Today we removed "number of available players" information from the lobby.
When we introduced this functionality, our intention was to show that there were available online players for every different game, to encourage players to play the least played games.
At first it looks a good idea, but with the years is appears that the results are not so great.
Most of the times, the number of available for each game is huge. However, only a very few part of online players really want to participate to a given game, and even a fewer part wants to create a new table for it.
In addition, the resource cost of this function (and the associated "suggest this table to player X") is growing exponentially with the growing audience of BGA. Recently, it contributes to crash the service.
To conclude: with a big audience, this is way to costly and quite inefficient to display the exact number of players waiting for a game.
Spoiler alert: the situation is exactly the same for "suggest this table to player X" feature, so it is going to disappear some day or another.
Some more explanation on the general direction we are taking:
We introduced the "Simple mode" (or "Automatic lobby"). It allows you to automatically find opponents for a given game, and is way more efficient than the "available players" statistics we used to provide on the lobby (and the "suggest" feature).
In the near future, we will continue to upgrade the "Automatic lobby" (simple mode) to make it more efficient, and will also upgrade the "Manual lobby" (advanced mode) for those who want to keep 100% control on their tables.
When we introduced this functionality, our intention was to show that there were available online players for every different game, to encourage players to play the least played games.
At first it looks a good idea, but with the years is appears that the results are not so great.
Most of the times, the number of available for each game is huge. However, only a very few part of online players really want to participate to a given game, and even a fewer part wants to create a new table for it.
In addition, the resource cost of this function (and the associated "suggest this table to player X") is growing exponentially with the growing audience of BGA. Recently, it contributes to crash the service.
To conclude: with a big audience, this is way to costly and quite inefficient to display the exact number of players waiting for a game.
Spoiler alert: the situation is exactly the same for "suggest this table to player X" feature, so it is going to disappear some day or another.
Some more explanation on the general direction we are taking:
We introduced the "Simple mode" (or "Automatic lobby"). It allows you to automatically find opponents for a given game, and is way more efficient than the "available players" statistics we used to provide on the lobby (and the "suggest" feature).
In the near future, we will continue to upgrade the "Automatic lobby" (simple mode) to make it more efficient, and will also upgrade the "Manual lobby" (advanced mode) for those who want to keep 100% control on their tables.
