Lobby Update & few extras

[mikkashar]

The arena setting options on the game page are different from and less specific than the arena settings available in the lobby, and while I may have misinterpreted, I think it tries to use both sets.

The game page only lets me indicate one playing speed, which can be marked as "locked" or "flexible", but nothing indicates what the range is on "flexible". The lobby page lets me indicate preferred, acceptable if preferred aren't available, suboptimal (which when it's come up in the past, I've been prompted as to whether I wanted to accept rather than being dropped into the game, and unacceptable for game speed.

The game page only lets me pick one setting for 'playing hours', with "locked" or the unspecified "flexible" as options. The lobby page lets me indicate playing hour preferences much as it does game speed options.

The other filtering options are also expressed differently, and language is only available on the game page.

The matching system seems to try to honor settings from both pages? I may be confused about this, having attempted to request games through both the game page and the lobby to compare how they work. However, at one point I was talking to another player about playing a turn-based arena game in a less popular game. We were both waiting on matches, with different but overlapping settings on the lobby page (through which I requested a match, IIRC), but I'd left the game page on "locked" for the game speed, and we weren't matched for a game until the other player expanded their settings to include that game speed. I'd prefer that the available options be the same for both, but if they're not, only the options on the page from which the match is requested should be used to filter possible matches.

[miklomike]

Why are tournament games not just joined automatically? It is still not very apparent if you are getting a tournament invite or just a regular invite

[ChiefPointThief]

+1 in favor of old lobby. Chat and ability to create multiple tables are a few major issues.

[KenFin1]

I am not a fan of the new lobby. That might be too mild. I detest it and avoid it wherever possible. Sadly there are some instances where I get forced to use it (rematches, invites etc) and I wish I had the option to use the old lobby for those too. Please don't remove the old lobby it will prevent me using the site how I like to and given how limiting the new lobby is by comparison I am confident it will see my stop using BGA for anything other than very occasional use (if at all). The old lobby allows users to see multiple games at once, open multiple tables with different options to see what other people want to play, etc. All much more versatile and useful than the new single game lobbies.

As my post in another thread all about people not liking the new lobby:

In the new lobby:

• you can now queue for different tables of the same game but you still cannot create more then one game table which I find a step backwards.
• Also when you join a table it jumps to a different place in the list which makes it hard to keep track of if you're trying to join multiple tables.
• It's hard to see everyone at the table,
• you can't chat,
• you can't view their game experience/ranking nor their karma
• you can't amend game details if someone is at the table, and
• if you try to cancel matchmaking it boots everyone from the table instead of keeping them in the table while you tweak things
• If you're trying to invite people they seem to be able to join before you've finished setting the options so if you haven't got everything set you're stuck as above.
• Similarly for a rematch if you want to change variant or expansion you can lose the players when trying to tweak it.
• You can't link to player profile pages by clicking on the user names anymore

I could go on. Given the old lobby allows all of these i question why they didn't just make two/three improvements to the old lobby that I saw people request before:

• show karma rating either as % or coloured blob next to player name,
• add a "discuss" button next to join/view/quit so you can launch chat without going into the table page.
• allow filtering by variant so you don't see all the variants under each game if you're not interested in them

those all made sense to me. I can't recall who they were or where their posts are now though or I would link them.

The old lobby is so quick and seems to have a much lower overhead than the new lobbies which have a lot of visual bloat and clutter that detract from the matter at hand - playing a game! By all means keep both now that the new lobbies are live but leave the old lobby there for those who prefer it, and give users the choice which to default to. That way you will keep your user base happy and not alienate people unnecessarily.

[cigma]

[*] You can't link to player profile pages by clicking on the user names anymore

I mostly agree with you, but not quite in this point. You might click on a player's name to see some info and then on their profile:
.

Player_Info.JPG (53.86 KiB) Viewed 1287 times

But, as you can see here, in the new lobby you also can't kick a player who is offline (and thus blocking the table) as you can in the old lobby. Just another point to mention... I opened a new bug report on this: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=100561

[nik592]

But, as you can see here, in the new lobby you also can't kick a player who is offline (and thus blocking the table) as you can in the old lobby.

Is that due to not being able to kick a player at all, or due to them being the table admin (for whatever reason)? I believe that may have always been the case - you can exit tables where you are not admin, but you cannot kick the admin/creator of the table. I'm not sure how it defines the admin in cases where everyone was just queuing automatically which could be the problem in this case (as one assumes it just randomly chose a player to be admin, or they were queuing first or something).

[SirKappy]

As a newcomer to the site (only joined a few weeks ago) I'm not sure what's the old lobby vs the new lobby. Based on this thread it seems like the "Play Now" section is the old lobby and the "Games" section is the new lobby, though correct me if I'm wrong about that. In any case I do feel like the "Play Now" section is the best way to find tables and join games. It's straightforward. I can quickly change between real time and turn-based and see how many tables are available for every game I've favourited. It's definitely my preferred way to find and join games.

[Stu_1977_SEmelb]

Please, please don't take away the old lobby, it is so much better. It is bad enough that untimed games must now always be "friendly mode". (There are now almost 400 green thumbs for bug report 78071.)

As others have mentioned, the new lobby has no discuss button, it is cluttered and harder to do what you actually want to do but also it has no "presentation" text editor for a table description.. (Yes most would probably not care about this, but I do.) I could go on and on about how these changes for the worse started with the removal of the orange and green banners for turn notifications and how things have steadily gone downhill from there making the site just that little bit less user-friendly and navigable with each major change... but I shan't.

[mikkashar]

The arena setting options on the game page are different from and less specific than the arena settings available in the lobby...

Today I used the game page to request an arena game of Patchwork, with game speed set to one move per day and "flexible" enabled. I was dropped into a 24 moves per day turn-based game, with playing hours that are 3am-3pm for me (and I'm no sort of early riser). That didn't overlap with my preferences on the "play now" arena lobby at all, and I don't think I've ever set anything that indicated those playing hours were acceptable.

"Flexible" needs to be clearly defined, and either adjustable or a lot narrower than that. That degree of variance from my requested game speed is unreasonable. (I expect to time out while I'm asleep or away from the computer. I proposed abandoning the game but that was declined. My opponent and I don't share a language, so while I explained briefly in chat, they may not have seen or translated it.)

[Sounder]

Is there a way to shut the bell off again to stop receiving notifications? I may have missed something completely obvious, maybe someone can help me out.

Thanks!