A new lobby for BGA

[Sunmaster14]

New lobby seems ok to me, keep up the good work

[danialabdl]

its much better than before

[Toolswiz]

I don't update to premium since I can't suggest player for a table. Why is this option disabled?
Very frustrating update

[DrFriendless]

This lobby is horrible. I only play games with my friends, and now it's even harder to create games. Copy how they do it at yucata.de, please.

[sourisdudesert]

Copy how they do it at yucata.de, please.

The funny things is that that's what we did. We grouped tables by games, like this website.

If you click on "small icons" and "expand all", you'll see that the view is pretty much the same than this other website (except that ours is much pretty).

[Andarus]

looks good. But clicked on a tutorial button for 'Love Letter' and 'page not found.' I am sure you will sort out these wrinkles in time

[Caffe Latte]

This is your turn on undefined (43 in progress)

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P.s. still - well done improvements, team!

[beccers]

This is amazing. Thank you. Under the old system I really got tired of tables I was trying to click on kept moving before I could get into a game.

[senatorhung]

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!

currently like eoc i have a bunch of games favourited so that they appear at the top. some of them are actual favourites where i am willing to see all open tables all the time. others are games which are played much less often, but i am always willing to join an open table if someone starts a game. there are also games there where i only play specific configurations.

i have tried out a majority of the games on BGA .. some of them i am willing to play again, but many i will never look at again. currently there is no way to distinguish between those 2 types, and they are all a mass at the bottom of the screen. occasionally i will dip my toe down there, but basically i generally ignore everything outside of my favourites.

using your new skeleton, here's how i would flesh things out if i had my way.

instead of just 1 categories of games (favourites) defined by the user, have more choices available when clicking the 'favourite' button - i would add games you are willing to play if there is a table open and games you do NOT want to play

1. games where you are currently willing to see all open tables (expanded ALL automatically) - these are ultra.favourite games or new games to BGA that you want to try out when they are hot <<FAVOURITES>>
2. games that you are willing to play (expand all OPEN tables automatically) - these are games that you have played before and are generally willing to play - will also likely include games that you are willing to play turn.based, but not real-time. <<OPEN>>
3. suggested unplayed games <<UNPLAYED>>
4. games you know .. but EXCLUDING games you do NOT want to play <<GAMES YOU KNOW AND MIGHT PLAY AGAIN>>

in the current situation, if i played a 'suggested' game, and didn't like it, a new unplayed game would be added to the suggestions, while the game i didn't like gets added to the front of the games you know section (sorting by recently played) - if i could exclude games i don't like .. then that bottom listing gets much shorter and i might visit those games more often.

so, you could still allow the user to adjust display options for each section, but having the default display options sort of match the game category (as defined by the player) - that might make more sense.

i dislike having to create a game before knowing how many players are available .. that information should be beside the create button. losing the suggestions functionality is not great. also, with my suggested categories .. unless someone has specifically excluded a game they do not want to play, they can be included in the list of players available. that might be misleading too far the other way .. but might be more incentive to create the table (and doesn't hurt too much since you can open multiple tables).

oh, and automatically adding a game to favourites if you decide to join .. don't do that anymore.

[nabuco]

The new lobby doesn't bother me so much in turn-based games, but it's very bad in real time.
How should I do to play premium games?

In addition, the list of available tables was very useful, is there any possibility to keep it at least optionally?
I would like if could set the old lobby in settings, but at least the list of tables is necessary.

I like the option to join several tables, but wasn't possible add that to the old lobby?

Thanks