Dear BGA, it's time to fix the arena silent launch-expel problem.

[LesserJester]

Dear BGA. Will you please fix the way arena matches can start without notifying you and then allow the opponent to expel with 0% played. I'm online. I'm at my desk. No notification, nothing until i get expelled. What gives? This bug has been mentioned several times and the report is completely ignored. Why? Stop mucking around with EL0 tinkering and fix this. It's more a form of cheating than any ELO hoarding. It penalises players to lose ELO and Arena points when they don't know a game has begun. It also gives the expeller cheap points they shouldn't receive. That is far more detrimental to your site than someone getting consecutive wins ELO.

[Kayvon]

There may be some misunderstanding. You've posted this in the user discussion forum, but phrased it as a message to BGA. May I suggest emailing them directly or filing an official site suggestion?

The forum is a great place to bounce suggestion ideas off of other users, but not a great way to reach BGA directly.

If I've misunderstood and you're writing just to rant and get it off your chest, feel free to disregard.

[LesserJester]

This area is called suggestions. Is it not the place to suggest BGA fix actual problems with their site? The bug report hasn't been responded to so what else am I meant to do?

From my experience they don't answer emails btw. They just leave you hanging. Forever.

[Kayvon]

This area is called suggestions.

Correct. This is where players discuss suggestions with each other. It's a great approach to thinking through some of the ideas before suggesting them formally.

From the phrasing of your first post, you're not discussing anything with users. You're writing a "Dear BGA" letter. This is not the place to do that.

[KenFin1]

Well I think it's a great suggestion LJ and I would like to see this implemented too. I've posted in other places saying as much. Not sure why Kayvon is responding that way. It looks like a suggestion clear enough to me, and I agree that arena launching could be greatly improved. Following some previous back and forth with people i think the practical suggestion to improve it was rather to provide a manual accept (with anonymised details) that way people can't back out just because they don't like their opponent (they won't know who it is at that stage), and afk players don't get expelled because they wouldn't be able to accept and hence the game would not start to begin with, and the in-game expel ability would not need to be changed. I think this might have been both in a forum thread and in a bug/suggestion report, but my custom CSS is stopping me from accessing that area to check that at the moment and I don't have time to unload it at the moment.

Kayvon I see you're a developer. Do you have anything constructive to say about their suggestion / my alternative? Would they be possible to implement or is this tied up in another bit of the BGA code that the original developer holds all the detailed knowledge of?

[LesserJester]

This area is called suggestions.

Correct. This is where players discuss suggestions with each other. It's a great approach to thinking through some of the ideas before suggesting them formally.

From the phrasing of your first post, you're not discussing anything with users. You're writing a "Dear BGA" letter. This is not the place to do that.

Meh, semantics. Tomato, tomayto. Other users seem to be able to cope with the format. Would it help if I re-title it?

[Kayvon]

KenFin, I think that suggestion makes sense. I coudn't opine as to how easy it would be to change the backend to support that, though. I do game development, which has no insight to the BGA stuff before the game is running.

To my original response, I'm just trying to clear up a misconception about contacting BGA through the user forums. "Dear fellow players" makes a lot more sense that "Dear BGA", since that's who you're talking to. Rince they're not participating in the discussion, it's not much different than starting with, "Dear King Charles III," except that Charles probably doesn't code.