Today when looking back over my previously-played Troyes games, I got an error saying that I could not view a replay because I was at the replay limit. Investigation revealed this old post: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=11762. That post is locked or I would have replied there.
In that thread, it is stated that the limit is quite high and should not be encountered in normal use. It is true that I have been playing on BGA for over a year and today is the first time that I hit it. But I didn't hit it by using some kind of automated web crawling script -- it was through manual navigation of the site over the course of about an hour. So it doesn't require some unnaturally fast or prolonged site access. And in case anyone thinks this is a "non-premium thing", it's not -- I've been a premium user for a long time.
Since it was asked in the previous thread, I'll explain why I was viewing "so many" past replays in this case. Like a lot of people, I log my plays on boardgamegeek. My usual habit is to log a play soon after the game ends, but occasionally I later realize that there was information I wanted to include that I neglected originally. Recently I realized that I wanted to keep track of which secret goal card each player started with in my Troyes games, because I was curious to see what trends I may notice.
At first I assumed this wouldn't even involve looking at the replay at all. I was hoping that the play summary page would include this information. No such luck. While the scoring summary does list all of the secret objective cards, it does not indicate which card was given to which player at the start of the game. Okay, not ideal, but I figured I'd just open up the replay log for each game and check there. Still no luck. The log does not show this information. So the only method left for me to use was to open a replay for each player for each game and look to see what card they had at the start of the game. I was in the process of doing this when I ran into the limit.
By the way, Troyes isn't the first game where I've had to do this kind of thing (although it was the first where I had to open the replay for every individual player). Off the top of my head I've also done it for Keyflower (to record home tiles), Russian Railroads (to record the starting bonus chosen), and Madeira (to record the initial round goal tile). I imagine I didn't hit the limit in those cases both because I didn't have to open the replay log for each player and because I hadn't played as many games of those. But if I'm hitting this issue with Troyes, then I suspect it is only a matter of time until I hit it again. And while a theoretical solution would be to enhance all of these games to make the information easier to access, it's not clear to me that this would be a good use of programmer resources, and in any case it's only going to help until I run into the next game which has this kind of issue.
As someone who loves to analyze data about my plays, it pains me that this tedious process has become even more tedious by the presence of this limit. I assume the limit wasn't imposed arbitrarily, but I'm curious about what exactly it is trying to prevent. If it's trying to stop people from pounding the BGA servers, then I sympathize, but surely there is way to accomplish that while still allowing players like me to get their game data. If there was an option to download some kind of raw data file which contained all of the data about a particular play, then I'd happily do the work on my end to write something to parse through that. Then at most I'd need to do a reply query once for a given play, and then I could get what I needed from that file. Alternatively, if it was possible to subscribe at a higher cost in order to have the replay limit removed (or significantly extended), then I'd be all for that as well.
If the limit is there for some other reason, then I'd love to know what it is.
Thanks!
Mitch
http://blog.mitcharf.com/
In that thread, it is stated that the limit is quite high and should not be encountered in normal use. It is true that I have been playing on BGA for over a year and today is the first time that I hit it. But I didn't hit it by using some kind of automated web crawling script -- it was through manual navigation of the site over the course of about an hour. So it doesn't require some unnaturally fast or prolonged site access. And in case anyone thinks this is a "non-premium thing", it's not -- I've been a premium user for a long time.
Since it was asked in the previous thread, I'll explain why I was viewing "so many" past replays in this case. Like a lot of people, I log my plays on boardgamegeek. My usual habit is to log a play soon after the game ends, but occasionally I later realize that there was information I wanted to include that I neglected originally. Recently I realized that I wanted to keep track of which secret goal card each player started with in my Troyes games, because I was curious to see what trends I may notice.
At first I assumed this wouldn't even involve looking at the replay at all. I was hoping that the play summary page would include this information. No such luck. While the scoring summary does list all of the secret objective cards, it does not indicate which card was given to which player at the start of the game. Okay, not ideal, but I figured I'd just open up the replay log for each game and check there. Still no luck. The log does not show this information. So the only method left for me to use was to open a replay for each player for each game and look to see what card they had at the start of the game. I was in the process of doing this when I ran into the limit.
By the way, Troyes isn't the first game where I've had to do this kind of thing (although it was the first where I had to open the replay for every individual player). Off the top of my head I've also done it for Keyflower (to record home tiles), Russian Railroads (to record the starting bonus chosen), and Madeira (to record the initial round goal tile). I imagine I didn't hit the limit in those cases both because I didn't have to open the replay log for each player and because I hadn't played as many games of those. But if I'm hitting this issue with Troyes, then I suspect it is only a matter of time until I hit it again. And while a theoretical solution would be to enhance all of these games to make the information easier to access, it's not clear to me that this would be a good use of programmer resources, and in any case it's only going to help until I run into the next game which has this kind of issue.
As someone who loves to analyze data about my plays, it pains me that this tedious process has become even more tedious by the presence of this limit. I assume the limit wasn't imposed arbitrarily, but I'm curious about what exactly it is trying to prevent. If it's trying to stop people from pounding the BGA servers, then I sympathize, but surely there is way to accomplish that while still allowing players like me to get their game data. If there was an option to download some kind of raw data file which contained all of the data about a particular play, then I'd happily do the work on my end to write something to parse through that. Then at most I'd need to do a reply query once for a given play, and then I could get what I needed from that file. Alternatively, if it was possible to subscribe at a higher cost in order to have the replay limit removed (or significantly extended), then I'd be all for that as well.
If the limit is there for some other reason, then I'd love to know what it is.
Thanks!
Mitch
http://blog.mitcharf.com/
