New lobby (integrated to game page)

[sourisdudesert]

Long time since the last post, since we took time to process your feedback and upgrade the new lobby.

What has been improved (today's release)

• Restrict to group is now available
• Restriction by level is now available with the same flexibility than it is on the old lobby
• Click on "Accept" on invitation sometimes did not bring you to the correct table (especially for turn based and tournaments)
• Arena mode: seats are filled up during the progression of the search
• Alpha game: fix bug that prevent the game to be started from new lobby
• Missing warnings (ex: "this option is not recommended for beginners") are now visible
• You can now invite players from any empty seat (not just the one with the "+")
• Fix annoying bug that constantly invite the same players to your table created in the new lobby
• Fast turn based: playing hours default value is not correct
• + many others little things that are too many to be mentioned.

Thanks for your feedback!

Thank your for all your contributions that help us a lot to improve this new lobby. During the 2 last weeks, the usage of the new lobby doubled and its usage is continuously increasing: thanks a lot for this!

Below, you will find answer to all of questions/remarks asked since my last post.

If you do not, you are probably in one the following case:

• Your remark is way to general (ex: "I don't like this" / "this interface is stupid" / "this is ugly"...). As explained before, there is no way back: the only way is forward, so if you dislike the new lobby and do not want to help to make it better, please continue to use the previous one which is still available just like before.
• Your remark is lacking of context or details: we need specific cases that we can reproduce. Saying that "XXX does not work" is not enough since most of the time it is working. We need to know the steps needed to reproduce your exact problem.
• There is personal attack against admins in one of your post / you are rude in a way or another: sorry, but this is something we cannot accept, so your post (and further ones) will be ignored. Whatever your opinion is on this new lobby, the whole BGA team worked on it during months by involving a lot of players (both experienced and not) on it. Showing disrespect or being rude is not the best way to make you heard, so yes you will be ignored in admins answers.
• It does not concern the new lobby but other features that did not changed
• It has been answered before: I made several post since the beginning of this thread

Feedback on your feedback

I would love if - after clicking "rematch" - I see the table I'm in, with who and with what settings, instead 90% of the visible field was covered by irrelevant info about the game that I obviously know about "enough to play"

This is something we want to work on, but according to our stats players are finding their way better with the new lobby. I am not saying there are not room for improvements, but at least we progressed compared to old lobby

if I click "rematch" on a game, it takes me to the new lobby, and doesn't have that "no time limit" setting selected, even though it was in the game being "rematched"

This was indeed confusing and has been fixed (in old and new lobby). Read this: viewtopic.php?p=128820#p128820

And rematches now require 4 clicks to accept ...

Just 1 click on "Accept", just like before

How to enter the game chat before joining a game? I cannot find a DISCUSS button.

You do not have to click on Discuss anymore: the chat window opens automatically on bottom right. One click saved

edit: please at least give us the option of using the old (and clean) interface to start new games until the new lobby has all the same functionality. / How do I continue to use the current lobby?

We do. Please use "Play now" on the menu, just like you used to do.

I just tried to cancel an
Arena game (Noir: no other opponents found as yet) using the new interface, and it won't let me: nothing happens when I click the shiny red cancel button

Sorry but we need some specifics (ex: link to table) otherwise we cannot see what happened. This is the same for all other bugs reported.

I have a major problem: in games where language is important (Stella, Just One for example), it is not possible to choose the language in the new lobby, and not even possible to see the game language in the waiting tables.

Confirmed, and this is fixed now.

From the table we can see the ELO and reputation of the other players as they join. Also, by hovering our mouse we can see how many times they have played this game. We can't see any of that from this new lobby page.

Yes you can, by clicking on the different players.

About the new lobby the only thing I can say is that they invited me to a rematch of a game. Somehow I am participating in that rematch but I also opened a game to the public.

This was indeed unclear and has been fixed.

When I want to play a game from this main page of the game it often invites a friend

This has been fixed.

New lobby does not handle alpha games correctly: it generates non-training mode alpha games.

This has been partially fixed (now this is way more easy to start Alpha games, but there may be still some non-training remaining)

Can we choose random amount of players?? Every time i go to a game page where i push start it puts two players, so i need to choose manually if i want to change the number ... But no choice as whatever amount.

You cannot, and you could not either on the previous lobby, so there is no change here.

What you CAN do, is to choose a high number of players (ex: maximum for this game) and click on "Start" when there are enough opponents for you at the table.

I do not like the new lobby. It is ugly, confusing, has poor flow, and works poorly. BGA typically has excellent design and user interfaces. Something weird has happened here.

