Not enough users

[ChiefPointThief]

But to ask for someone to actively create ads for boring games to cater for a handful of players... really?

Did anyone have this expectation either? Also you've been here eight years and played 30,000 games. 99% of which have been hanabi. So as for boring games you've basically deemed almost none of the games here are worthy of your time.

You seem to have this kind of expectation.

You seem to have misunderstood something I said.

What brings in money is to work with popular games and do things that the masses are interested in.

You know what the masses like? Things like the summer challenge and bga awards. Like I've already mentioned there are things that bga can do to increase the community for games using these types of events. The summer and winter challenges don't even require you to play the games to achieve the reward. They could do something like offer double the gift points for playing games released during that month or whatever other reward they think fits to get people to play them. With the bga awards they could let people know months in advance of at least the games that will be nominated at that point and require players to play in at least half the games of that category to vote instead of telling people the week of the vote.

These are things that you like. And these do not solve the problem for long. The game will be dead again in no time. And there are so many games that these events won't be able to cover all these games anyway. OR there are so many events going on at the same time that people would rather play on a few events not all of them.

You mean I clicked on the threads about these events 140,000x by myself?

The more people to enter communities the longer they stay alive

Unnecessary. Just find online friends and ask them to play that dead game with you. No need to force active communities to exist for all of those games.

There goes that "force" word again. Also bga already incentivizes playing more games. It is better for the site to have several games with strong communities but carry on.

[Stroom]

The more people to enter communities the longer they stay alive

Unnecessary. Just find online friends and ask them to play that dead game with you. No need to force active communities to exist for all of those games.

There goes that "force" word again. Also bga already incentivizes playing more games. It is better for the site to have several games with strong communities but carry on.

Who says that multiple small communities is better than a few large game communities? Small community means less players to play with at any given time. Large community means that there's always someone to play with and the community has less chance of dying off.

Small games can just exist without anyone playing them. Just like on my shelf... Once in a while someone gathers his/her friends and opens up a game, plays it and then doesn't play again. Just find your online friends yourself.

[TsPeacock]

The wait times are really getting ridiculous. They should really do more marketing, especially since they charge (or have a paid level). I had never heard of it until someone told me about it.

[Stroom]

It's not about marketing. It's about having a lobby system where people can see ALL the different games waiting for players. And remove the new game finding abomination that makes you decide what you want to play first. This is what is killing the less popular games. People just don't know that there are players willing to play that less popular game.

[Cappa]

The wait times are really getting ridiculous. They should really do more marketing, especially since they charge (or have a paid level). I had never heard of it until someone told me about it.

I really doubt you never heard of the paid level until someone told you about it, they literally spam you with advertisement before a game about it.

[Zozoken]

The wait times are really getting ridiculous. They should really do more marketing, especially since they charge (or have a paid level). I had never heard of it until someone told me about it.

I really doubt you never heard of the paid level until someone told you about it, they literally spam you with advertisement before a game about it.

No, the message was about Board Game Arena, not premium. They said it's strange to not hear about BGA since they charge for part of their service. And I absolutely agree with them. I found other game sites long before I found BGA through internet search. Though it seems they have some exposure now from people talking about BGA on BGG forums and YouTube. To put it into perspective, I heard about RuneScape long before trying it out (it wasn't for me), but found their game site FunOrb through digging (sadly doesn't exist anymore). Certainly I learned about a certain site that starts with the letter Y long before I learned about BGA!

[RicardoRix]

enter 'play board games online' into google:
and the first response is BGA for me.

[Zozoken]

The wait times are really getting ridiculous. They should really do more marketing, especially since they charge (or have a paid level). I had never heard of it until someone told me about it.

I agree with you. Though this idea has been met with resistance.

The general mood of the thread is that it's not BGA's problem to fix long wait times. BGA doesn't owe us anything and dead games / long waiting times are to be expected because players are not obligated to play the specific games we want or the times we want. If we want to play something like chess we should go to another site, decide to play a more popular game, bring friends, etc etc.

