Why can't everyone have their preferred color?

[flamesplash]

If two players have green as their preferred color, why can't they both have that on their own displays?

The point of BGA is that you're in separate spaces and therefore not looking at the same physical components.

It seems like if all players want to be green, they should be able to see that on their own displays.

[nik592]

One argument against this is that it then becomes confusing when trying to discuss the game state.

"Hey, why did the green player just block me?"
"Huh? You ARE the green player!"

But also, I assume that programmatically, it'd be a fair amount of work for minimal benefit really. I love playing red and I honestly get super confused when I play non-red IRL (I often start trying to play with the red pieces), but BGA prevents me from having that confusion (mostly), and really, it's just a colour. I live with playing a different colour when red isn't available, so why not because someone else wants to play it occasionally?

[dschingis27]

I already made a longer take on why certain things are not implemented here: https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... 28#p244028

"Why" is a weird way to ask for this. Because the answer is trivial, it is "priorities" most of the times. You have a fair point but there are countless wishes about this website that are more important.

[flamesplash]

I already made a longer take on why certain things are not implemented here: https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... 28#p244028

"Why" is a weird way to ask for this. Because the answer is trivial, it is "priorities" most of the times. You have a fair point but there are countless wishes about this website that are more important.

Why isn't that weird when you consider UX design which should come before engineering prioritization. It's certainly possibly that there are material ux concerns around this, and if there are, my question is open to those understandings

[dschingis27]

UX design which should come before engineering prioritization

Well, UX design and engineering go hand in hand. For each UX design feature you want, someone has to engineer it. With the question "Why can't?", you make it sound so absolute - as if it is clear that someone decided that it can't. But that's most likely not the case - it just turned out the way it is and to change it now requires engineering.

What you might not know is that for many years, the core of the whole BGA website was build as a passion project by two guys "in their basement". So I always first assume that some suboptimal design was simply not thought about because there were so many other things to think about.

[Shivaware]

Feel free to vote for (or against) this suggestion: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=31224

This feature has been happily working on "another site" for many years now. I imagine a new player might be surprised ONCE the first time they exclaim "Guys! We gotta stop blue!" and find out it works differently than they expected.

This feature also didn't exist in the early days of this other site, so some old games there still have non-standard behaviour. BGA has amassed an unbelievable amount of technical debt here. It's not likely that existing games could easily be updated to have this feature, so it would probably only exist in newly developed games. This is somewhat similar to how older games usually have no support for undo (another standard feature at the other site), but it is more common in new games. If BGA does start introducing this color feature on new games, it might make sense to show a warning dialog the first time someone plays a game. Or they can just scan people's chat message for colors in addition to swearing and mentions of other sites.

[Exotic Dreams]

I had assumed that because the reason for the colors in games is to tell players apart.
You can tell at a glance for instance which color meeples are on a board. Fo r instance playing carcassonne, you see red players meeples on the board. If two players had red meeples, it would become confusing because there would be two players with red meeples on the board.

For games where the only difference is the color of the name, then I assume it wouldn't matter and your suggestion would make more sense.

[Strode]

I had assumed that because the reason for the colors in games is to tell players apart.
You can tell at a glance for instance which color meeples are on a board. Fo r instance playing carcassonne, you see red players meeples on the board. If two players had red meeples, it would become confusing because there would be two players with red meeples on the board.

The point is that I could see my pieces as red and yours as blue, and you could see yours as red and mine as blue. We're not looking at the same screen.

[FrankJones]

Why would it be difficult for both players to see Green on their individual screens (while still preserving two different colors for viewing the game replay)? I wouldn't think that would be a difficult programming task at all.

[nik592]

You're introducing an extra variable into what each player sees. Now instead of one user interface, you have 4 different ones (or more). Yes, it's only a colour, and hopefully style sheets can handle some of it, but I'm not sure what happens with in game pieces and graphics. I'd assume you'd easily end up with bugs where two players had the same colour on one person's screen. And now you've got players reporting bugs that a developer can't as easily reproduce, as it may depend on them having the same colour preferences as the player reporting the bug.

Not knowing anything about how BGA is coded, it might be easier than I'm thinking, but I spend a lot of my time trying to work out why a bug that's been reported doesn't replicate for me (not for BGA, this is in my own job). Every time you increase the variability between what I see and what you see, you increase the chances of a bug in one of those views and not the other. But as I say, maybe BGA is coded in a way that would make it easier than I'm thinking.