Board Game Arena

The new "modern" interface is not what I would call "snazzy". It just has a style that is more in line with modern technologies, but that doesn't work for a board game site. The old interface had a more stately, baroque quality that fitted much better with board games and gave tournaments a sense of gravitas, like it felt that you were competing for something historical and meaningful.

I still play tournaments because I'm already invested in them and I want to keep winning more trophies, but I suspect players who are new to the site will have a harder time getting invested in them with the way things look now. We can already see that the subscription rates seem to have decreased a lot. Tournaments that used to fill out to several hundreds players now seem to have only half as much participants.

I think the site was taking us for idiots when it presented the update with saying "we created a new, better interface for you". For one, it's not their role to declare if a change is "better", that's for the users to decide and give their feedback on. Secondly, I don't believe they really thought it was better, the truth is probably that they just had to switch to something more modern because it would allow the site to run more smoothly. It wasn't about what looks better, but what was more efficient for them from a developing perspective.

But in that case, if they were having trouble with how the site runs, I would have much preferred they decided to raise the price of subscription, so that they'd have more resources to make things run smoother while still keeping the old tournament look. As it is now, it doesn't make me want to financially support them if that's how they are going to use the money.

Shipping an update that removes features and works worse isn't an update. How can you ship the update when you broke one of the most used tournament features, invites? Needs to be addressed ASAP or rolled back.

A modern interface should be an improvement for mobile players. But the "updated" page is worse in visibility than the one we had. I see the same as other users wrote here: fewer participants in tournaments and fewer tournament creators. Alexia's tournament group (one of the biggest private tournament groups) is still inactive because she struggles to set up new tournaments on her phone or tablet. If anyone made bug reports / suggestions related to the new tournament system that need upvotes: post them in this topic.

Please revert this change, even after a while we can't get used to the new lay-out and we want the old lay-out back!

Also about invitations: we want to be able to invite specific users with less than 100 ELO, without opening a tournament for all < 100 ELO players. Especially for newly released games some active users don't have 100 ELO yet (but we want to leave the unreliable users out of our tournaments).