Board Game Arena

I am fairly certain this has come up in other games too, but I have not found an appropriate answer in my quick search, so I gotta ask: why isn't karma game specific?

I ask mostly because a player (not gonna name names) has recently been hit with a pretty big karma penalty due to behaving really poorly, falling below the 65% karma required to play Arena. Said player then promptly started playing 30 seconds 2-player games of Backgammon with an alt account or a friend and raised their karma back to the proper level. Terraforming Mars generally lasts around 40+ minutes. Any player getting a karma hit can therefore circumvent the penalty fairly easily without actually suffering much of the consequences.

This feels utterly wrong. An easy fix would be to make karma game specific - but I am sure there could be other solutions that could work. So why isn't one implemented? Why is BGA letting players easily circumvent their toxicity?

Because karma is supposed to "measure" something that's not game-specific.

The suggested solution is not a solution, because it's not addressing the problem. The problem you see is that you can easily raise your karma by playing short or fake games. Making karma game-specific doesn't help, because you can still play fake games (e.g. with a dummy account and making sure you end the game as quickly as possible), and what if someone behaves badly in backgammon? they could still easily raise their karma.

Then make game specific karma + disable short / fake games somehow. Or I dunno, I am not that well-versed in the nitty-gritty of this system and I am open to any solutions really. The current system is just way too exploitable and needs to change.

My personal opinion: just ignore the karma and use red thumbs to avoid "bad" people.

I already have. But that is a patchwork solution, not a real one. The current system makes Karma basically not much of a thing :/ I dunno, I guess I am just a bit frustrated about how unjust this feels :/

i feel you, and have also started to use the red thumbs for everyone who drops out of a game. it's a game of whack-a-mole though, but still, I hope every premium player does those few clicks to block people who abandon games on purpose. it's really frustratig!