Have voting on suggestions

[asd123321]

Then you would know if there is a lot of interest and high level of
agreement like with bug reporting where you see how many report it.
The large amount of discussion on ELO is ignored with little idea
of how much support there is for any idea.

To start it off, try these

1 Should we be able to put a minimum number ELO for someone to join?
2 Should we be able to prevent someone with a high degree of
slow games from joining?

[demiurgsage]

This is not democracy, this is a business.
1. What's the reason for voting if you vote for one thing and then the other thing will be implemented. Only frustrating for users.
2. Online voting could be easily manipulated.
3. People who vote should understand how the proposed changes will influence on the full system. Voting has sense only if the question is easy and don't need expert thinking.

[Shaq Jenkins]

Then you would know if there is a lot of interest and high level of
agreement like with bug reporting where you see how many report it.
The large amount of discussion on ELO is ignored with little idea
of how much support there is for any idea.

To start it off, try these

1 Should we be able to put a minimum number ELO for someone to join?
2 Should we be able to prevent someone with a high degree of
slow games from joining?

I don't want the suggestions forum to turn into what the bug reporting system is. The bug reports are hard to sort through and are sometimes labelled poorly, so it's difficult to tell if a bug has been reported already. I like how the forum is currently structured - players start topics and others weigh in on the issue at hand. I do wish that more moderators would give their input, especially on some of the recurring topics. I also don't like the idea of voting for yes or no questions because some issues are complicated and can't be neatly solved with a yes or no answer.

With regards to your topics:
1. Instead of a minimum ELO, I would suggest an ELO range that is more specific than the ones we have right now. In particular (and this is probably the 100th time I've complained about this here), the Average level range needs narrowed. Players who are below 1400 need a separate category and it should be labelled "Apprentice" or "Novice." I'm sick of seeing players with 2 wins out of 40 games played labelled as average level. There's a huge difference between someone who is ranked 1580 and someone ranked 1315.
2. It seems like the current Karma system doesn't account for this like the old one did. I think people should definitely be able to prevent slow players from joining their tables. I never limited my tables based on slowness (I limited them based on green thumbs and how many times they left a game, both of which are more important to me than speed).

[demiurgsage]

1. Instead of a minimum ELO, I would suggest an ELO range that is more specific than the ones we have right now. In particular (and this is probably the 100th time I've complained about this here), the Average level range needs narrowed. Players who are below 1400 need a separate category and it should be labelled "Apprentice" or "Novice." I'm sick of seeing players with 2 wins out of 40 games played labelled as average level. There's a huge difference between someone who is ranked 1580 and someone ranked 1315.

Agree. For me a good solution would be ranges like (-100; +100) from Table Creator, (-200; +200), and no restriction.

2. It seems like the current Karma system doesn't account for this like the old one did. I think people should definitely be able to prevent slow players from joining their tables. I never limited my tables based on slowness (I limited them based on green thumbs and how many times they left a game, both of which are more important to me than speed).

There are two solutions to deal with slow players.
1. In some games fast settings are configured improperly. So you should create topics concerning such games and complain about it hoping that admins listen you. Also in some games it's possible to add very fast settings.
2. The other solution is more coplexed. Every time the player in the fast game drops below half of the time bank he gains some sort of slow points. If a player have a lot of slow points in comparision with number of recent games, he will not be able to join fast games. If he in normal games continue increasing the number of slow points, he will not be able to join normal games too. The idea is that no one want to play real-time game with a player who every turn spend all his time bank.

[demiurgsage]

I also think that all suggestions now have little sense.
BGA have major issues to deal with.
1. Critical bugs of main site are not fixed. Also most of popular games have major bugs.
2. Servers stability is insufficient. Too often servers are temprorarily or long time inavailable.
3. Reputation (karma) and ranking (elo, BGA rating). A lot of improvements can be made here. Now you can lose your karma and your rating in a game lost due to bugs and servers instability.
4. Game Art. In most of the games on BGA cards and tiles looks ugly. They looks ugly on PC, it's hard to imagine for me how awful they looks on the tablet or on the phone. I think the game art should be improved to look good on players screen.

[sourisdudesert]

Hi,

You can vote for bugs, which helps us to identify which are the most important.

Voting for suggestions is interesting but we cannot take it into account. So this is a lof of effort for something that don't make much sense.

Think about something : when Facebook introduced the newsfeed, almost everyone was against this. When Reddit introduced sub-reddits, almost everyone was against this. So you cannot rely on a vote to decide on a service evolution.

Additional thought : what if we take a decision that would annoy a little 75% of the current users, but at the same time would please new users and double the audience of this website? This decision cannot be taken by a vote.

@demiurgsage : about bugs, if I take the most popular games here (Seasons) + the most voted bug, then I get 14 votes. I don't consider that 14 votes on almost 3 millions games played as "major". About stability : you cannot take the last events and make a general assumption that "BGA is unstable". We had 3 crashes this week, while it did not happened since a long time, and we took action (+ explains) immediately by replacing the WHOLE unstable thing. You have the right to think it is insufficient, but at least please become a member to allow us to pay more server or more people to improve this efficiency!


