Will BGA ever care about its customers?

[Tof63]

Many of you have expressed your frustration with the “Return to Main” link change, but I don't think that reflects the opinion of the majority of users. I think the new behavior suits the vast majority of players in fact...

Your approach is wrong. Don't guess what others think, listen to their feedback. If the majority of those who give feedback at the proper channel (the Forum) say it's a bad change, then you go with that. You do not get to decide the opinion of those who do not give feedback.

Think about elections. If, let's say, 60% of people vote in a given election, then officials do not get to say 'we think the remaining 40% would have voted this way or that way'. That would sound pretty ridiculous, right? Well...

Your comment about elections is completely inappropriate.
I have 25 years of experience in software development, and my experience is that a satisfied user doesn't tell you anything. It's very, very rare for someone to come up to you and say, “Hey, I really like this change!”
I understand the double frustration of seeing an unwanted change and not feeling listened to, but I put myself in the developers' shoes: you can't satisfy all users, and yet I continue to try every day.
You are free to try the solution with the link I provided (which also offers many other settings to improve the site)... or not

[Boudica of Celtia]

You are free to try the solution with the link I provided (which also offers many other settings to improve the site)... or not

the link is french. is the app also french? and can it be used on mobile?

[FrankJones]

Making money off you is a bit of a stretch. You have played over 12000 games since being a member in December 21.

Assuming you have paid for premium that entire time and BGA get all of the money from it (which they don't, there will be transaction fees) you pay less than 2 cents per game, and that's to pay for salaries, framework, servers, royalties. They aren't making a lot from you.

You're making many assumptions there ...

To your point, communication could be better from them. But what have they done that makes you feel they have competent for you?

The deletion of a legacy game on friendly (unlimited time per turn) because we hadn't played in a while.

We wanted to take a break from the game. Having months worth of progress deleted without notice is just the latest annoyance from BGA. Was there any notice of this changed policy? Any discussion with the userbase? Of course not. Just one day, your game tables start disappearing. Like i said - contempt.

I believe it is stated somewhere that friendly turn-based games are ended if nobody makes a move in 40 days.

Taking a break is a bit different from "taking a 40-day break". Server storage space is not infinite, so they cull games that seem to have been abandoned.

[Tof63]

You are free to try the solution with the link I provided (which also offers many other settings to improve the site)... or not

the link is french. is the app also french? and can it be used on mobile?

Here is the english link :
https://en.doc.boardgamearena.com/ChromeExtension
(The doc is not completely up to date, some new features have been added)

The extension is available for android devices, using browsers that allows extensions (Quetta, Firefox mobile, Kiwi... I personally recommend Quetta)

The current supported languages are French, English and German

[nik592]

Many of you have expressed your frustration with the “Return to Main” link change, but I don't think that reflects the opinion of the majority of users. I think the new behavior suits the vast majority of players in fact...

Your approach is wrong. Don't guess what others think, listen to their feedback. If the majority of those who give feedback at the proper channel (the Forum) say it's a bad change, then you go with that. You do not get to decide the opinion of those who do not give feedback.

I'm not sure if you're thinking Tof is an employee of BGA - he's not and probably listens to feedback way better than anyone who does work for BGA (in terms of his work on his extension). In fact, many bug bears introduced by BGA have been resolvable by use of the extension, and he's always open to adding new features (where it's workable) suggested in the forum thread.

[thejuice027]

I had great hopes when Asmodee purchased BGA,

dude, Asmodee has been poor to it's customers since before BGA so idk why you had high hopes.

[h_illes]

Your comment about elections is completely inappropriate.
I have 25 years of experience in software development, and my experience is that a satisfied user doesn't tell you anything. It's very, very rare for someone to come up to you and say, “Hey, I really like this change!”
I understand the double frustration of seeing an unwanted change and not feeling listened to, but I put myself in the developers' shoes: you can't satisfy all users, and yet I continue to try every day.

But if the general approach is 'we know best', why bother asking for feedback? BGA didn't have to do that, they could have just said 'this is how things are from now on'. But instead, they asked for feedback and promised they would act upon it.

I'm not sure if you're thinking Tof is an employee of BGA - he's not and probably listens to feedback way better than anyone who does work for BGA (in terms of his work on his extension). In fact, many bug bears introduced by BGA have been resolvable by use of the extension, and he's always open to adding new features (where it's workable) suggested in the forum thread.

It was clear he's not an employee. I know about the extension, and I respect it highly.

[nik592]

It was clear he's not an employee. I know about the extension, and I respect it highly.

Then I don't get why you'd summarise his approach as guessing what others think and not listening to feedback. For the most part I don't disagree with Tof's perspective - mostly when software or websites work the way users want they don't tell you they're happy with it, they barely even notice. It doesn't occur to them that features have been designed a certain way, it just feels like it does what it's supposed to do so they just get on with using it. It's when things aren't working how they want that they're more likely to speak up. Every now and again you get a user so impressed with a feature that they thank you for it, but that's even more rare than those who actually complain. And I've also seen where a change is made, some users complain, the decision is reversed and even more users complain about that (even though they never commented on liking the original change until it was taken away).

I get where you're coming from about BGA not accepting feedback and having this weird culture of making decisions for the better of the community and when people point out flaws in those decisions and/or suggest better ways, they ignore that. There's a big difference between that, than there is to responding to a request for a feature with "well, I'm not actually sure most users really want that, but I'll put it in as an option anyway for the few that do..."

And also as a software dev, there's actually a big proportion of users who don't know what they want. There's nothing quite so frustrating as putting time and effort into a feature only to have a customer then tell you they actually wanted something different. Some of the feedback on the forums reflects that - people who've looked at a feature that they don't like and suggested it should work in the opposite way because it would have suited them in a specific moment, and completely ignoring the other impacts that making such a change would have. I don't put most of the feedback on ELO changes (which I know is your biggest issue with lack of considering feedback by BGA) into that category - it's fairly well considered by those commenting, and really should have been addressed by BGA if they care about their user base.

[FrankJones]

What nik592 is saying is obviously accurate, right?

When people call customer service: "Hi, how are you doing today"? I hate when they ask that. I'm not having a good day, obviously, because I'm about to waste time trying to get a customer support rep to fix a problem that I wish had not happened in the first place. Do people ever answer that question by saying, "I'm doing great, everything's fine, and I just wanted to call to tell you that"?

When people ask to speak to the manager: Same thing. Most of the time, it's because there is a problem.

I help manage the Bug report forum for Terraforming Mars. For every 1 post in the general forum giving thanks or praise to anyone who works on the Terraforming Mars game, there are 1000 bug reports or complaints (most of them nonsense).

Because of this, developers must be very careful which requests get implemented (as nik592 noted).

If I see 4 people upvote a suggestion in the bug forum, so what? Even if 10 people upvote it. Who cares? That means there are thousands of players who either don't care or who would possibly downvote the suggestion if such a thing were possible.

[xate]

We wanted to take a break from the game. Having months worth of progress deleted without notice is just the latest annoyance from BGA. Was there any notice of this changed policy? Any discussion with the userbase? Of course not. Just one day, your game tables start disappearing. Like i said - contempt.

From our FAQ:

How long does a game table stay open if nobody is playing anymore?
When nobody has made a move at a game table for a while, it is closed automatically to free up server resources:
A real-time table is closed automatically if more than 4 hours have elapsed since its creation and if all players at this table are now offline.
A turn-based table is closed automatically if no move has been made in 40 days.