Thanks a lot for your remarks on the previous designs. I should mention that ALL our previous designs have received hundreds of bad feedback, so it is nice to see that at the end they are considered excellent

If the old lobby is going to be taken away eventually (as I suspect)

Some usage of the old lobby (ex: extended display of all tables for multiple games) cannot have a real equivalent with the new one, so at least for these parts, there is no plan at now to remove them.

really just struggled to open an alpha game. There is no 'create' a table button. Just went round in a endless loop on the 'play now' page.

This has been fixed (was concerning the old lobby).

Another bug: accepting a rematch just dropped me to the new table create page while that game is now on my open games list.

Fixed now.

But why I must click on every single player to find that info? This is very uncomfortable. That information are important, you need to see it immediately. (and all the same requests about having "more information")

For you, yes, but our tests shows that for a majority of players, this information is much less important than the other. For players like you who really want to have an immediate access to the whole informations, we can only recommend to continue to use the old lobby.

Why I must click on a player and then click (again) for eliminate that player?

Because this clarify the interface and makes a player expel (which is not a common decision) more reliable. Again, if you want to have everything displayed and accessible in one click, we can only recommend to continue to use the old lobby.

[Silene]

I'm not a regular user of the new lobby, because I need the functionality of an overview over different games that the play now area offers - thanks for keeping that working!

However I sometimes try to use the new lobby to see how things are.
When I use it from my phone I repeatedly encounter the following problem:

I go to the lobby by clicking Hanabi somewhere and it leads me to this screen:



I do agree that this might be a good first presentation for new players, that haven't played the game yet or are new to BGA. But IMO (as others have mentioned before) - for players that have already played this game thousands of time, there is no useful info on this top part of the page. It would be awesome, if this section could be compressed into a small line, that takes up only about 10-20% of the size with the ability to expand if needed.

But besides that, as long as we have this big info-panel, the first thing we always do there is to swipe down, which means put your finger on the lower part of the screen and move up - most likely you start somewhere in the circle here:



But when I do that, I'm not actually swiping down, but instead result into this:



So what happened? I only scrolled down the "Latest news" (as you can see the scroll bar is now at the bottom).

It's just a small thing and i can just swipe again starting somewhere else. But since it happens to me in this usecase almost every time (you can see the overlap of the newsbox and the circle in 2nd picture), it starts to get annoying.

Also the "latest updates" in this case is the message about Hanabi becoming now a premium game - that was about 3 years ago if i remember correctly. Repeatedly getting old news is confusing and unhelpful as it makes the user start to ignore most instances of "latest updates" they encounter, which means they most likely miss when there is actually something new to read.

My suggestions:
* Make the game-page-header minimizable and minimize it by default when the player has already played the game (or has already played it 10 times or more).
* Don't put a scrollable box in the swipe-location (this is fixed automatically should the whole thing be minimizable)
* Put a date on news (maybe turn the header into "Latest Updates (12/2020)" or something like that.

[Silene]

...continuation for when I want to start a game from there

So this is how it looks after you successfully swiped down:



Side note: This is how I would want my screen to look like right after I entered the page - without having to scroll down like shown in previous post (apart from the fact that there's still little info about settings + players that have joined but I guess there's just so much that fits on a mobile device screen...). The arrow down on the upper right could do the expand into the whole info screen instead of doing exactly the same as the burger-menu on the left.

So now I want to play a game. I see a big "Start" button. But I also see, there are no players on the table, so to me it makes no sense to click "start" just yet. I'll continue waiting... (which isn't doing anything as my table isn't opened for others to join yet - but that fact is nothing to grasp intuitively... it rather looks like I should use the "+" sign to add players myself)

suggestion: Change label on the button into something like "start searching for players" or "open game table". Shorter isn't better when it leaves out vital information. The word "Start" is usually used for the moment when you actually start playing. To keep the big "Start", you could also add a small "click to start searching for players" like it is on the cancel button after you finally dared to click start anyway.

[Silene]

How to enter the game chat before joining a game? I cannot find a DISCUSS button.

You do not have to click on Discuss anymore: the chat window opens automatically on bottom right. One click saved

It doesn't open for me. Neither on mobile (android), nor on pc (chrome). I can't find a button for that either.

But even if it did - you would probably have to navigate into the chat line anyway (those are clicks too)? When you click the DISCUSS button, you are immediately in the chat line to start typing.

[twenty9oh7]

Thank your for all your contributions that help us a lot to improve this new lobby.

Little new to the discussion here, so I apologize sourisdudesert if you've answered it. Do you want suggestions in this discussion post, or in the bug reports?

Thanks!

[sourisdudesert]

Suggestions and general feedback goes on this thread.

What obviously does not work (= not working the way it is intented to work) can go in bug reports.

[twenty9oh7]

Thanks!

