Not seeing an async game conclude is a bad user experience

[letullius]

Hi all,

Recently gotten into async gaming on BGA with family on another continent. Previously, my experience mostly focused on live games.
I was baffled when I noticed that async games will just END without any conclusion and just disappear (besides a small notification).

Expected behavior:
- (Game concludes on my opponents turn)
- I get a notification as usual
- I enter the game and see the last turn of my opponent play out
- The game concludes

Current behavior:
- (Game concludes on my opponents turn)
- The game ends and vanishes from my feed
- I have to click on my profile and on the !-button to see if a game concluded
- I click on it, and click on the respective game
- The end game screen loads
- there I have to click on "replay last turn"
- I can see the last turn of what happened

Is this on the roadmap somewhere? It's such a detrimental user experience.

[ufm]

Many players play tens or hundreds of turn-based games simultaneously.
Leaving all finished games to be manually checked one by one is actually a bad idea.
If needed, you can request notifications via mail as well.

[letullius]

Different user journeys. Make it a setting you can turn off.

[GTSchemer]

I am an engineer and a BGA freelance developer. From a cost / benefit perspective:

Cost:
* Major amount of BGA effort to integrate this (would need to freeze all async games or preserve their states at a pre-victory moment -- currently async games automatically archive after a brief amount of time).
* Possible development effort both on BGA and freelance / volunteer side to make sure all games are compatible with this new system.
* Will annoy the vast majority of async users, who would feel BGA is making changes that harm the user experience further.

Benefit:
* Some users may like seeing the end of the game without loading a replay, even though the game is async.


I struggle to imagine anyone approving the funding.

[letullius]

Thank you for chiming in.

It's a strong enough negative experience for me that I wanted to provide that feedback as a data point. Of course, before sth like this is entertained, one would have to see what the split is between Live and Async games and of those async games, how many are more casual users, and of those, how many perceive that as a pain point.

Not knowing much about the architecture, so obv take it with a grain of salt:
The base information seems to be there already (I can replay the last turn after going back to the game), so wondering whether instead of freezing the state and interjecting before the end of the game, it could instead be forwarded to that "replay" option.

[nik592]

I mean, I usually become aware of the game end via the emails I get, but I also have on occasion made a point to check the notification menu when I access the site, same as my games played. Yeah, I have to open each game that finished in a new tab and check what happened (ie. I can't just have the site take me from one game to the next), but it's not that difficult to do.

Not necessarily arguing that your suggestion is a bad one (though there are some obvious cons that others have pointed out), simply that it's not the difficult to just check your notifications on each login, and additionally, enable the game-end email if you want another indication that a game has finished.

[FSKFSK]

You do get a notification when a turn-based game concludes. It shows up in a different place than the "it's your turn" notification.