Major improvement about quitting players

[Liallan]

You perhaps shouldn't make some of the assumptions you have... I don't have to assume you're referring to someone like me, but I am one of the ones being harsh so it seems to fit.

I know how much time it takes to code all this up

Thank you! Some commenters really don't seem to, or maybe they wouldn't be so harsh...

Yes, I'm aware that it's time consuming, but taking time doesn't automatically make something good. While I can appreciate something taking time and people working voluntarily and all that, I really, really seriously dislike this and I can't pretend it doesn't bother me just because it took time.

With the old system, you would have had to expulse him, then continue to the end with the zombie skipping just the same and get no ELO, or agree to abandon the game and get no ELO. How is the new system not better in regards to this case? It has been precisely set in place for this kind of occurrence (rage quit or player not taking its turn near the end of the game).

Sigh. And you say you're listening. It also affects games that do not fit those circumstances. In turn-based games, people are often abandoning a game quite soon after the game starts. I'm not convinced that turn-based games were considered. Now you can't expel someone, and sometimes that is precisely what we would prefer to do. Waiting 5 minutes in a live game so you can skip is certainly not the same as having to wait days and days for a turn-based game, with no way to expel anyone. It is also my understanding that one person can choose to skip someone's turn, and maybe I don't want to do that.

Over half my games get abandoned, and NONE of them were the last turn or two because someone was losing... nearly all of them were early in the game.

and it doesn't seem like anyone is listening to us.

Really? The system has been adjusted on several accounts since the first post in this thread, and a FAQ (http://boardgamearena.com/#!doc/Game_clock) has been set up by sourisdudesert to track the current state of affairs (some commenters clearly didn't read it, or didn't check for changes before posting).[/quote]

I read it. It has one new section, which mentions your two options. Which does not address most of the stuff I have personally talked about in terms of this new system. It does not address what I wrote above. If all the quitters only quit because they were losing towards the end of the game, I might see the point. I think it seriously ruins the turn-based situation, and I know I am not alone in this opinion.

As to not "listening" -- personally, I'd rather see more responses on the forums. It isn't just this thread - it's everything. When no one responds, you feel like no one is listening. That was something I noticed fairly quickly about this site versus other places I have been to.

Some posters seem to think BGA is a multinational hydra with lots of VPs of everything and business angels struggling to get us to take their money, and that we owe them the world just for showing up and having a game. In a sense, it's flattering, but still... nowhere near the truth.

I don't think you owe me the world just for showing up. You have a right to run the place any way you see fit. But just because you don't owe me the world doesn't mean I don't have a right to an opinion. But I don't have to stay any more than you have to listen to me. Most of my personal comments have not been about bugs. And I'm not the only one feeling like this - I was just looking at yet another complaint that we have to wait days on someone and can no longer expel people, and that it "ruined" the turn-based, and hasn't played anything for a while. (I honestly have no clue why the ability to expel someone was taken away.)

From everything I can tell, you make decisions for real time and then simply port them into the turn-based, which doesn't always work right. I do realize it's a lot more work to make the real time and turn based completely different -- but you guys are the ones who decided to add the turn-based and "make it the best."

[chrm]

IIRC there was a message that I will not lose points for this game, if I concede. But I couldn't concede, so I quit. Was that wrong? Is there any other option besides conceding and quiting?

You can't concede a multi-player game. However, on a two player, you should lose ELO points for conceding because you're "agreeing to lose" so to speak. But you should not have quit, no. That gets you a leave penalty.

What you need to do is offer a group abandon. Everyone agreeing to abandon doesn't give anyone penalties.

My options for ending a game are 'concede' 'abandon' and 'quit'? I think the message after one player times out uses another word like "You can 'leave' without losing points". Also the dialog for ending the game doesn't change if one player already timed out. That is kinda confusing. I was looking for the option to "'leave' without losing points".

No that doesn't sound normal. Are you sure all 3 came from this one game? You can only get two penalties off one game: one for leaving and one for being over-time. (You haven't mentioned being over time.) You could also get a red thumb, which is kind of like getting another penalty. But 3 quit penalties?

I'm sure. You can check it if you look at my profile. Here is a screenshot:



I think right after the game I had only one quit penality. Later that day suddenly I had three for the same game.

[friglis]

Since you have put in place that new system of giving all the time in the world for players to play their moves instead of the other player just being able to kick them out, half of my turn-based games are basically on a halt... For the NNmit games, the players have over 100 days to do their moves, and after that, we'll skip their turn, and they'll just get more time to do their moves. Seasons, Jaipur, Tokaido, and other games are the same, players have a number of days to play their move (i.e. 5 days at first), and afterwards, every time we skip their turn, they are given another 24 hours to play their next move. So a Seasons game with 4 players, with one who is not playing and for which we have to skip turns every 24 hours, is taking way over one month to play. Same with Tokaido, Jaipur, and NNmit is worse! Hanabi has a very interesting way of working with stalled players. It will discard a card for them if we skip a turn, so actually skipping turns is NOT an option! So we just have to leave the game stalled forever.

This new system does not work for turned-based (as the excuse of bad internet connection is moot here!), and it just makes all these games stalled, and makes your gamers not be so active on your site to play as many games as they used to because of all the stalled games. It is very frustrating. I am sure a lot of people do not have a schedule that allows them to play live all the time, so I vote for changing the way this works for turn-based games. Thank you.

[glitter and doom]

I still have trouble understanding how this new system works.
Why did I get a time penalty when I have 32h14 to spare?

