A new lobby for BGA

[GABI_Tim]

I prefer the old solution. Worst of all, you cannot suggest players to join anymore??

[Caffe Latte]

The new "x games in progress" is distracting. Previously it meant I must do turn, now - ah, that yellow thing.... maybe at least change background colour, when table is waiting for me to move.

Respect for changes itself! And for listening

[Gavron]

I agree - the new lobby is far inferior to the old one...

[RicardoRix]

The new "x games in progress" is distracting. Previously it meant I must do turn, now - ah, that yellow thing.... maybe at least change background colour, when table is waiting for me to move.

Respect for changes itself! And for listening

Yes now it's a permanent banner, a colour change would be nice, green maybe when there is a turn to be played?

[sourisdudesert]

UPDATE:

• For turn based players, the brown top banner is no more permanent (it works exactly like it was before). There is a new element in the lobby to access your games in progress.
• Expand all / collapse all are available from the top right "display options" menu.
• + some minor updates

[irakun]

Thank you for listening to our feedback and updating accordingly!

I really believe that the lobby is looking much better after the updates that you are doing! (The "expand all" button is great and the fact that now all tables corresponding to each different game are group together is also fantastic!)

I was actually going to suggest that the "Create a new table" section was too big, but as I write this post, you updated it and decreased it in size and now it looks muuuuuch better! (larger rectangles for tables to join and smaller ones for creating a table, very nice!)

So once again, thank you really much for listening to our feedback and for your hard work!
Keep it up!

[eoc]

• There is now a "See all game tables" link below your favorite games. Using this, you can "expand" all games with a single click (or collapse all). For those who have an important number of favorite, we recommend to use the "small icons" display option too.

I believe this should only expand games with actual open tables, automatically updating when new tables are created or existing ones can no longer be joined. Expanding a list of 40+ games only to see an empty "fake"-table for yourself to create is bad UX. I understand my suggestion could be a performance issue, but as BGA I'd much prefer having to work on that for a bit compared to players quitting BGA because they don't find tables they want to play at.

Another suggestion aimed at finding tables (with a similar potential performance issue because of live updates and layout changes when tables open/close) – instead of "sort by popularity", allow sorting by current number of open tables. That way, active games would always be at the top of the list!

[sourisdudesert]

I understand my suggestion could be a performance issue

There is no performance issue, as all your suggestions concern your browser (and not BGA servers).

We thought about "sort by tables available", however it changes constantly and it would make a very instable interface, so this is probably not the solution.

[blasleo]

Not like this lobby. The old lobby was much much better

[eoc]

I would have preferred a reply to the more substantial part of my posting Are you planning to do something about "all tables" showing very unhelpful empty tables for every single one of my games?
edit If they stay, could you at least display the correct amount of player slots, or at the very least don't show all slots beyond the minimum as "required"? Many games I configure for a certain number of required + optional players, and the fake table shows the max. possible playercount with all of them required. That is not what's happening when I click on "Create" so why display it like that?

There is no performance issue, as all your suggestions concern your browser (and not BGA servers).

The performance issue is with browsers having to display lots of animations at the same time. The servers would not be affected, but using the lobby on computationally challenged devices without proper GPU help wouldn't be fun. Even on my desktop machine I ran some performance tests last year and the old BGA lobby was in the top 5 of load-heavy pages because of the constant movement of tables there.

We thought about "sort by tables available", however it changes constantly and it would make a very instable interface, so this is probably not the solution.

You could consider sorting not by the exact number, which I agree would be jumpy, but by whether or not 1+ tables exist / existed in the past X minutes (client-side). That way, when a new table is opened for a rarely-played game, it might even jump in front but then the order of the remaining games can stay the same until another such game jumps from 0 to 1.
edit – this could also help players discover new games, which is the opposite of what "sorting by BGA popularity" achieves (namely, preferring games which are already played a lot by showing them first). Given the page-wide encouraging of those discoveries, I'm not sure what the current sorting option is trying to achieve, hence my suggestion of repurposing it.

I've checked my personal list of favorite games right now, which sits at 32, and only 4 to 5 of them had tables. It's hard to find those when the buttons look mostly the same!