Board Game Arena

That was considered and rejected because it's entirely incompatible with turn-based games.

You might appreciate reading the oiiginal discussion surrounding the auction feature. It's a bit late to change it, but the discussion provides context for the myriad of opinions involved. Here it is:
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=52587

This part is particularly important:

Months of planning and volunteer hours have gone into making these a top-notch experience. Having said that, we also recognize that no single solution will please everyone. Fortunately, these optional experiences don't replace the core game experience. If you discover this particular implementation isn't for you, we would invite you to continue to enjoy the existing experience supported by the official ruleset.

Thank you for your answer. I appreciate the huge amount of work that goes into developing games on BGA, which is why I pay a subscription (even though I don't play much). So to finish my statement, pity, you don't give any alternatives except:

controversial auction system* / no auction**

* and I call it "controversial" because I can choose the weakest faction and force another player to unknowingly choose it (it's enough that this player doesn't understand how this auction system works, and most don't understand it)

** giving up on auctions is not a better solution, because the factions are very unbalanced (which is what the 'The lost fleet' fixes).

I hope that one day you will change your mind and give players an alternative. Best regards and thanks for your work

zbirone wrote: ↑02 February 2025, 15:51which is why I pay a subscription (even though I don't play much).

What a coincidence! I'm a subscriber, too! You may find this PSA helpful:
https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=40816
tl;dr: We're volunteers, not BGA employees.

Complaints like yours are precisely the sort of reason I was hesitant to volunteers months ot do this to begin with.

1) The feature will take many hours to complete
2) The feature is entirely volunteer work and we have families and competing responsibilities (see #1)
3) Following discussions on BGA and other sites regarding this, it's clear that no matter which approach we take to a draft a very vocal subset of players will be unhappy. (For a mild example of this, just scroll up to my previous post right here.)

This is something I'm still working on in my free time, but I make no promises as to whether it will ever be deployed. The vocal negative reactions towards optional work I've done previously (random maps, anyone?) makes me reluctant to volunteer myself for further abuse (see #3), so this isn't a high priority.

I hope one day you will change your mind about ridiculing systems that were discussed at length *years* ago, then implemented for free by volunteers. The time to chime in was back then. Further complaints just reinforce that I should stop spending time on this.

Perhaps people are confused about the bidding system because they do not know what to bid.

First, look at the options, and decide what you think is the WORST option, that is the faction you should bid 0 on.

For all other factions, your bid should be how much you would rather have it, compared to the WORST faction.