Re: A new lobby for BGA
Posted: 13 September 2019, 12:43
New lobby seems ok to me, keep up the good work 
The funny things is that that's what we did. We grouped tables by games, like this website.
currently like eoc i have a bunch of games favourited so that they appear at the top. some of them are actual favourites where i am willing to see all open tables all the time. others are games which are played much less often, but i am always willing to join an open table if someone starts a game. there are also games there where i only play specific configurations.eoc wrote: ↑13 September 2019, 12:32 I would have preferred a reply to the more substantial part of my postingAre you planning to do something about "all tables" showing very unhelpful empty tables for every single one of my games?
edit If they stay, could you at least display the correct amount of player slots, or at the very least don't show all slots beyond the minimum as "required"? Many games I configure for a certain number of required + optional players, and the fake table shows the max. possible playercount with all of them required. That is not what's happening when I click on "Create" so why display it like that?
The performance issue is with browsers having to display lots of animations at the same time. The servers would not be affected, but using the lobby on computationally challenged devices without proper GPU help wouldn't be fun. Even on my desktop machine I ran some performance tests last year and the old BGA lobby was in the top 5 of load-heavy pages because of the constant movement of tables there.sourisdudesert wrote: ↑13 September 2019, 12:10 There is no performance issue, as all your suggestions concern your browser (and not BGA servers).
You could consider sorting not by the exact number, which I agree would be jumpy, but by whether or not 1+ tables exist / existed in the past X minutes (client-side). That way, when a new table is opened for a rarely-played game, it might even jump in front but then the order of the remaining games can stay the same until another such game jumps from 0 to 1.sourisdudesert wrote: ↑13 September 2019, 12:10 We thought about "sort by tables available", however it changes constantly and it would make a very instable interface, so this is probably not the solution.
edit – this could also help players discover new games, which is the opposite of what "sorting by BGA popularity" achieves (namely, preferring games which are already played a lot by showing them first). Given the page-wide encouraging of those discoveries, I'm not sure what the current sorting option is trying to achieve, hence my suggestion of repurposing it.
I've checked my personal list of favorite games right now, which sits at 32, and only 4 to 5 of them had tables. It's hard to find those when the buttons look mostly the same!