Suggestions I have:

- Please add hover tooltips for the icons for the display box to the right hand side of the page (i.e. "Watch a game in play", "Tutorial videos", "Game rulebooks" or "Player Resources", "Pictures"). My window was not maximized and all I could see were the icons with no context because the display box was not shown.

- The icon for the previously mentioned "Game rulebooks" of "Player Resources" on the upper right display box is for a "linked resource" (chain icon). This iconography intuitively makes me think if it is clicked I will be redirected to an outside website (which is what happens if you click on the icon below in the "Game Rules" area). My suggestion would be to possibly change this iconography to something like a question mark for the resources available.

- A golden crown is placed on the user that is the Table Administrator, but there is nothing indicating this except my familiarity to BGA. Maybe some sort of tooltip for this as well or placing "Table administrator" in text under the player's name

- It wasn't intuitive to me that I needed to click on a user to see their karma or if they are online. A hover tooltip that says "Click for Player details" would help new users.

- Additionally, a visual reference that a user is online without having to click would be nice. Perhaps a red or green dot on the user avatar icon like the other format has to show premium users. It shows a green dot on my avatar when I'm creating a game, so hopefully this isn't an odd request. Mainly this would help the table administrator to easily identify a player who has taken a seat but has lost connection.

- Along with the "Join" button, maybe make it possible to join a game by clicking on an open seat (the grey silhouette)

- I only found the table restrictions from the hover tooltip (thanks!), so maybe similar to how it says "Players number" next to a toggle, it could also say "Table player restrictions" next to the current toggle

- My personal preference would be to have a brief description of the game rather than the "Latest Update" for the game. For instance, for Yahtzee it would be more beneficial to me if I were a new user who had never played to read:

"A player rolls five dice to begin a turn. They are then allowed to take up to two rerolls, each reroll being any number of those dice. After those rerolls, or when the player chooses to stop rolling, the player must choose which category to score the final result. There are 13 scoring categories, and each must be used for one of the 14 rounds."

rather than:

"Dear Yahtzee players,
Thanks to A-dam, two other issues have been fixed in the Yahtzee implementation!
- The confusion about Rigole between Yahtzee and Yam's is now fixed for new games! Yahtzee is now really Yahtzee! (and of course nothing changes for Yam's)....

That's all I have! Thanks for doing all the heavy lifting while we all armchair quarterback it

[frodobolseiro]

I hated that now it's impossible to create a ELO game with no time limit.

If you really want to play have a ELO gain/loss after your game, we now encourage you to create a Turn based game with the slowest speed (1 move every 2 days). If you were used to use "Normal mode + no time limit", it makes practically no difference: even if some of your opponents goes over their time limit (which is pretty high), you are absolutely not forced to expel them. However, the improvement compared to the previous situation is that you still have the possibility to expel a non-playing player in case it is needed.

Me and my friends know what no time limit means and we DO care about reputation. This "new way" we can't stay out of BGA for 5 days, for example, because we'll run out of time.

You could have just put some rule in the style: if a table has no actions in the last 60 days it is automatically cancelled. But the question that remains is: why make it easy if we can complicate it, right?

Such a bad way to solve a problem that didn't even exist.
You'll lost like 9 premium members (when it's over), me and my friends just played this way.

[miklomike]

If you really want to play have a ELO gain/loss after your game, we now encourage you to create a Turn based game with the slowest speed (1 move every 2 days). If you were used to use "Normal mode + no time limit", it makes practically no difference: even if some of your opponents goes over their time limit (which is pretty high), you are absolutely not forced to expel them. However, the improvement compared to the previous situation is that you still have the possibility to expel a non-playing player in case it is needed.

Can you explain why you are against this mode so much? I really do not understand how anyone is getting stuck after you limited no time limit to friends only. There is already a warning displayed as well. And even if you had an opponent stop playing, the table is automatically abandoned after a set amount of time. If it helps I'm sure you can change the time to be 1/3 of what it was, just abandon any games that have had no move in the last 30 days.

Those of us who wish to use no time limit should not be penalized with not being able to earn ELO. If you are really going to eliminate this mode, then can you please enable "no time penalties for games set to friends only". This will give us players everything we are asking for, time to play with no penalty and ability to earn ELO. But it also gives YOU everything you are asking for, which is no one will get stuck because a player could end the table once an opponent goes into negative time, but the player in negative time will not get a penalty because you are playing with friends only and friends don't give friends time penalties.

I would like to hear your thought on this, thank you very much for the changes so far.

[Matt C 1970]

Thanks a lot for your remarks on the previous designs. I should mention that ALL our previous designs have received hundreds of bad feedback, so it is nice to see that at the end they are considered excellent

This is actually rather encouraging, and I hope to see the new lobby improve over time. (I have noted some of the improvements so far.)

I appreciate the courteous responses to the flood of criticism, also.