Finish the Game or Don’t Start It 🔥

[Ceaseless]

Hi everyone,

I am perhaps an old generation guy but I also love to play a lot in real life around a table : association, pubs, friends.

In this real life no one would stop the game and rush away because it looks like he is loosing. We go to the end, we say thank you for the game (and we meant it) and have a funny time. By the way in such condition it can happen that someone has to leave for personal reason (emergency, etc, ..) but it is exceptional.

BGA is a wonderful place to play with remote or busy friends to game we love, but also play with stranger.

However, I understand that more and more people want to find here the chess spirit : it is perfectly fine to concede ; or even some want to find a kind of video game.

I am an old generation and dumb guy that would love to keep the real life board game spirit on BGA, and be able to launch a game by selecting in a settings that : "we play up to the end". Would love to have such a feature to make both world of users and user expectations live together.

Best regards and have fun

Or instead we could keep the real-life board game experience alive by remembering conceding is a natural part of board games, as you already pointed out in the case when you gave your Chess example, Chess being a typical board game.

[tbhp]

You're mixing conceding and quitting. Those are different things:

* Conceding: only possibly in 2p games, after 50% progression. The conceder loses normally, the other player wins normally. The game is counted as a win/loss to all effects with full elo/Arena score changes. Only final game stats (if any) are not complete. This is a legal move, no penalties involved.

* Quitting: can happen with any number of players at any moment. It's equivalent to being expelled by another player due to running out of time. It results in a full loss, plus an additional karma and elo loss. The other players get a shared win (so a tie if it's a 3+ player game), and only part of the corresponding elo/Arena score change (according the game's progression). This is a disruptive action and has its own penalties.

You are free to red thumb players who do one or the other or both, or any other player for any other reason. You're also free to discuss if the distinction between the two makes sense, or if the penalties should be different. But you should be aware that when you start a game any of those could happen. If you can't cope with that, don't start a game.

I don't see why the two concepts need to exist. Conceding is basically sugarcoating quitting by calling it a different name. The consequences listed for quitting are exactly what it should be when someone concedes.

People already get those consequences when they get kicked for reasons outside of their control, like things happening in their life. If we accept that people may get kicked out and suffer those consequences even when they didn't choose to do anything wrong, why should deliberately leaving a game ever get away with those consequences?

[tbhp]

However, I understand that more and more people want to find here the chess spirit : it is perfectly fine to concede ; or even some want to find a kind of video game.

Chess often ends in situations where the winning player needs to clean up the opponent's board before they can go on to set up their inevitable checkmate. Those situations are unnecessary because the climax already happened when the decisive piece exchange was made. After that, you are just watching the board get emptied, and therefore become less interesting than if the game had finished after the final battle, so to speak.

Waiting for checkmate in those situations is a bit like watching a movie epilogue going on for too long. The thing is that most games on this website don't work like chess. They keep getting more and more complex until the end, not less. Even if one player is clearly losing, it's interesting to see how the other player is going to complete his winning board. The same isn't true in chess, as you'd just be watching a queen checkmating a king on a mostly empty board, a very basic and unoriginal situation.

And on the video game part, when you play alone you aren't hurting anyone by quitting. And if you're playing against other people, depending on the game, it would be inappropriate to quit too. The term "ragequit" exists and has a very negative connotation.

So, no, just because today is a different generation doesn't mean you should be fine with people acting differently than you did in your day. For people who care about games and culture, the same values as ever still apply, because those values are not relative to any era, they are just what is right.

[Fuchur]

I’m honestly tired of people conceding games that are already in progress.
We invest time, focus, and strategy into a match, and suddenly it just… ends.
Not because the game is finished, but because someone decided to quit.

When you start a game with someone, you implicitly agree to play it to the end. In real life, nobody would just stand up and leave the table without a word.
I played a lot on BGA between 2020 and 2022 and I almost never saw this. I recently started playing again with a friend, and he agrees that on Ark Nova it happens all the time.

Rage quitters don’t even bother to warn, ask, or explain. They just concede. I don’t care about the Elo points, I care about finishing the game.

If conceding becomes normal, it kills the whole experience of board games.
Maybe frequent concessions should be penalized more seriously.

Am I the only one who feels this way ?

Hi, you're complaining about players who conceded to you.While looking at your game history i've stumbled over this table a few days ago where you conceded yourself to someone else :
https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=796250081

I'm wondering if you want this to be a one way : No one is allowed to concede when you're winning but you can leave any time ?

Or perhaps there are sometimes valid reasons to end a game ?

[Fuchur]

8<
Waiting for checkmate in those situations is a bit like watching a movie epilogue going on for too long. The thing is that most games on this website don't work like chess. They keep getting more and more complex until the end, not less. Even if one player is clearly losing, it's interesting to see how the other player is going to complete his winning board.

As usually this is a lot of nonsense : If someone is clearly winning there is no need to play it out. You only need to do that when both players think they could win. There is no interest at all in continuing a game where on player makes random moves (as it doesn't matter any more).

