Board Game Arena

thoun wrote: ↑14 February 2024, 11:37

Silene wrote: ↑14 February 2024, 11:32

thoun wrote: ↑14 February 2024, 10:47

If it's to see popular games, you have a filter on the game list : https://boardgamearena.com/gamelist?isPopular=

I can't take a collection of pictures where it's not obvious what the tag "popular" is based on seriously.

It seems to be the exact same list in the same order as the old one, isn't it ?

As Silene said, the popular list doesn't have any gradation. We can't tell if number #30 has a few more or a ton more tables than #35.

We also can't tell which games have more turn-based versus real-time tables. Most cases, popular is still popular, but some games are quite skewed.

And a tiny detail - a listing of images is bad for copy/paste.

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Putting it all together:

I like learning a new game once or twice a month. I rarely have an uninterruptable time block for a real-time game. Ever so often I would scout down the old list, copy game titles to notepad that I had heard of at IRL game nights or that just sounded interesting to me. I skipped titles where real-time tables outnumbered turn-based as a proxy for mechanics that might not work well outside of real-time. I'd stop once I either had a good set to look into further or had gotten too far down in active table counts.

Sometimes I would do this in reverse - start with a short list of games a friend mentioned and just Ctrl-F on the original BGA table count list. That way I could quickly see if BGA had the game and, if so, the active tables and relative popularity. I can technically still do this, but now it requires searching for then clicking into and back out of each game's individual page to get that popularity. You can't use Ctrl-F on BGA's isPopular list since it is images, and, even if you could, without a popularity rank listed next to the game you can't check from isPopular against the other games in your list. Meaning, if you start with a set of game names, it requires a lot more effort to order that list into most to least popular on BGA.

Having the active table information for all BGA games in one text list helped me narrow down what game was the best bet for me to try next.

I always used to compare how game popularity rises, eg. chess vs hive.

It is sad that page gone =(

I also miss the old Games in Progress stats page. Vote to bring it back!

I miss this page as well, it inspired some of my game choices.

I also miss this page which has proven very useful in supporting community tournaments (multi-game tournaments).

Silene wrote: ↑14 February 2024, 09:53

thoun wrote: ↑13 February 2024, 21:21 What was the real use of that list, outside pure curiosity about stats ? I never really understood the use for it

We used it to check out games we're considering to add to the allround league.

May I ask why?

it seems that it was deliberately taken off, is there any reason to share why? I could imagine that it helped increasing the gap of popularity as many players just looked for what has the biggest player base to try out new things

However if there is no real reason and customers are asking for it to bring it back, can we reimplement? I was also just coming to this forum post as I was looking for the list myself and not able to find

DoNotCopy wrote: ↑26 May 2024, 16:22 it seems that it was deliberately taken off, is there any reason to share why?

As another user said: it would have to do a database pull every time someone loaded or refreshed a page it was on. While not an intensive resource request on it's own, how many users are loading that page a minute during peak periods? It is unnecessary loads when the server is having issues.

Changing the code to have the server automatically request the information once per hour or once per day, and then serve up the cached data instead of live data would solve that issue.

To solve that, just create a dedicated web page to show only how many tables in progress for each game.
It will be then not so often loaded.

i literally came to the forums to try to find what happened to this page.

please bring it back!