[chrisa]

Hello,

I have already mentioned this, but nobody seemed to notice: in some 2-player turn-based games, when we skip the turn of a player who has not played for 5 days or more, we lose ELOs and he earns some. For example, see: http://en.boardgamearena.com/#!table?table=13121207
There's a bug report: #2260.

So please, give us a way to expel those players that join tables just to see what's happening around and never play!

Chrisa

[Krystal]

well it says that some new changes are

* As soon as a player is out of time (ex: because he left the game), you can make him skip his turn.
* If this player get back in the game, he can continue to play normally.

the problem is that the second a player is out of time, no matter whether he plays or not, he can be expelled at any time until the end of the game. so he can continue to play normally if the other players allow him. and how will he play knowing that even in the last second of the game, while playing, he could be expelled by some prick? this is completely wrong! what do you do about it?

[derscheid]

well it says that some new changes are

* As soon as a player is out of time (ex: because he left the game), you can make him skip his turn.
* If this player get back in the game, he can continue to play normally.

the problem is that the second a player is out of time, no matter whether he plays or not, he can be expelled at any time until the end of the game. so he can continue to play normally if the other players allow him. and how will he play knowing that even in the last second of the game, while playing, he could be expelled by some prick? this is completely wrong! what do you do about it?

If the player is at negative time, he has absolutely nothing to complain about. (Especially if they've been irritating me in the chat.)

Say you're playing 6 Nimmt with a 5 minute bank. Someone's playing slowly, and taking about 55 seconds a turn, every turn to everyone else's 15 seconds. Eventually, 9 people sit around for 5 minutes as the slow person times out. Someone will chat "huh, should we kick?" and the slow player rejoins, plays, gets a minute of refreshed time, taking them to 45 seconds positive. They then stare into space and time out again. One of the other players ejects them, "Hey!" the slow guy complains. "I was trying to play!"

Bear in mind, this person has wasted 15+ minutes of 9 players at this point, 45 seconds at a time. If I hit the eject button, I'm not the prick. If this is trying, try harder. That's some useful feedback they can use as a player.

(This goes for me, too. If you're in a game and I'm not playing, HIT THAT BUTTON AND KICK ME. I'd rather take the penalty than feel guilty for holding up the game. Gaming is fun, waiting on me's not fun-so I don't expect you to do it.)

Also, since penalties go away after a while, it's not like the occasional penalty is even painful for most players*. I'm gonna play 60+ games of RftG this month, plus a bunch of 6 Nimmt!, I think I can manage to absorb a couple of kick penalties.






* People who only play turn-based Through the Ages are affected the most by spurious penalties. However, since penalties only prevent you from joining games with limits, and not creating games, this is not a huge problem.

[volkerk]

I find that Quinarbre's important point about vacations has been pretty much ignored in the discussion so far:

For turn-based games, it's not totally fair to rely on the single fact that time rules are specified from the beginning. I'll explain with an actual example.

I'm currently involved in a Stone Age game which is set to one turn per day, and so far every player in it has managed to keep up that rhythm, so we're all at 5 days left and we're all abiding by the time rules that were set in the beginning.
However, that game began 2 months ago (which is normal considering the number of players and the speed we agreed to), and we're probably going to play for about one month more. If one of us decides to take a one-week vacation without access to internet, a 3-month game is ruined whereas everyone has played by the rules most of the time, and no one can do anything about it. I think everyone would agree it's a bit abusive to ask such a commitment to people :
- you don't know in advance how long the game will take
- not everyone knows what they'll do during their weekends and vacations in the next 3 months (at least I don't !)

So, if turn-based games do skip your turn automatically, at least there should be a "vacation mode" like someone suggested in another thread. Of course some boundaries like "no more than consecutive 2 weeks of absence" or "warn 1 week in advance" could be enforced.

Seconded, thirded, ...

It's totally normal in long-running turn-based games like Stone Age, Puerto Rico, Caylus, or Tobago that someone will disappear for days or even weeks at some point during the many-month-long game. And since BGA has no vacation mode there's no way to indicate in all your games that you're on vacation, so in order to even just politely notify my fellow players that I'd be gone I couldn't think of anything better than putting a message in my profile - which of course nobody reads when they're about to skip me. It's definitely not a good solution to go into each game I'm playing and post a note there - first it takes a ton of work (and time you may not have when going on a trip), and second those messages scroll down the screen quickly due to game updates and buddy updates, so my fellow players may not even read them.

In turn-based games a vacation mode is essential, there needs to be a distinction between "I don't care to play anymore" and "I'm temporarily unable to play, sorry". I see no reason why someone should get penalized for going on vacation - and either having to quit all my games before the trip or being skipped/expelled from all of them during my absence is a great way not only to kill my reputation, but also my interest in playing on BGA, period. I'll just stick with Yucata and BAJ, which don't needlessly pressure you. Unfortunately they don't have several of the above-mentioned games

[lindalou]

This didn't help me any today. I was playing Puerto Rico earlier with a player who went offline in middle of the game. I was finally able to skip that player after getting several "server found error" messages, but then was unable to do anything else. Even tho I asked for and received suggestions from other members, who did try to help, ultimately I was forced to actually quit the game in order to get out of it...which of course earned ME the penalty instead of the player who left the game. I tried to expel the player, but kept getting a message that the server found an error. Also go that message when I tried to go ahead and make another play in the game, hoping that I could keep skipping the other player...plus I did leave the game open for over an hour, hoping the player would come back and formally abandon the game, but no such luck

[The Glen]

[*]Skip his turn, then abandon the game with no penalty to you. As stated in the FAQ (http://boardgamearena.com/#!doc/Game_clock), players whose turn was skipped automatically vote yes when a player proposes to abandon the game.[/list]
I
Een

this worked for me
-cheers