Arena season 16: New Year, New Challenges!

[ktrabi]

Same for Unknown planet. I lost 85 Elo points for unfinished games that I didn't have the longest time to think about (which was dissapointing). No one has earned badges and xp points for arena placement. And all the players in the elite league were left with the same points (including me).

[LesserJester]

Same for Unknown planet. I lost 85 Elo points for unfinished games that I didn't have the longest time to think about (which was dissapointing). No one has earned badges and xp points for arena placement. And all the players in the elite league were left with the same points (including me).

When did the game launch? Apparently (according to Thoun but I've no reason to doubt them) when a game launches part way through an arena season it carries over into the next one so that could be what's happened with this game similar to TTR-Europe

[LesserJester]

The bug report has been acknowledged so they're aware of it and say they are taking steps.

Problem still ongoing for now however. While I appreciate there will be lots of games to go through even in ones where it has been adjusted already it is still only partially fixed.

Eg in Next Station London the platinum players have now been bumped down into Gold (not bronze as they should have been) and they have kept their platinum score (so 6 platinum -> 6 gold) and they are therefore still leading the table. The top player there is still Licolnsbruder who hasn't played a game since 7th January. The elite players got reset to 1 silver. These platinum tier players should be set to 1 bronze.

https://boardgamearena.com/halloffame?g ... &season=16

Edit, it now seems to be fixed for this game (Next Station London) so presumably the other games will follow in due course. Thanks for fixing this BGA folk.

[ktrabi]

Same for Unknown planet. I lost 85 Elo points for unfinished games that I didn't have the longest time to think about (which was dissapointing). No one has earned badges and xp points for arena placement. And all the players in the elite league were left with the same points (including me).

When did the game launch? Apparently (according to Thoun but I've no reason to doubt them) when a game launches part way through an arena season it carries over into the next one so that could be what's happened with this game similar to TTR-Europe

The game has been available since November 8 and the 15th season has ended. Now the 16th season is underway and the leaderboards have been adjusted. Unfortunately, I still don't know why I lost ELO points and no one received badges for the 15th season. I assume they are still trying to fix everything.

[Robyn Hood]

In the FAQ, there is also nothing written about the fact that you also lose elo, not only arena points. While I understand that you lose arena points when you do not finish in time for the season (but it should in fact be the player who used most of the time, which is apparently not the case), it does not make sense at all that you also lose elo. The game should just switch to standard mode and if it is not cancelled, the elo should be distributed according to the final result of the game.

Here are the bug reports
- for elo deduction:
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=110198
- for incorrect thinking time calculation:
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=110273

[BROT42]

Hello!
I want to acknowledge the issues concerning the end of Arena Season 15 that have emerged in the past few days and explain a bit what happened and how we managed the situation.
Basically, everything was linked to the recent ELO changes (released last December), which included changes to how BGA processes the player rankings, including Arena. Those were complicate and delicate changes to very old parts of the platform and they were especially hard to test, so some difficulties where expected.

• some players didn't get their arena league reset: there was an issue with league promotion to Elite, which meant that some players got stuck in nonexistent leagues (for some games). As a result, the system simply ignored those players when resetting the Arena Rating during the end of season process. Those players were reset to the correct Area rating just the day after. Unfortunately, due to technical reasons, this process caused some players to be reset twice.
• some players did not receive the Top Arena Player award: for the same reason (promotion bug -> never reached elite) some awards were never granted, like the Top Arena Players for the rankings of each game (since they are awarded only to Elite players). We were able to recover most of them today.
• odd behavior for ongoing TB table at season end, which caused wrong loser and ELO update: there were some incompatibilities that we hadn't predicted between the end of season process (very old) and the newer ELO changes + a small bug in the re-adapted process. The bug caused the result to be based on the current players' score instead of the time spent (as it should have). Additionally, the incompatibilities mentioned caused the "partial" result of the game to be processed as a standard arena game, thus updating the ratings of all players (not just the loser) and causing the mysterious ELO updates that never got to be notified to the players. Sadly, since the arena season has ended, and the result have been permanently recorded, we have no way of recover the arena points lost due to this issue.

I hope that this update cleared some confusion!
As always, thank you for the patience, the support and the quick reports that helped us identify the issues

[Wonderful Plays]

[*]odd behavior for ongoing TB table at season end, which caused wrong loser and ELO update: there were some incompatibilities that we hadn't predicted between the end of season process (very old) and the newer ELO changes + a small bug in the re-adapted process. The bug caused the result to be based on the current players' score instead of the time spent (as it should have). Additionally, the incompatibilities mentioned caused the "partial" result of the game to be processed as a standard arena game, thus updating the ratings of all players (not just the loser) and causing the mysterious ELO updates that never got to be notified to the players. Sadly, since the arena season has ended, and the result have been permanently recorded, we have no way of recover the arena points lost due to this issue.
[/list]

You have, you just decided not to, which is very sad to hear as your paying customer.

[h_illes]

Hello!
I want to acknowledge the issues concerning the end of Arena Season 15 that have emerged in the past few days and explain a bit what happened and how we managed the situation.

I reported an Arena bug weeks ago. I got negative Arena points for a win. I got no reaction, nothing; I never got it back, and now Arena season has ended. It is very disappointing. In any case, you should look into it to make it sure this never happens again.

The game:
https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=449542561

Bug report:
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=107164

Basically, everything was linked to the recent ELO changes (released last December)

It is particularly sad that most of those changes were ill-advised and should have never been implemented in the first place. BGA's decision-making process really needs to improve.

[chrysanthemum454]

We are very happy to see that this way of doing things contributed to making the Arena more popular:

I don't think this is true for all games. I'd like to see the numbers on Innovation, in particular. The Gurus voted in a complicated version of the game with multiple expansions and I noticed that it started taking noticeably more time to get a game to trigger. Now, instead of going back to something that a larger number of players would prefer to play, the Gurus have voted in the same complicated version of the game.

It's fine to have some variance, but at least in some games, it seems to me like a relatively small number of players are monopolizing Guru voting in favor of their preferred setup in a way that discourages other people from playing for that season, which then has a reinforcing effect because only the players who like that setup play enough to become Gurus, so they all vote for that setup again, meaning those of us who want some variety continue to play fewer games...

I know there's no perfect system and the Guru system is in most cases an improvement over what came before, but it still needs some tweaking. In particular, for games with a variety of different expansions/play options, I think there should be a requirement that two consecutive Arena seasons can't have the same (or substantially the same) setup.

[gems55]

What does the blue bar across the top of the page, to show the arena progress through the 90 days show? Yes, I know each bar is for a day, but why do the light/dark blue regions change (move up/down) each day?

Just curious.

They represent games played on each given day.

Thanks