> The person who knocked me out wasn't just some new player who didnt know what they were doing.
> [...]
> This sort of thing damages the integrity of the game, imo, which is sad.

It is.

The comments expressed here and in other posts in this thread inspired me to do some research into the character that sniped you. It turns out that this account was a duplicate account of someone else in the tournament, apparently interested in weakening some of the competition. It was rotten luck that that account got paired up with you in the qualifying round, but I guess it had to be somebody.

I disabled the duplicate accounts and temporarily disabled the main one for this month, to ensure that that player doesn't profit by the scheme.

Additionally, I wrote some scripts and put them into place that will help me detect duplicate accounts. Using that, I was disappointed to find quite a large number of duplicate accounts (including some active this month, though most were not) and disabled those as well.

It's not possible to be absolutely sure that people aren't duplicating accounts, but to go to all the effort just to gain an edge in a web site game is a little bit pathetic. The policy remains: one Monster Arena account per person, and despite some resources I have to enforce that, it's essentially an honors system.

Gil, you have a good idea about giving inactive players a slight penalty, to discourage sniping. However, unless the only requirement was that players allocate new stat points, this would penalize the perfectly legitimate strategy of saving gold up for bigger purchases. I think just the fact that sniping is a losing strategy overall is discouragement enough. The real problem is the issue of multiple accounts. If you have a second account you don't care about, losing strategies aren't deterrents.

Let's see how things go for the next couple months. That will give us a chance to see how effective the tools I wrote will be, and if they are, maybe I can set up some way to automate them.

In the meantime, I'm certainly open to other ideas.