Why can't everyone have their preferred color?

[BartholomewBart]

It'd only work of it were 1v1 games. In group games it'll lead to confusion as stated here.

[Jellby]

Why can't? Because it's not implemented.
Why isn't it implemented? Probably because it wasn't a priority at the beginning and it isn't now. (But who knows, maybe it's in the works and will be available with the next update.)
Why isn't it a priority? I would say there are other much more important issues.

It is however, something that could potentially be done with a browser extension.

[flamesplash]

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.

Since we're having a nuanced software design discussion. That's not categorically right. You can absolutely design something without a full implementation. So consider my question with that in mind. Is there anything in the design of a site like BGA that would make my suggestion a bad experience for users? It's very possible someone did decide it wasn't a good user feature. If you disagree with the premise of my question, the best approach would be respect my question and move on rather than try to shut down my curiosity.

Engineering can and should come second as part of a negotiation on what is actually feasible and where design may need to change because of computer/implementation limitations.

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.

Makes perfect sense as to why they may not have considered or prioritized the feature. They are however more than 2 guys in their basement now, and were acquired by a few years ago now, so in a similar vein to Google being two guys in a garage, they aren't stuck in the past as to why they can't make updates, and clearly they have.

[FrankJones]

I'm not a professional developer, but I have some programming experience and knowledge. I don't see why this would be difficult at all; seems to me it could be accomplished with a few simple if/else blocks.

As for why it does not exist as a feature here, I would guess that Jellby's answer is correct. Other things have been deemed higher priority.

Or, more accurately, for any specific game, such as Carcassonne (where I think the display colors of the meeples IS very important, since the red meeples blend in with the color of the city tiles and are thus difficult to see), the individual developer for that game would need to modify the code. And perhaps that's a big ask, since it would essentially be volunteer work.

I would recommend someone write a suggestion report in the bug/suggestion forum for a specific game and see what response the developer gives.

[FrankJones]

It'd only work of it were 1v1 games. In group games it'll lead to confusion as stated here.

Would it necessarily? Why? If it could be done in a 1v1 game, where, for example, maybe player "John Doe" sees his own pieces Blue and the opponent's pieces Green, but the opponent sees his own pieces blue and John Doe's pieces Green, then in theory the same could be applied with more than 2 players.

Where it could potentially be confusing is analysis/discussion of a game replay, but in the game replay, anyone viewing it (including the people who played the game) would see the 3 (or more) distinct colors, that way, when posting something such as "I'm not sure the move by the blue player at move 328 was optimal", everyone knows which player that refers to.

Yes, this could cause confusion. In the meantime, though, there is still some confusion, because when I am purple (my first choice color) most of the time, I occasionally get confused when my opponent is Purple instead.

[dschingis27]

I'm not a professional developer, but I have some programming experience and knowledge. I don't see why this would be difficult at all; seems to me it could be accomplished with a few simple if/else blocks.

See, that's the difference between a hobby programmer and someone who really has to maintain a large codebase. In principal, it is easy to code, however, the problem is to not to break anything existing. Depending how good the existing code is, you need to make changes at several places in it, you possibly need to change code for replays, maybe for results and statistics. It is always the problem to not forget any edge case (with the gazillion of games on BGA, there might be some special color rules for certain games). That is exactly why it's often more appealing to programmers to start fresh (including new games on BGA) instead of doing maintenance or updates.

It's similar to having a big house, when you start building the house, it is simple to change certain design features. However, when you have a big old house, something as simple as getting new switches and sockets in the wall can cause a big effort and trouble down the line.

It is obviously possible in principal though. That's why I personally find the thread title not so great. Because if "Why can't?" was meant as a theoretical question, then the answer is, "Yes, it can!" Maybe asking "What if...?" had made the point more clear. If it was meant as a prcatical question, the answer is "priorities". It is also different to ask for a change of something long existing than to ask for a discussion of a new design. If I want to buy a new car and you ask me "Why can't it be blue?", I am open for discussion. But if I own a red car for 5 years and you ask me all of a sudden, "Why can't it be blue?", then I find it weird. The car is not blue because it's red, what do you mean? If you wanted a general discussion about car colors, maybe start a little different.

