About the lobby

[LightKnight]

Today has seen a perfect illustration of a recurrent problem with BGA lobby, which is the double problem of players refusing to start a game but not leaving a table, and of players staying admin of a table without ever accepting to start the game. The latter is what occurred today.
As of the moment I'm writing this post, a table with such an unmovable admin has remained for 1 hour, parasiting the lobby, trapping players, who have to react quickly when the table stops the starting process to click on "quit the table". The table might keep that way for a very long time, and block and frustrate a lot of players still.
(I myself was stopped for about 3 minutes)
One thing about Catan that makes this even more likely to happen is the huge playerbase: people keep coming in, making it more difficult to solve these situations (at the second players would leave those kinds of tables, new players would join)
Edit: after just a little more than 1 hour, the table finally was cancelled.

[Jellby]

If a player refuses to accept and does not leave, the table administrator can expel them (and they cannot join again without an invitation).

If a table administrator is not responding, players can simply join another table. If the administrator is offline, other players can expel them. I'm not sure exactly what the condition is, but sometimes I see an "expel player" link for an unresponsive administrator, I'm guessing it's when they're offline or have been for some time.

None of this is specific to Catan, though.

[Romain672]

I could be wrong but I think either:
- the table administrator is disconnected: any person can kick the table administrator, and if there is another prenium player the table will still exist, else the table will end
- the table administrator is connected: then the first time the table is full, the pregame will start. And the other times, the pregame should not start

As a bonus, the table is hidden (you need an extra click to see it) for those not in automatic lobby.

[LightKnight]

- the table administrator is connected: then the first time the table is full, the pregame will start. And the other times, the pregame should not start

The pregame did start.
Dozens and dozens of time for one hour, trapping a lot of players (for about just 2 minutes each on average, I suppose, but it was still frustrating, and you had to react quickly once someone would cancel a pregame to immediately click on "quit the game").
Also, that was just me, a veteran in BGA, being trapped for like 2 or 3 minutes*, so what about some people who know little of BGA and want to play some Catan, and they face this weird situation and don't understand what's going on?
*: to be fair, I was trying to find a few seconds to message the admin of the table to try and solve the situation, until I just quit the table.

And I think I'm not the only one on BGA that regularly faces issues with Catan specifically. I am not entirely sure why it's this game specifically. There are other games where I have to wait for quite some time to find some players (if ever) (obviously not blaming BGA on that one, just to clarify), and others where you have a similar playerbase as Catan, like Seven Wonders, and where you don't typically encounter such issues. For some reason, Catan attracts these, to some degree.

[LightKnight]

(to be fair, though it looked like a kind of bug making the prebug appear systematically, an alternative explanation could be that, for some weird reason, the admin was trolling everybody; but doing that for one hour requires excellent patience)