Board Game Arena

I enjoy playing real-time arena games. However, multiple times each month, it happens that I start waiting for an arena match to be found in a game that has a lengthy queue, but after several minutes of waiting, something comes up or distracts me, and I return a few moments later to find that a game had finally started, the arena game auto-started, and I was expelled for not playing within the time limit.

This causes me to lose Elo points as if I had lost, plus extra Elo points for being expelled, all without taking a single turn. It also causes my reputation rating to be dramatically reduced.

Now this is not a problem in normal games because one must click the accept button, so if I stepped away for a moment the game cannot start. But the auto-start on the arena games causes the game to start anyway.

Clearly ultimately I am "at fault" for getting distracted while queuing for arena games, but it doesn't seem productive or useful for Elo and reputation to swing so dramatically when no moves have been taken.

Now perhaps some reduction is useful in that if there were no penalty an unscrupulous player might decide he dislikes his opponents and thus intentionally get expelled to avoid playing them, when arena is meant to force one to play all opponents in the selected league band.

Still, I would suggest that in the case of games that start automatically (arena games), if a player is expelled without having taken any action at all, likely due to being temporarily away from their computer, their Elo reduction, arena score reduction, and most importantly reputation reduction, should be significantly less than a player who quits intentionally halfway through a game, instead of being treated the same as is currently the case.

Thoughts welcome!

You and I have suffered the same fate. And it seems that neither of us would purposefully 'game the system'
There are however those who, if what you recommend was implemented, would look at the game start and if they thought that they did not have a good chance of winning would not start and lose less than if they did start and lost.

For example, I play alot of Kingdom Builder, which in Arena mode is 3 player. Certain combinations of boards and goals give a distinct disadvantage to playing third. I could see some players if they drew third in one such game would not play rather than play and lose.

Definitely not a good idea. If the game started and you are not playing, you are making other peoples lose their time. At the very least reputation should drop by a lot. And with how easy it is to regain reputation (which is another problem by itself, IMO reputation loss should increase based on how many time you already lost reputation), having Elo drop too is still a good idea.

If one want to fix this problem, the solution should be avoid this situation to occur in the first place.
For example, remove the auto-start, so you have to manually accept the game, but make your opponents fully anonymous (either up until the game start, or up until the end of the game) so that you have no information other than "the game is starting" to chose whether or not you want to play.

Hi,

On a related note, I noticed when you are using "Replay" mode, you don't get notification that a game has started in Arena (assuming you were in the queue), increasing chances to miss it.

See here: https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... =9&t=19270

Cheers,
Y.

I agree, something needs to be done about this.

If someone joins the arena queue and is waiting for 10 minutes, the server should verify they are still there before auto starting the game.

It does not make sense to treat someone as if they quit the game, considering they where never there in the first place.
It seems if someone has quits on there reputation it just means they play arena a lot.
Some game queues can take a long time till they start.