It's a bit hypocritical since the same logic can be applied to recent changes to elo and the Games In Progress page. It's BGA's site, they can do whatever they want with it, you are paying for access to their entire library of 900 games which is still worth it despite the changes, nobody is obligated to care about elo, it's up to Hanabi players to find players of similar level and agreed conventions, we can make a spreadsheet to track our games if we don't like how the new GIP is, etc etc.

It ignores a lot of navigation issues of the site... How does one coordinate games unless they bring in real-life friends like I do? With the way lobby is, tables timing out if they are not filled by a certain time, not having a LFG forum like most gaming sites, not allowed to post LFG threads in the forum, groups being incredibly unwieldy to find and operate, advertised games do not match player preferences and cannot be manually set by tags, the inability to see what games people are actually playing right now, etc etc. Apparently BGA's hands are tied. There's nothing they can do!! At least we have the notification bell which is helpful for finding real time games.

The workaround (not necessarily the solution but I call it the solution) is to bring friends outside of BGA's framework such as Discord and get them to play games on here. There are several people on my friends list that made accounts just to play on our game nights and they don't visit the site in between. It's not ideal, but it's what we have to do if we want to experience all BGA has to offer.

Once again I encourage anyone affected by long wait times to find a nice and friendly BGA group that coordinates games or find people outside of BGA that wants to play specific games. Maybe posting a thread on the BGG forum for the specific game, for example. Stating the obvious issue "Games have long wait times. BGA should market more to help fix it." has only been met with "No, the problem is you. It's not BGA's problem. You fix it." That's not been helpful and will only serve to drive newcomers from the site.

[RicardoRix]

You're misunderstanding the premium feature, and why it exists. BGA is primarily a free to use web service. A community site. Even if it is now owned by Asmodee.
Premium is to show support for the site, but more so is used as a way to raise money to give back to game publishers and to entice them to want to have their games on BGA. A scratch each others back scenario.

The #1 concern from the user base is new games. Given they release a game about every 2 days now, and the availability of the top rated games has improved drastically. I would say they are hitting their own goals.

There are discord servers and and the general messages to start a new game.

Take it as a sign that the servers tend to creak in the evening. They've got their hands full just keeping up with the current demand.

They can't make users out of thin air, and they can't force them to play the game you want to play. There are lots of tables created ALL the time - just join one. OR bring your friends.

[Cappa]

The wait times are really getting ridiculous. They should really do more marketing, especially since they charge (or have a paid level). I had never heard of it until someone told me about it.

I really doubt you never heard of the paid level until someone told you about it, they literally spam you with advertisement before a game about it.

No, the message was about Board Game Arena, not premium. They said it's strange to not hear about BGA since they charge for part of their service. And I absolutely agree with them. I found other game sites long before I found BGA through internet search. Though it seems they have some exposure now from people talking about BGA on BGG forums and YouTube. To put it into perspective, I heard about RuneScape long before trying it out (it wasn't for me), but found their game site FunOrb through digging (sadly doesn't exist anymore). Certainly I learned about a certain site that starts with the letter Y long before I learned about BGA!

Huh? BGA is the first result on google. Its been like this for years. Second is tabletopia.

You're misunderstanding the premium feature, and why it exists. BGA is primarily a free to use web service. A community site. Even if it is now owned by Asmodee.
Premium is to show support for the site, but more so is used as a way to raise money to give back to game publishers and to entice them to want to have their games on BGA.
The #1 concern from the user base is new games. Given they release a game about every 2 days now, and the availability of the top rated games has improved drastically. I would say they are hitting their own goals.

There are discord servers and and the general messages to start a new game.

Take it as a sign that the servers tend to creak in the evening. They've got their hands full just keeping up with the current demand.

They can't make users out of thin air, and they can't force them to play the game you want to play. There are lots of tables created ALL the time - just join one. OR bring your friends.

Quite a relief to finally find a post that actually makes sense in this thread.