(EXPERIMENTATION ENDED) Arena mode upgrade

[Raining Tacos]

nonsense... you had me before and after Arena, now you've lost me. This change is really unnecessary, if you can''t find a game in arena go to simple. This meetup thing will have me going back to Steam/Tabltopia for all my gaming as well as letting my monetary contribution to this site lapse. We had to wait a minute or several for a game before, no big deal, now I'm sitting for 10 minutes every time, are you kidding me. Who are you trying to appease here? This was my favorite website for gaming and now i hate it... thanks. Anyone with any type of life away from their computer does not have this kind of time to waste.... Huge thumbs down, please abandon this awful change before I abandon BGA.

[laiayo]

Some statistics:

In the last hour, those of you who requested an Arena games got a table in 72% of the cases.

I think new arena mode is a good idea but you have to adjust times and frequencies in some games so people don't wait more than before.

[sbryantf]

I think some tweaking is needed for the turn-based games. Before, I would sometimes get matched with fast players and finish multiple turn-based games in a day. I also had the option to start a second table of the same game once I had matched. Now, if I match a fast player, the game ends and I'm stuck waiting a long time (24 hours?) before I can hope to start another one.

The way it is right now, I'm not sure a primarily turn-based player can get enough games in to really be competitive in arena mode. Before the change, it was possible to partially compensate by having multiple parallel games in progress.

[FastPlayer]

Sorry, we can't give you a Coloretto table this time


Explanation: 2 players wanted to play and we need at least 3 to create a game table.


Good news: you have the right-of-way for you next Arena session.

katastrofa not chance play game all time just this!!!!!!!!!!!!!
FIX TIME VERY VERY BAD!!!

[psrv]

I think some tweaking is needed for the turn-based games. Before, I would sometimes get matched with fast players and finish multiple turn-based games in a day. I also had the option to start a second table of the same game once I had matched. Now, if I match a fast player, the game ends and I'm stuck waiting a long time (24 hours?) before I can hope to start another one.

The way it is right now, I'm not sure a primarily turn-based player can get enough games in to really be competitive in arena mode. Before the change, it was possible to partially compensate by having multiple parallel games in progress.

This. Right now I can't start a turn-based game of Hawaii in Arena mode for hours. I don't understand the reason for this restriction. And once this turn-based game starts then I will, presumably, have to wait hours to start a second game. I think there should be an option to start a turn-based game immediately if players are available.

[Rell-Witten]

so far, when ive wanted to join a lobby, it disappeared in 1 second, not 1 minute. If this is intentional, I don't think it's a good idea.

[Jest Phulin]

Having dedicated start times for turn-based games makes little sense.

Yes, I can understand why it is important in real-time -- there needs to be a way to encourage enough players at a table are together. The entire purpose of turn-based, though, is that you don't need to have all players at a table together.

Yes, I can see an argument for "it's better* to have one standard for both real-time and turn-based, just adjusting the lengths of time for each." (*Better implies a value system, in this case ease of coding, not user experience.) However, that argument doesn't have support when the Round Robin style of tournament is examined -- multiple parallel games for turn-based games are created when a turn-based game starts. It is possible to code different behavior for different styles of play time.

[Vermont]

I play real-time games in arena mode, and find the latest change discouraging. Instead of staying in arena mode to play game after game, I am now just playing regular games because I can sooner. I would expect you will see your arena participation numbers drop quite a bit.

But another way, I would rather be able to regularly play games in less-than-ideal conditions, than not be able to play at all.

I DO love how you are experimenting and iterating to make things better - please keep that up! This feedback is meant to help with evolution, not to discourage creative thinking.

Thanks.

[sprockitz]

For turn based it would be nice to be able to create multiple games at a given interval. So an option when you join turn based to chose, join up to, say, 3 turn based games of a given type. Likely a caveat that you aren't matching the same people multiple times.

For real time, I'll reiterate the time between games for the really short and popular games should be decreased. 10 minutes for can't stop doesn't make sense when a game takes only a couple minutes...this leads to substantial downtime.

Something to pre-register and a count of how many people have pre-registered for lesser played real time games would be nice...so people could see someone else is actually interested in playing. Give people an alert at 2 minutes (or up it to 3-4 minutes) to confirm participation so you don't have a bunch of offline players getting into games.

[DerVerrückteMax]

That will just lead to less people playing. Already I don't feel like waiting 8 mins now till I have to click to join a game if it may happen. Why not simply let people choose the range of ratings they want to play with and done? And if they don't find anyone in that range - they just expand the rating range themselves.
E.g. I could enter that I only want to play with silver 5 to rank 10.