New Rule: Arena is Not Allowed For Leagues

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https://www.chess.com/leagues
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Very high rated players are paired down 100% of the time in arenas, and you are not allowed to intentionally play lower rated players in all your games.

Combined with the new simul rule, I look forward to chess.com banning 90% of players in the top leagues.

I know hindsight is 20/20, but man, it sure would have been convenient for a reasonably intelligent adult to have made the rules for this thing.

Sometimes it’s just not easy to predict this stuff. It was obviously intended to get people to play more and get more higher rated ppl in arenas but it’s obviously easily abused.

I predicted it, others did too. AFAIK Chess.com tested leagues in beta for a few months.

These rules can't be enforced... can they? If someone spams a ton of games he will lower his rating by playing worse and so on. Most people seem to do that. This whole thing comes down to who is more determined to exploit the system. Bad opening? Low chance to win? Resign and start a new high risk game and do the same. How can they even enforce that lower rated opp rule. In Arenas that's a given, as you mentioned.

Personally don't really care for these things and will just focus on rapid and trying to play decent Chess and improving in the long-run.

The picture shows arena is still allowed.

Should trophies be earned only by winning against higher rated players?

Bad idea, maybe instead make anything outside of a 150 rating difference give less points or something that doesn't make people auto-abort games ;p

Think about @lighting 

I can confirm the did that

Arenas are illegal for people like @dragonb70

Chess.com wont take away his trophies though, because they're ridiculous people who don't understand their own competition.

chess.com: here are rules!

players: thats unfair

chess.com: we updated our rules!

players: huh, bad communication, you didnt say that

other players: you are doing nothing to enforce the rules

chess.com: doesnt respond

There was no (good) reason to change the rules they had on day 1, which allowed simuls.

No one is going to have a problem from playing Arenas. That is for other methods of playing that might result in playing only lower rated members.

Except the feature is not open to everyone, it causes rating drops for most players (making easier pairings due to lower ratings), and has a tendency to skew towards non-random pairings, especially for streamers and titled players.

That it's not available to everyone is a good argument, but there was not an effort to make it fair for everyone to begin with. High rated players have a large advantage.

Sure, it's perhaps more palatable to have rules bias against lower rated players than poor people, but it still comes across as inconsistent.

well it looks like @dragonb70 doesn't know what "illegal" means, he still blasting away in bullet/blitz arena

Looks like he's not leaving anything to chance. He's been playing almost non stop. He's on pace for over 15k.

Does that mean that having your challenge settings to +25 -∞ is not allowed? 

@mrgrinch0 is currently #6 on the overall leaderboard... but #4 in his division, so if it ended right now wouldn't advance, heh.

Who knows, certainly chess.com doesn't. Maybe they'll figure it out someday.

For now I think it's fine.