Stop automatically accept arena games

[ArmagedOFF]

This is terrible. I lost so many games without any moves, far away from my phone.
What is the reason for this behavior? Why is it different from regular games?

Please vote for this suggestion - https://boardgamearena.com/#!bug?id=14271

[thoun]

It's normal behavior, so you can't refuse game and by this way chose your opponents else you could just cancel until you play weaker opponents.

[Blacktango]

I think the main reason is that you shouldn't be able to refuse to start after you seeing your opponent, because it would be cheating to leave just because you see a high ELO player, and wait for an easier game instead.

A solution might be to still show the confirm start button like in normal games, but hide the opponent information.
But well, that needs some more development and it's all about prioritizing this dev.

[Purohueso]

More than the opponent information being hidden, maybe it should be that you can't withdraw from the match (and closing the app/page would be forfeiture), but both players should have to click on a confirmation button to start the match. This way, the match doesn't start until both players are aware of it at least.

... and now I thought the downside: someone might just decide to wait it out until their opponent forfeits, which would be solved by a countdown... which the game itself already has. Maybe there should be a 2-3 minute countdown on the confirmation page and then the game just starts?, the countdown is technically extended this way to about ~5 minutes, which should be enough to avoid most of the unaware timeouts.

[Chiffa of Kettari]

But... why send the request for a game and then go away? This issue is the most easily solved by not starting arena games when you don't have time for playing? Am I missing something here?

[Gulchen]

But... why send the request for a game and then go away? This issue is the most easily solved by not starting arena games when you don't have time for playing? Am I missing something here?

One would rather be doing something else in the meantime, instead of just
staring at the ​ Searching for opponents... ​ tab while waiting for a game to start.
(The game-start sound doesn't always play, and even if it always did, there would still be the
issue that what one is doing in the meantime might involve briefly leaving one's computer.)

For me, the main issue is it taking so long that I forget I still have a wait open.
Accordingly, my preference is that one be able to set two amounts of time
- longtime and shorttime - where after longtime waiting, a ​ continue wait ​ button
comes up, and if one doesn't click that within shorttime, one's wait is cancelled.

[ArmagedOFF]

But... why send the request for a game and then go away? This issue is the most easily solved by not starting arena games when you don't have time for playing? Am I missing something here?

Searching for opponent takes too much time. I don't like to sit and stare at screen. I have time for playing, but not for waiting. That is the reason of starting another activity.

[ab in dc]

This happens to me all the time. The website doesn't even give me a notificatoin when a game starts. Then I get expelled and lose ELO/Arena points.

Do folks really expect people to stare at an open table for 5-10 minutes waiting for player without switching to other tabs? Wby should I lose points just because BGA cannot reliably make a sound when a game starts?

This is infuriating. At the very least, the default option should be Abandon not Expel when the game hasn't even started. And frankly if we're going to be paying more for BGA moving forward then the website needs to do a much, much better job at alerting me when I don't have the tab active.

Perhaps years ago when every single browser tab was running in the background it would make sense, but now Chrome regularly puts a tab to sleep when I'm looking at something else.

[Strode]

But... why send the request for a game and then go away? This issue is the most easily solved by not starting arena games when you don't have time for playing? Am I missing something here?

Searching for opponent takes too much time. I don't like to sit and stare at screen. I have time for playing, but not for waiting. That is the reason of starting another activity.

But then other players who accept your request are stuck waiting for you to come back.

[ab in dc]

But... why send the request for a game and then go away? This issue is the most easily solved by not starting arena games when you don't have time for playing? Am I missing something here?

Searching for opponent takes too much time. I don't like to sit and stare at screen. I have time for playing, but not for waiting. That is the reason of starting another activity.

But then other players who accept your request are stuck waiting for you to come back.

That's exactly why the game shouldn't start until both players signal that they're ready.

In fact there are already plenty of times when BGA tries to start an arena game but then halts because one player is unreachable for some reason. I'm nots ure what triggers that but it already happens.