ELO & ARENA POINTS

[tcarlaw]

One great suggestion I heard would be to implement Arena Premium and Arena Open(to free accounts) for each game. I would extend it slightly and say that Arena Premium matches would count for both Premium and Open. It would encourage people to buy Premium accounts and protect paying subscribers from a flood of free dummy accounts.

[ChiefPointThief]

One great suggestion I heard would be to implement Arena Premium and Arena Open(to free accounts) for each game. I would extend it slightly and say that Arena Premium matches would count for both Premium and Open. It would encourage people to buy Premium accounts and protect paying subscribers from a flood of free dummy accounts.

I don't think it would encourage people to buy premium. I have made several friends playing spades here and the majority of them are non premium members. Just taking a small sample of the top 20 current arena players only 30% are premium. Spades is also a game you can play for free in several places.

[MANNY-OLIVIA]

BGA should create a PREMIUM LEAGUE!

There's more BOGUS Accounts playing Spades than there is Premium & genuine Non-Premium Players put together.

Interesting comment made by a Player that isn't a Premium Member and doesn't play In Arena.

All BOGUS Players should go and play on these FREE Spades Sites!

[ChiefPointThief]

I can understand that Arena creates a lot of excitement in new players as the K factor lets them rise through the rankings quickly and whets their appetite while accumalating badges.

Having the leagues and badges to give players the sense of accomplishment isn’t the problem. It is that arena is marketed as competitive season but in this format it is possible for the totality of your season to not be consider especially if you lose on the back end.

When discussing this prior I referenced the last loss of the arena champ from last year. They were paired with the lowest ranked player at the table by far and they received 5/6 (-25pts) of the entire teams penalty for losing. Which means in order to break even they have to win 83.3% of games in this situation. If they have been playing consistently good all season and get a few bad draws w/ partners they can suddenly plummet below players they have far excelled all season.

There should be an option to filter opponents by elo. This would also help players w/ a decent amount of elo to avoid dummy accounts. In order to keep a dummy account afloat and play top players they would have to create dummy accounts for their dummy accounts.

[MANNY-OLIVIA]

Looks like someone is trying to conceal the point here.

PREMIUM PLAYERS want a PREMIUM LEAGUE!
They've had enough of all these DUMMY accounts, which are created for CHEATING & SABOTAGING.
Furthermore, new DUMMY accounts cause an uneven distribution of cards.

Temporary Premium Accounts should be more identifiable.

[ChiefPointThief]

I am curious as to why the current policy for bga has a lighter punishment for players who they find guilty of cheating than players who are punished for seeking information on bga's policies in forums.

[MANNY-OLIVIA]

I found out who are next Arena Champion is and he sure does deserve the Trophy.

What a shame the CLIQUE'S Plan BACKFIRED!!!

[tcarlaw]

I am curious as to why the current policy for bga has a lighter punishment for players who they find guilty of cheating than players who are punished for seeking information on bga's policies in forums.

I think this is a great point. You can look at a players reptuation to see if they have been moderated and had their ELO reset for cheating but the onus seems to be on players to red-thumb people they don't enjoy playing with, while the forums BGA takes more responsibility for trying to maintain a positive atmosphere.

I don't think this is necessarily bad as BGA provideds hundreds of games to thousands of players and policing people gaming the system would be a monumental task. The problem is you can rehabilitate your karma so quickly playing easy short games like Blackjack while you can take a bigger hit for missing the start of a game when a chime doesn't go off and you are in another tab. You can easily lose 30 karma points in a day this way. I was surprised how small the karma penalties were for using profanity or insulting comments compared to missing the start of a game.