Board Game Arena

BGA offers the option to only be matched to players above a certain karma level which is great. The highest you can set this level to however is 75%. At this percentage, I’m still running into players that are taking ages to make a move. I can be waiting close to 2 days for them to make a single move. Their profiles usually shows ratings in the 90s, with their last several games being problematic.

I would like to be able to set my matchmaking preferences to only play games against people with a 100% karma rating. The current highest setting, 75%, still means playing against people who time out on 1 in 4 games on average, which is nowhere close to being “very good” karma.

Possible implementations would be adding more options (90% and 100%), or letting players set their own custom value. To make sure players know what they’re doing, you can add a warning when selecting the 100% option. Something like “at this karma level, finding a match may take longer.”

In manual lobby mode, you can already restrict to >85% Karma.

thespacepope wrote: ↑21 June 2022, 06:43 The current highest setting, 75%, still means playing against people who time out on 1 in 4 games on average, which is nowhere close to being “very good” karma.

This is not true. You get one Karma point for a completed game and lose 20 Karma points for a timed out game (you get -10 Karma only for your first time out).

Sadly, 85% still is lower than 100%, or 90%, so that doesn’t help with the players I am encountering. Also, thanks for explaining the karma system, I did not know that yet.

To give even more explanation on the karma system:

You get -20 for any game you quit or get expelled from. Timing out (as in, going red on a timer) doesn't lose you any karma points. You do get 1 karma point for every game you complete **where you don't go negative on your timer**. Theoretically, you could be 100% reputation and still go negative timer on every single game, as long as you don't get expelled.

Since I am often playing BETA games, there is a note that we are informed reputation might be affected due to bugs there.

So were there a setting for pure 100%, for core gaming maniacs it might mean less playing beta games living in a constant fear to lose 100% reputation and not to be able to join to some very special and wonderful tournament

Last few days I have suffered a string of late and quitting players, and i have a feeling the system not really working as intended (but I'm still new so it could just be that I miss something). A number of those players had a LONG string of such "offences" and still had 100% karma. (guess they just play 20 games of 10 minutes each and bounce back).
So I think the 100% limit wouldn't really work as intended and would not achieve the purpose really. Better would be to have the -20 penalty to be applied to the max Karma for say ... 60 days or something.

Just a side comment.

75% karma doesn't mean you leave 1 in 4 games. If you leave 1 in 4 games you will lose 17 karma per 4 games. If you play 24 games and leave 6 you'll drop from 100 to 8. There isn't a clear way to say "x% karma implies you leave 1 in n games". Going over time also plays into it.

I'd like a 100% karma feature as well. I feel BGA is disincentivized to implement this as they likely don't want to restrict people from playing on their platform. I imagine they seek to be lenient to allow those who make mistakes with Karma to correct themselves and climb back out. I find the karma system to be regularly ineffective and I too would like ruin less games by to expelling less slow players.