This site is so mediocre

[Lucy Tania]

Games with reported bugs that go uncorrected for years.
Absentee developers.
More and more games with no improvements to what already exists.
A ‘volunteer’ model with no accountability for the owners.
Same pointless karma system for years and years.
Sloppy and ill-thought out user interface and placeholder text with no thought behind it.
A site with no vision.

Edit:

Don't waste your time telling me that the site is good, actually. I said it was mediocre, not bad.

I've both played a lot and paid a lot, and I would have done neither if the site was outright bad.

The mediocrity is 100% the responsibility of the owners of the site. Obviously volunteers make nearly everything run and deserve almost all the credit for what is successful on BGA.

And that is the problem. Have you seen the owners put ANYTHING into site quality?

Do they review the site to ensure the user experience is optimal? No.
Do they invest in the quality of gameplay, hire experienced developers and programmers to review code and perform quality control? No.

Almost everything is exactly the same as when they took over from the previous owners. They are happy just raking in the cash and putting all the work on volunteers, who they pay nothing for. They haven't made a single improvement.

No vision. If you are happy with stasis and good enough, feel free to mindlessly wallow in it. But if no one every asks for anything better they certainly will not provide it.

[ufm]

https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... 12#p189412

[nik592]

So if you feel there's somewhere better to play, or it makes you not want to play here at all, you're welcome to do either. I don't disagree with some of your points, and there's plenty of room for improvement, but that doesn't change the fact that I get a lot out of BGA and appreciate what the (mostly volunteer) devs put into implementing the games.

[TexArcher]

Now here's the good side:

-- A great selection of games, with new ones being added regularly.
-- A huge player pool, so you get to play against a lot of different strategies if you're the type who like to play a game 100+ times.
-- Some other sites are turn-based only. I appreciate that we have the option to play real-time or turn-based here, and even to set the speed of turn-based games in moves-per-day.
-- The vast majority of the games run flawlessly, with well-designed interfaces.

I could go on, but that should be enough. Sure, this place isn't perfect, but it's very good for just a few bucks a month.

[RicardoRix]

https://boardgamearena.com/player?id=84188225
38000 games played, that's quite a statistic.

While I lament frequently myself about BGA, it's worth noticing that the site does not run itself, and is extremely complex.

gg BGA, on balance they deserve more praise than complaints.

I fixed all the bugs in Troyes recently, and added an undo, maybe you missed it.

[Exotic Dreams]

The site has room for improvement. Unfortunately I have noticed an increased amount of error messages popping up lately.

That said to share my praise of BGA:
-I truly appreciate being able to play here for free with the options that are available for non premium members. They could have made it paid account only access.
- I appreciate how while there's a link for a premium account and if you try to do something that requires a premium account, this link pops up again to remind you.
Buying a premium account is not shoved in your face all of the time. This does happen on another webpage I'm involved in. Not sure if I should call them out here.
-There's an amazing variety of games.
-The overall layout and features of this site seem quite well designed.


I am involved in another site that does not have any free accounts beyond getting a trial account to try that site out before either leaving or buying a paid account. You have to pay to play otherwise. I get much more irritated when there's bugs and glitches there since everyone pays to play.

[ufm]

I fixed all the bugs in Troyes recently, and added an undo, maybe you missed it.

The play record is focused on Targi and RtfG, and those games have some glaring persistent bugs.

[RicardoRix]

I fixed all the bugs in Troyes recently, and added an undo, maybe you missed it.

The play record is focused on Targi and RtfG, and those games have some glaring persistent bugs.

Not quite the gripe they were singing here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhbObZEF0Mc

I presume you'd like to be praised for the work you do ufm, rather than griped at for the work you don't.

[ufm]

I fixed all the bugs in Troyes recently, and added an undo, maybe you missed it.

The play record is focused on Targi and RtfG, and those games have some glaring persistent bugs.

Not quite the gripe they were singing here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhbObZEF0Mc

I presume you'd like to be praised for the work you do ufm, rather than griped at for the work you don't.

No. I meant the op doesn't seem to care at all about games they don't play and how the platform system works.
There were many old games which found a new maintenance dev and got some updates (including your update as well).
However, players who play other old games don't see the changes, because nothing happened for them.

[brh2113]

Now here's the good side:

-- A great selection of games, with new ones being added regularly.
-- A huge player pool, so you get to play against a lot of different strategies if you're the type who like to play a game 100+ times.
-- Some other sites are turn-based only. I appreciate that we have the option to play real-time or turn-based here, and even to set the speed of turn-based games in moves-per-day.
-- The vast majority of the games run flawlessly, with well-designed interfaces.

I could go on, but that should be enough. Sure, this place isn't perfect, but it's very good for just a few bucks a month.

Amen! Absolutely there are things that could be improved [1], but also:

- Free to play for most games, free to play if a premium acct hosts for all games, and cheap to buy premium regardless
- Ladder system that shows who the expert players are
- Ability to study replays from those players at any time to learn from the best!

I love this website and get so much joy playing games together with my long-distance friends, as well as strangers!


[1] Not sure where the right place to post feedback is, but off the top of my head:
- Refreshing the page seems to reload the full game art assets from the server, which could be cached for a faster page load, particularly on mobile?
- Would be nice if the clocks were configured for better increment time (lower increment per move, higher base of starting time and time bank limit). This is particularly nice for games like Terraforming Mars or Great Western Trail that have a lot of analysis on the opening position before the first move, or generally have fast per-turn play but once or twice a game you want to really stop and think hard about a critical move.
- Would be nice to "step in" to a game and replay from that point on for more detailed analysis. Requires using psuedo-RNG with seeds instead of "true" RNG for most games though.
- For devs, would be nice if there were git commits and change history on the game source code, instead of an FTP server rsync; as it is it seems hard to collaborate toolchain wise (but I haven't done much dev work).
- Elo system would be nice if it didn't have the floor at 100, so it would be more of a true elo system without introducing inflation over time.

All things considered those are all minor improvements, though; the website as it stands is fantastic IMO!