This is one of my biggest pet peeves on this site, and I'm pretty tired of some of these rationales for not having a 'confirm move' button, so I'd like to address them. Again.
Jest Phulin wrote:It has to do with the quality of programmers BGA hires
OK, that's supposed to be a joke. Ever game on BGA is developed by volunteers. Some take the extra time to put in confirms (thanks, Victoria_La
), some want to get the game to the community as quickly as possible. While there are standards of minimum requirements, a confirm/back button is not one of them. Once a game makes it into production, it is difficult to even get bugs fixed, let alone have new features added.
This is the only legitimate argument against adding the functionality - the belief that their time would be better spent on something else.
What they should have done was institute some kind of more rigid design spec/standards in the beginning, or any time since then, such that basic functionality like this is in all new games. Now there is too big of a backlog of games that all have different code (which also makes the site and games way harder to maintain generally) and they don't want to be bothered, so they won't even admit that it is/was a mistake.
They could at any point choose to make it a standard, or to slowly add it to old games one at a time (perhaps in order of popularity), but they refuse to attempt any solution, however unambitious or long-term, because they claim it is not a problem in the first place. This is despite DOZENS of threads and complaints asking for this functionality, and even though they routinely find time to spend on implementing features that no one has expressed an interest in.
Jest Phulin wrote:Additionally, there are technical issues with this. Remember that BGA was developed as a real-time gaming experience. As such, as soon as a player makes a move on their device, it is propagated to all other devices at the table. It does not send the entire new game state, just the change in state. So, having a "reset to beginning of turn" option requires the last moves to be kept in the heap, stepping back through them. With the animations taking non-zero times, reset/redo can have clock issues.
This is crap. It is perfectly implementable technically, as proven by Tash-Kalar. And if people are taking too long on their turns for ANY reason, the solution is a shorter timer (we need more timing options here anyway), not stripping the interface of useful/necessary features that may extend a turn by a few seconds. If you are not okay with people using the full timer, then don't join/create games with that long of a timer - simple.
I imagine the functionality would actually speed things up in many cases anyway, as it is much quicker to work out your turn when you can see what is happening instead of having to calculate it all ahead of time, and when you aren't constantly worried about making a fatal misclick.
Jest Phulin wrote:Then, too, there are philosophical issues. When playing among friends, many people will allow players to take back moves. But in tournament settings, the rules get stricter. The official rules for chess even state that if a player just touches a piece, they must make a legal move with it (
https://www.fide.com/component/handbook ... ew=article , rule 4.3) The question then becomes, is the confirm/reset requested because the player is prone to misclicks or because they want to see what the game state would eventually be?
This is also crap. Firstly, for the obvious reason that this problem is solved by a simple checkbox when creating a game or tournament to allow/disallow 'confirm' functionality.
Or, secondly, by simply learning to be realistic about the limitations of the interface. Touch screens and mice are not as reliable at translating our intention faithfully into action. I actually just made a serious error in a tournament Targi game the other day because my coffee mug was on my mousepad, and I accidentally rolled my mouse under its handle initiating an unintended click. I would never even use this site on a touch screen because I know I would be constantly making uncorrectable mistakes that would infuriate me.
These frustrating mistakes are virtually impossible with the physical version of the game, or if something analogous did occur in both situations, it would be considered absurd to make a player stick to their move in the physical version. Consider the example of a cat knocking a game piece in the physical version vs. a cat knocking a mouse on the floor causing a misclick. If you were playing chess with someone, and their cat jumped onto the table knocking over their king, would you begin your victory celebration? Well, random events beyond the players' control always count in the BGA version, which is obviously unfair.
Lack of this feature also closes off the site to people with physical disabilities like Parkinson's (I am curious how the FIDE would handle this, people without steady hands just aren't really allowed to have a fair chance at playing chess?).
So this argument boils down to: in order to stop people from seeing ahead on their turn, during which all the actions are under their control and thus calculable already anyway, we should allow the possibility of frustrating interface mistakes, make games harder to play on cell phones, remove games further from the experience of an actual table top, force people to have to play memory and do maths in their head instead of focusing on gameplay, and disenfranchise a potential user base of people with certain physical disabilities. Absurd.
Jest Phulin wrote:I am not saying these issues can't be overcome. I am simply stating that there are non-trivial issues that need to be addressed to put in a reset button, and the last several times this issue has been discussed it has been determined that there were higher-priority issues for BGA. Such as keeping the site running...
These so-called issues ARE trivial, and I do so wish people would stop trotting them out. The only thing this feature would take is time, as there is no negative to it that doesn't have a very simple answer, and the only argument against it is that the time would be better spent elsewhere.
But based on how often this comes up, I am pretty sure that isn't true - perhaps one way to keep the site running in the long term would be to attract new users (and retain more old ones) by simply making the interface more of a joy to use instead of an irritant, and by opening the site up to those potential members who have tiny screens or unsteady hands which now make it virtually impossible to play effectively.
The admins seem to prefer to instead go the short term 'flashy new stuff' route most of the time, providing useless unrequested features that sound cool (my favorite example is probably the hilariously poorly implemented 3D mode) and working on new content or site redesigns, instead of working on improving the overall user experience and building loyalty by addressing this frequently mentioned issue.