As for your statistics about chess : I wonder where you get them -- as far as i know chess games (at least if both players have a decent level) are almost never going down to a queen cleaning up the board

[tbhp]

8<
Waiting for checkmate in those situations is a bit like watching a movie epilogue going on for too long. The thing is that most games on this website don't work like chess. They keep getting more and more complex until the end, not less. Even if one player is clearly losing, it's interesting to see how the other player is going to complete his winning board.

As usually this is a lot of nonsense : If someone is clearly winning there is no need to play it out. You only need to do that when both players think they could win. There is no interest at all in continuing a game where on player makes random moves (as it doesn't matter any more).

As for your statistics about chess : I wonder where you get them -- as far as i know chess games (at least if both players have a decent level) are almost never going down to a queen cleaning up the board

I just explained why there is interest. Also, I don't know about you, but I don't make random moves when I know I'm going to lose. I try to complete my board nicely, the way I see fit.

This is not true about chess. If one player gets a significant enough advantage, but has no clear way to checkmate, then the safest road to winning is to conservatively exchange pieces until the board is emptied enough that they can easily checkmate. The reason you rarely see that at high level is because people usually concede before.

It's easy to understand why concession is an ingrained feature of chess, if you are familiar with the game. The thing is most games just aren't comparable. Most games either can't be drawn out the way chess can, or they have an aesthetic building element that means you'd want to see the end of the game even if it's already clear who lost.

[MarkSteere]

Most games either can't be drawn out the way chess can, or they have an aesthetic building element that means you'd want to see the end of the game even if it's already clear who lost.

None of my games (Blast Radius, Herd, etc.) can be drawn out the way Chess can. They're all naturally finite. No tacked on, forced finitude rules like superko or the 50 move rule are needed. And I suppose there is a small degree of satisfaction in seeing what it all "bulids up" to, such as the board being completely filled, or one color being completely eliminated. (By the way, Chess can "build up" to where one player is checkmated.) But seeing the ultimate built up state is not nearly so satisfying that it would warrant making a long series of random moves in a game you've already lost, or inanely making non-random moves to "complete the board nicely." A game is an adversarial competition. Not a cooperative art project.

[tbhp]

Most games either can't be drawn out the way chess can, or they have an aesthetic building element that means you'd want to see the end of the game even if it's already clear who lost.

None of my games (Blast Radius, Herd, etc.) can be drawn out the way Chess can. They're all naturally finite. No tacked on, forced finitude rules like superko or the 50 move rule are needed. And I suppose there is a small degree of satisfaction in seeing what it all "bulids up" to, such as the board being completely filled, or one color being completely eliminated. (By the way, Chess can "build up" to where one player is checkmated.) But seeing the ultimate built up state is not nearly so satisfying that it would warrant making a long series of random moves in a game you've already lost, or inanely making non-random moves to "complete the board nicely." A game is an adversarial competition. Not a cooperative art project.

Well that’s your opinion. In my opinion games wouldn’t have elegant mechanisms and artful designs if the goal was just to win it and that’s it.

It’s as if you played a video game and simply cared about completing the game, not the artistic experience of playing through it.

I think board games have proven to have enough artistic value for us to view them as an art form of their own and treat them with the respect they deserve.

[MarkSteere]

Well that’s your opinion. In my opinion games wouldn’t have elegant mechanisms and artful designs if the goal was just to win it and that’s it.

It’s as if you played a video game and simply cared about completing the game, not the artistic experience of playing through it.

I think board games have proven to have enough artistic value for us to view them as an art form of their own and treat them with the respect they deserve.

Inventing elegant mechanisms is what it's all about for me. Their beauty supercedes how a game is played, or even IF it's played.

From what little I know about video games, they seem totally irrelevant to this discussion. You're fighting to get to the highest level you can before you get killed, or before you get killed N times. At no time are you inanely making meaningless, random moves in a game you've already lost.

Games can certainly be played artfully. But the art is in the strategy. Interesting patterns can form, but that's not the objective. Competitive play is totally different from finger painting.

[nuffbought]

Hi everyone,

I am perhaps an old generation guy but I also love to play a lot in real life around a table : association, pubs, friends.

In this real life no one would stop the game and rush away because it looks like he is loosing. We go to the end, we say thank you for the game (and we meant it) and have a funny time. By the way in such condition it can happen that someone has to leave for personal reason (emergency, etc, ..) but it is exceptional.

BGA is a wonderful place to play with remote or busy friends to game we love, but also play with stranger.

However, I understand that more and more people want to find here the chess spirit : it is perfectly fine to concede ; or even some want to find a kind of video game.

I am an old generation and dumb guy that would love to keep the real life board game spirit on BGA, and be able to launch a game by selecting in a settings that : "we play up to the end". Would love to have such a feature to make both world of users and user expectations live together.

Best regards and have fun

Or instead we could keep the real-life board game experience alive by remembering conceding is a natural part of board games, as you already pointed out in the case when you gave your Chess example, Chess being a typical board game.

What's wrong with having the option that there is no conceding in the game? Everyone gets their preference. Win win.