Board Game Arena

On Tuesday, the new season announcement said:

No Arena rules are changing this season.

Today, suddenly, opponents are anonymized with "Player x", and one has to manually accept the game. Neither of these are bad changes, in fact I think they're good ideas. But

• with no notice, they look like glitches rather than intentional changes, especially when
• there was no notice. In fact an announcement was made 2 days ago that Arena mode would not be changing this season.

What's going on here? Accidental feature release, or just abysmal communication with users?

I thought this was a bug at first and refused a few arena games because of it!

I'm not convinced that players having to accept arena games is desirable. For games with a smaller player base and/or arena settings with more players, it can already be hard enough to get a game. Having no punishment for players who join the arena queue and forget about it will presumably make that even harder. At least in the past they would be kicked and suffer karma loss (which potentially means they can't join the arena queue any more).

At first I also thaught this was an bug but it seems it is not.
Sorry but for me that kills arena ... I liked it that you do not have to accept because you could do something different while waiting and just popping in every few minutes to see if a game is started - now I have to sit and wait - what a waste of lifetime. Not seeing the points the opponent has does not make it easy to understand the game strategy.
Maybe you want to rethink this and activate the arena mode as you said before "with no changes" and maybe make a vote until next arena season it the majority of the community is fine with it or not.

Before: click Play Now, put the screen in the background, and do something else, bell rings, foreground BGA, game starts.

Now: click Play Now, put the screen in the background, and do something else, bell rings, foreground BGA, click accept, and wait two minutes while it says "Waiting for: Player 3," then the game fails to start, and I have to do it all over again.

Before was better.

Given that they failed to announce this major change to how Arena games start, it would be nice for them to at least explain why they changed it.

I'm wondering if it has something to do with trying to make it harder for people who multi-account to get their alt accounts on the same table. If this is the only change, then I don't know how that would solve the issue. But maybe there is something else hidden in addition to the visible change that combats the cheating problem. If there's something hidden, then we may never know because disclosing it gives the cheaters hints about how to get around it.

Security through obscurity is a proven failure. Much better to develop robust systems and publish them.

I don't like it at all. Please go back to the old way. Just as mentioned before, waiting for other players to accept is tiresome. Why would you queue if you don*t want to play ??

TheCat wrote: ↑09 October 2025, 21:08 Security through obscurity is a proven failure.

That's a nice platitude, but the only robust system that would 100% eliminate multi-accounting is some form of authentication inextricably tied to an individual. I doubt BGA has the desire and/or means to do that. I also think many users don't actually want that.

I'd love to be proven wrong. Maybe we can brainstorm ways to ensure any one person can only open one account and that they can't circumvent the mechanism even if they know exactly how their identity is being verified, oh, but it also doesn't require disclosing information to BGA that people aren't comfortable giving. I'm all ears.

This is ripe for an implementation of a zero knowledge proof. The proposition is how can we set up a system in which BGA can verify the truth of the statement "there is no other existing account associated with me on BGA" without the person having to reveal anything about themselves?

From the start I'm removing cryptographically hashed biometric information from consideration because 1) I'm not sure that meets the criterion of not revealing anything about your identify and 2) it likely violates the criterion of not requiring the disclosure of information to BGA that people aren't comfortable giving.

To keep this from derailing the main purpose for this thread, I've moved this topic here.

Count me amongst those that thought it was a bug. Hopefully it was just an error on BGA's part rather than a deliberate unannounced change.

In heat, having to press Accept is not inherently bad, as we'd often start a game and need to wait 5 minutes for a player to timeout and then everyone agree to abandon, rinse and repeat...

I can imagine it's horses for courses though, good for some games, bad for others, as it could promote a "start a game and wander off without quitting mentality"?

I don't have a strong opinion on now having to accept a game as there are pros and cons for each style, and i assume you don't show the other players rank so people don't hand pick who they play against in the arena, but how about showing us the level of the other player AFTER all parties are in the game? Knowing your opponents level gives you a heads up about how they are likely to play and sometimes makes a difference your own play strategy. Thanks for considering