[Jellby]

Question: do mainstream chess sites allow users to choose their colors? I don't mean black and white (or predefined dark/light schemes), but something like: I want my own pieces always green, and the opponent's always purple, then the starting player will sometimes be green, sometimes be purple.

[flamesplash]

I'm not a professional developer, but I have some programming experience and knowledge. I don't see why this would be difficult at all; seems to me it could be accomplished with a few simple if/else blocks.

See, that's the difference between a hobby programmer and someone who really has to maintain a large codebase. In principal, it is easy to code, however, the problem is to not to break anything existing. Depending how good the existing code is, you need to make changes at several places in it, you possibly need to change code for replays, maybe for results and statistics. It is always the problem to not forget any edge case (with the gazillion of games on BGA, there might be some special color rules for certain games). That is exactly why it's often more appealing to programmers to start fresh (including new games on BGA) instead of doing maintenance or updates.

It's similar to having a big house, when you start building the house, it is simple to change certain design features. However, when you have a big old house, something as simple as getting new switches and sockets in the wall can cause a big effort and trouble down the line.

It is obviously possible in principal though. That's why I personally find the thread title not so great. Because if "Why can't?" was meant as a theoretical question, then the answer is, "Yes, it can!" Maybe asking "What if...?" had made the point more clear. If it was meant as a prcatical question, the answer is "priorities". It is also different to ask for a change of something long existing than to ask for a discussion of a new design. If I want to buy a new car and you ask me "Why can't it be blue?", I am open for discussion. But if I own a red car for 5 years and you ask me all of a sudden, "Why can't it be blue?", then I find it weird. The car is not blue because it's red, what do you mean? If you wanted a general discussion about car colors, maybe start a little different.

I've been a professional programmer for over 20 years fwiw This should not be hard in a reasonable code base.

And again, the answer can be well beyond the the code base, which you fixate on in your responses, and other concerns I might not even be able to conceive of. If you need to me rephrase my question then in a manner ChatGPT would like to engage in good-faith: "What reasons exist that prevent BGA from allowing every user to be their preferred color, please consider implementation, User Design and other concerns"

[cigma]

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.

And which colours would a third player see for those two players? And can you see how this gets more and more complex with each increase of player number?

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.

Good you mentioned the game repaly - that's another reason to avoid this unnecassary complexity. If you played your game as the green player, and in the replay your colour is blue - how confusing would this be? How many unnecessary bug reports would there be just because of that?

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.

There is something close to this in the game of Azul. The general (not personal) pieces in this game have 5 different colours. There is a variant on BGA were these pieces have a different design (called chocolate skin). Players can choose their design individually. Now in a bug report, one player was referring to the "red pieces", but for the other player, the red pieces were different ones (which had another colour for the first player). Even the developer was confused by this, because he didn't recognize (or remember) this difference. He couldn't identify the bug at first, because he was looking at the wrong pieces.

All in all, individual perferred colours are just a nice to have, which can on the other hand cause a lot of trouble. And we know there is always a shortage of BGA developers. As a result, I'd certainly favour fixing bugs or implementing suggestions with a greater benefit.

[BarnardsStar]

I've been a professional programmer for over 20 years fwiw This should not be hard in a reasonable code base.

If you’ve been a developer that long you should recognize what I mean when I say “edge case”. (Or is that something only 25+ year engineers know? ) It’s true that I can see a way for the bulk of the work to be fairly straightforward, through means of clever stylesheets and resource bundles etc.

But the edge cases in a site like this would be innumerable. I can think of far better uses of BGA staff time than fixing all the edge cases involved in a project like this.