Board Game Arena

It has come to my attention that there is a group of players who repeatedly quit during games and take advantage of site loopholes to recover their karma very quickly. These players use friends (or, I suspect much more frequently, their own alt accounts) to repeatedly "play" around 3 games per minute, thus getting their karma back very efficiently.

A screenshot of game history, anonymized to try to comply with forum rules - https://imgur.com/a/D2IpI1r

The games that I've noticed abused in this manner are Soluna and Neutreeko, and there may be others. These game implementations instantly go to 50% completion during the first turn, so it's possible for one player to immediately concede these 2-player games.

My comments, requests, and suggestions for the BGA team:

1. The immediate problem is quality control on all game releases to not jump to "50% completed" or higher after leaving Alpha. In case these games are legitimately halfway complete on turn 1, I'd suggest they become mandatory friendly mode.

2. Additionally, it seems fairly easy for these players to avoid any cheating detection that BGA might be using. If any detection systems are in place, adding rules to uncover any player playing a large amount of non-friendly games in a short timespan would probably be helpful.

3. Even though the above is the most extreme version of karma manipulation, there are less extreme versions such that BGA penalizes a user 10 or 20 karma points for quitting a 2+ hour game, but will also allow the karma to be recovered in a disproportionately small amount of time.

4. The suggestion which would solve the problem directly is probably not feasible for BGA, but having a separate karma rating for each game would make sure quitters of one game wouldn’t be able to recover karma by playing something else (shorter or more.) I recognize this is difficult and/or arduous and/or impossible for BGA to program and might also cause some confusion in the playerbase.

5. The simplest suggestion (with problems of its own, admittedly) is just making leave penalties harsher. I have an old related suggestion here with over 100 upvotes: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=66050

6. The suggestion I hope is the best combination of realistic and helpful, is to scale karma by some time-based factor. For example, setting a standard rate of karma gain (roughly 0.01 - 0.05?) per 1 minute of real-time game (using the average game length at that player count.) Then the penalty for a quitter can be based on the minutes elapsed in the game they quit, multiplied by 10, 20, or whatever -- as the leave penalty is currently 10 or 20x the gain.

7. Overall, I think BGA’s karma system is currently too lenient in multiple ways. Not only is it often too easy to recover karma from quitting, but the standard thresholds for game creation are not strict enough for my standards (and I’d imagine I’m far from alone here.) I try to not be insulted that the strictest karma threshold for Arena is 75%. Quitting has absolutely no place in competitive play. If I had the option to restrict all simple and Arena games to 100% minimum reputation, I would!! Do people miss Arena queues and have emergencies ever so often? Sure. But the occasional “quit” of that variety comes with a 10% karma penalty which is pretty easy to recover.

Conceding ≠ Quitting. Conceding does not reduce Karma. I agree with you regarding instant 50% issue though.

ufm wrote: ↑19 April 2024, 04:13 Conceding ≠ Quitting. Conceding does not reduce Karma.

Sorry for being a little too brief in the first part of my post. What is happening, is that people are quitting 4-player Agricola regularly, losing karma, and then playing sham 2-player games of Soluna and Neutreeko (and possibly Connect 4 as well) to get their karma back to 100.

Lumin_S wrote: ↑19 April 2024, 04:38

ufm wrote: ↑19 April 2024, 04:13 Conceding ≠ Quitting. Conceding does not reduce Karma.

Sorry for being a little too brief in the first part of my post. What is happening, is that people are quitting 4-player Agricola regularly, losing karma, and then playing sham 2-player games of Soluna and Neutreeko (and possibly Connect 4 as well) to get their karma back to 100.

Imo 'Karma system being too lenient', 'Bugs in progression rate calculation' and 'Colluding to finish games fast' should be separated from each other, as playing fast games legitimately (especially co-ops) can recover Karma quick enough.

Lumin_S wrote: ↑19 April 2024, 04:38

ufm wrote: ↑19 April 2024, 04:13 Conceding ≠ Quitting. Conceding does not reduce Karma.

Sorry for being a little too brief in the first part of my post. What is happening, is that people are quitting 4-player Agricola regularly, losing karma, and then playing sham 2-player games of Soluna and Neutreeko (and possibly Connect 4 as well) to get their karma back to 100.

The major issue here is that devs don’t have the ability to have a play on option when there is a quitter.

It is hard to properly gauge progression in some games. To catch a lion does this as well.
Game progression across most games is lower than it should be which is a problem also. When there is a quitter elo distribution is determined by game progress.

I agree the karma system needs to be fixed.

Also it is a shame that someone would rather quit a game to cheat others out of a legitimate win and spend time playing numerous games to get their karma back rather than to just accept their loss

Lumin_S wrote: ↑19 April 2024, 01:49 Overall, I think BGA’s karma system is currently too lenient in multiple ways.

I was wondering whether the system could just make it harder for frequent offenders to recover karma. Looking at profile pages it seems that BGA retains detailed reputation data for 60 days. If within that time someone's karma repeatedly dropped below some defined threshold, maybe it could be made to take more "good" behaviour to recover it? Or simply not let it be recovered for another 60 days? That would avoid penalising people who are occasionally affected by real-life problems, but still put a stop to the sort of thing you describe?

Just a random idea, but what if gaining Karma was also limited to, let's say, 1 point within 24 hours? Then it would take 10 days to recover Karma from a quit.

Red-thumb the players, no amount of quick games will remove the red thumb

Jellby wrote: ↑19 April 2024, 09:24 Red-thumb the players, no amount of quick games will remove the red thumb

I absolutely do this, obviously, and frequently encourage other players to also be quick to red thumb quitters.

But that doesn't make the behavior OK, and I would like the site to be aware of the current exploits and overall become significantly less quitter-friendly.