undo / confirm button

[wilsonreis]

Some games (Hive and Tzolkin come to mind) are quite harsh on misclicks, since there is no way to undo what youve done. Twin Tin Bots, for example, asks for confirmation before actually ending each turn.

I see that, on fast paced games, the player who keeps resetting his actions to think about them can get obnoxious, but with the advent of turn-based play and the amount of people who play from mobile (touch screens = more chances to misclick) , i really think its time to recode some oldies and make them more misclick friendly.

[ivan the tolerable]

there have been endless threads about this already, and the conclusion was pretty much that whomever runs the site feels strongly that confirm buttons are evil, regardless of the context, regardless of their absence slowing/disrupting gameplay.

i think the general consensus is to simply to reserve BGA for the light casual/social fast games, played from an old-fashioned mouse and monitor, and leave the rest to any one of a number of reputable sites actually designed around games for grown-ups, and for using modern equipment. lots of them out there to chose from, and they all have confirm buttons.

[Doodads]

The idea of cancel or confirm button can't work.
It means each move has to be confirmed 2 times.
It s a pain to play this way and a waste of time.
It seems better to me if the player learns to focus and play correctly.

[ivan the tolerable]

The idea of cancel or confirm button can't work.
It means each move has to be confirmed 2 times.
It s a pain to play this way and a waste of time.
It seems better to me if the player learns to focus and play correctly.

No, it means a player needs to confirm -all- moves made during a turn one time at the very end. What is actually a pain in the ass and a waste of time is watching a player blow an otherwise competitive game of t'zolkin an hour in due to a misclick. its particularly annoying waiting forever for players to think up an entirely new plan trying to salvage an untenable position they got stuck in due to it.
No matter how much 'focus' a player has, misclicks happen, particularly on a game with a lot of ill-defined buttons placed very close together, particularly on a tablet or mobile device. If you want to tell us that everyone playing from a touchscreen is an idiot and no one without a desktop with a mouse and a 22" or larger monitor should be playing games here, fine, but not much other than that could justify the position you have taken.

[Locu]

I don't ask for a confirm button everywhere, but in several games it would make sense in turn based mode!

[ivan the tolerable]

I don't ask for a confirm button everywhere, but in several games it would make sense in turn based mode!

more than just turn based it would seem. there are already confirm buttons, of a sort, in use in live games. Puerto Rico has one to confirm you are finished with certain actions. Somehow it didn't seem to break that game, just to help speed it up. this idea that a confirm button slows down games is the opposite of what it actually does, which is why every other game site i know of has them. they work. they work to streamline and speed up games. both live and turn based.

[zlatovrana]

No, it means a player needs to confirm -all- moves made during a turn one time at the very end. What is actually a pain in the ass and a waste of time is watching a player blow an otherwise competitive game of t'zolkin an hour in due to a misclick. its particularly annoying waiting forever for players to think up an entirely new plan trying to salvage an untenable position they got stuck in due to it.
No matter how much 'focus' a player has, misclicks happen, particularly on a game with a lot of ill-defined buttons placed very close together, particularly on a tablet or mobile device. If you want to tell us that everyone playing from a touchscreen is an idiot and no one without a desktop with a mouse and a 22" or larger monitor should be playing games here, fine, but not much other than that could justify the position you have taken.

Very nicely put.
I am playing games on my laptop without a mouse, using touchpad and misclicks sometimes happen and are very annoying.
Also, a victory doesn't feel real to me if it was just due to a misclick.

[bholle]

I will throw my support on a button. It is not so much 'undo' a poor move as it is 'confirm' that you intend the move you clicked. Many buttons are so close together and if you are using a phone it is very easy to misclick. Other sites do this.

I play Puerto Rico, and even turn-based where I have all the time in the world, if I am using my phone or tablet it is so easy to misclick and totally trash a game. Maybe one that has been going for weeks. It doesn't just affect me; as Puerto Players know a bad move by someone can cause somebody else to win or lose.

I am not sure where the controversy lies. No one is asking for a mulligan after any unseen information has been revealed.

A 'confirm' button can actually make turn-based games faster. I sometimes will not make a move on my phone because I am afraid of misclicking on the small screen. Rather, I wait hours later until I am infront of a desktop.

[asd123321]

While a confirm button would be a nuisance, the option of reversing the last thing you did as long as nothing occurred after that, would be a major improvement.

[pikiou]

Allowing to undo is a vast subject, and it all depends on the kind of undoing you want. I'll try to express the opinion of BGA admins since we talked about it a few times already, but they will correct me if I'm wrong ^^

They don't pay as much attention as you'd want on making sure you can't misclick. They develop and play games using laptops so they often don't think about tablets. In my first game here, Quoridor, you can very easily misclick. But in the last game I did, Sobek, there is a required confirmation each time you could misclick. Mostly because 2 years ago tablets weren't as popular as they are now.
So yes older games could be improved to prevent misclicks, but improving years old games could lead to lots of new bugs. Please realize a dev wastes between a tenth and a quarter of his/her time fixing bugs; since improving an old game is prone to raise even more bugs, there is little chance he/she'll take the risk. Harsh truth, I know. If you want to fix games I worked on (and all the new inevitable bugs ^^) please contact me!

BGA admins are against undoing multiple actions because it makes opponent actions unreadable.
They allowed me to do so for Time Masters but in this game you're supposed to control time so it's the only exception. I wish there were an option to allow it for beginners / low ELO players only. Just in case it were to become available, I'll program and disable the possibility to undo multiple actions in all my next games.
This feature is way too complex to add to an existing game, so existing games without it will never allow it.

They want multistep actions to be cancellable before they are completed, but even Sobek which I worked really hard on doesn't allow it: when you play a character card, you have to apply its effect, you can't retract. It would have required way more work I preferred to put in other things. This won't happen in my next games, but most of my first 6 still have this flaw.
Here as well, improving a game could lead to more bugs and less fun adapting new games.

When your action could be a mistake, admins make sure that the game pops up a confirmation dialog. This requires some work experienced players won't even notice, but the impact of preventing a disaster when your playing your very first games is so important it's worth the effort.

Thank you for this discussion, seeing that you care about as small a feature as an undo button motivates me into going the extra mile.