because you might be okay to play other games with them and you certainly would let them message you

another option would be to create the table, invite that player and immediately uninvite him. Then he can't join the tables either

Thanks for the responses folks - looks like I'm stuck with red thumbing them.

Whilst talking to them seems not unreasonable, unfortunately english is not their first language and I'd rather not risk unnecessary upset through miscommunication (and I'm a shy retiring type anyway).

The current game filters just don't have sufficient granularity to filter out particularly "gifted" (or persistent) players - I did try adjusting the settings but couldn't actually get the game filled as it also filters out people below my level as well as above. I don't want to filter out everyone else at that level anyway since I was just sick of seeing the same name on every bloody game!

Incidentally for this same reason I've given up on arena games - I got bored with playing the same full-time "professional" players time after time (and there you can't filter them out!).

Thanks again.