Hi, I have just started playing Terra Mystica on BGA and I am already facing issues with players that abandon the game and I will describe here two cases I encountered.
1) Yesterday I was significantly winning a game and a player that was supposed to take the last place abandoned the game in 6th round effectively lowering my ELO gain from ~50 to 0.35 and taking away my satisfaction from well-played game. I checked his profile and he did the exact same thing earlier on the same day, so I am sure he did this on purpose and that made me really sad and angry.
2) (If after passing in 6th round leech is automatically declined, you do not need to read this part) Two days ago I had a game when two players left the table after they passed in last turn, but before me and fourth player ended our actions. It is kind of understandable since they might have been in a hurry and they are already done with the game, but as I understand it, it still causes a big problem for other players. I thought that once I build a structure next to them they will need to accept or decline power leech, but since they are no longer in the game, this will cause them to time out, receive a penalty and it will lead to game being neutralized that I definitely don't want. This may put big restrictions on what I can do and may cause me to lose the game. Moreover, player that is losing may want to neutralize the game on purpose by building next to them and cause game to being neutralized what will cause much better ELO change for him.
Since Terra Mystica is a pretty long game, it is especially depressing to face such problems.
Solution to 2nd scenario is pretty easy. Automatically decline all non-free leech after passing in 6th round. If I am not mistaken, it is never good to accept it, if it costs you VPs. If that is already the case or if not taking that decision doesn't neutralize the game, sorry for taking your time to read this.
However 1st scenario is not as easy to fix. But I believe there is still a fairly simple solution. You could replace players that abandoned with a dummy AI. That AI could be super minimalistic - always passes and chooses a random bonus card and that is everything. You can argue that it is still not ideal, because some players might have adjusted their strategy on the fact that somebody will disrupt somebody and such unfortunate event will cause the game to go in a significantly different direction, but I think it is still much better solution than just neutralizing results of the game. In an ideal world one may think about developing some sensible AIs (ones from _some_ app are not hard to beat, but they act reasonably and would probably do well for that purpose), but that is of course much more work to do. No matter how AI performs, such player of course should always be considered as the one on the last place.
1) Yesterday I was significantly winning a game and a player that was supposed to take the last place abandoned the game in 6th round effectively lowering my ELO gain from ~50 to 0.35 and taking away my satisfaction from well-played game. I checked his profile and he did the exact same thing earlier on the same day, so I am sure he did this on purpose and that made me really sad and angry.
2) (If after passing in 6th round leech is automatically declined, you do not need to read this part) Two days ago I had a game when two players left the table after they passed in last turn, but before me and fourth player ended our actions. It is kind of understandable since they might have been in a hurry and they are already done with the game, but as I understand it, it still causes a big problem for other players. I thought that once I build a structure next to them they will need to accept or decline power leech, but since they are no longer in the game, this will cause them to time out, receive a penalty and it will lead to game being neutralized that I definitely don't want. This may put big restrictions on what I can do and may cause me to lose the game. Moreover, player that is losing may want to neutralize the game on purpose by building next to them and cause game to being neutralized what will cause much better ELO change for him.
Since Terra Mystica is a pretty long game, it is especially depressing to face such problems.
Solution to 2nd scenario is pretty easy. Automatically decline all non-free leech after passing in 6th round. If I am not mistaken, it is never good to accept it, if it costs you VPs. If that is already the case or if not taking that decision doesn't neutralize the game, sorry for taking your time to read this.
However 1st scenario is not as easy to fix. But I believe there is still a fairly simple solution. You could replace players that abandoned with a dummy AI. That AI could be super minimalistic - always passes and chooses a random bonus card and that is everything. You can argue that it is still not ideal, because some players might have adjusted their strategy on the fact that somebody will disrupt somebody and such unfortunate event will cause the game to go in a significantly different direction, but I think it is still much better solution than just neutralizing results of the game. In an ideal world one may think about developing some sensible AIs (ones from _some_ app are not hard to beat, but they act reasonably and would probably do well for that purpose), but that is of course much more work to do. No matter how AI performs, such player of course should always be considered as the one on the last place.