Ps : by the way, THANK YOU for those who are posting suggestions on this forum. Believe it or not, but I read EVERYTHING, and even if you get the impression most are ignored, a good suggestion always influence the future evolutions of the service.

[demiurgsage]

@demiurgsage : about bugs, if I take the most popular games here (Seasons) + the most voted bug, then I get 14 votes. I don't consider that 14 votes on almost 3 millions games played as "major". About stability : you cannot take the last events and make a general assumption that "BGA is unstable". We had 3 crashes this week, while it did not happened since a long time, and we took action (+ explains) immediately by replacing the WHOLE unstable thing. You have the right to think it is insufficient, but at least please become a member to allow us to pay more server or more people to improve this efficiency!

1. Bugs. You think that all players report a bug properly when they see it. This isn't the case. Players report bugs very seldom. Even if someone reports a bug he often reports a new one instead of voting for the same bug, if he don't see his bug in the top. Lets take a popular game "Through the Ages"; this game has game logic issues, so you can reproduce most of the bugs just doing certain sequence of actions. Bugs affect about half of TTA games. (Often a couple of culture points or one civil action you lose due to bugs don't change the game result. Also most of regular TTA players know about bugs and count them). I assume that 255 000 games were played by at least 10000 players. And all players played at least one game affected by bugs. So you can count how often players report bugs. 2% in best case.
Another game - Race for the Galaxy. Expansions add a lot of game-logic issues. As in case above when you play with all expansions almost every game is affected by bugs. You can count again how much players were affected and how often they report bugs.
And Seasons you mentioned also has game-logic issues. I didn't play Seasons recently so I can't give you specific examples. But players bug reports looks like certain sequences of actions always cause incorrect results.
My statement is fun players don't report bugs. They don't know rules too good and don't pay too much attention to games to report bugs. Regular players report bugs sometimes, but as bugs are fixed too slow they adjust their behaviour to existing bugs.

2. Stability. Your main problem is not server crashes. Your problem is lags, your problem is situation when server becomes inavailable for just 5 minutes. As 5 minutes is enough time to other players skip you from the game. When someone tell opponents about lags, they answer that lags is the what BGA is. Lags is what make users upset.
Also there is a lags-related bug. Sometimes when you try to make last move in the game, the game page start glitching and it's very hard to make this move. You need several minutes of refreshing and reopening BGA to make your move.

3. If you want to increase the number of users you should provide good service. It's easy to increase the number of users using social media. But are you sure your servers will handle 30 000 users? And even if they handle this number, are you sure that they remain on your site when they will see all bugs and lags?
So I would recommend to improve your service before attracting new members. It's easy to increase the number of users but it's hard to return them after they leave your site.

[sourisdudesert]

Thanks for your suggestions. You may know that I'm the only one to work fulltime on BGA, and my day are 24 hours. So I'd like to do all that you recommend, but I'll obviously need more people and server to satisfy you. So again : your (money) contribution to this service is welcome.

[Liallan]

Then you would know if there is a lot of interest and high level of
agreement like with bug reporting where you see how many report it.
The large amount of discussion on ELO is ignored with little idea
of how much support there is for any idea.

To start it off, try these

1 Should we be able to put a minimum number ELO for someone to join?
2 Should we be able to prevent someone with a high degree of
slow games from joining?

So, is this thread about being able to vote, or about ELO and slow players?

As to voting, the ability to be able to post suggestions, respond to them, or even just put a +1 is in a sense voting. While I disagree that we shouldn't vote because it's a business and not a democracy (even employees can be entitled to opinions), an actual vote doesn't make much sense to me. The bug reports are a mess. This forum already has tons of threads on the same thing, so it would be super difficult to follow any kind of voting. The concept of people having opinions isn't the issue - I would hope the site takes user opinions into consideration. But it doesn't have to be a technical vote.

Your two ideas kind of prove that point. #1 has already been discussed a ton. We only have that "average" "good" etc. stuff and there's been many suggestions on how to change that so as to have a bit more control over it, including just putting in high/low ELO limits. So if you want to "vote" on those, find those threads, read them, and post on them. #2 we used to be able to do just that, but the new Karma system doesn't account for where the Karma percent came from in the invitations. There's also threads on this, so again, if you want to "vote," find them and post on them. Trust me, there's plenty of people who agree with you on these issues (myself included), but it's all in other threads, which is why trying to vote on a given thread does not make sense.

[demiurgsage]

Thanks for your suggestions. You may know that I'm the only one to work fulltime on BGA, and my day are 24 hours.

I knew that your team is small but didn't know that you do most of the work by yourself. Great work for one man!
I wrote you PM on forum yesterday. Maybe you find it useful. Please tell me if you didn't receive it.

While I disagree that we shouldn't vote because it's a business and not a democracy (even employees can be entitled to opinions), an actual vote doesn't make much sense to me.

When you vote for something you take the things personally. So you will be upset when administrators do something opposed your voting. Voting is possible when it's initiating by administrators and they are ready to implement any decision. Also there is another possibility. Instead of voting administrators can conduct a survey that can be more representative.