Board Game Arena

Ok so I just had a huge timewaster of a toxic game. 4 of the 8 players were chatting privately which is an obvious no-no if they are telling each other secret/hidden information in a game which doesn't allow for anything but public table talk (this isn't just an an allegation or suspicion, they admitted to doing this). Afterward a couple of them threw insults at me and another player in chat - for making a reasonable move that didn't happen to work out.

Note that "Communicat[ing] with another player about the game privately (for example with an instant messenging app)." is explicitly against the code of conduct. So I felt the right thing to do was to report all 4 of them for this.

So I go to the red thumb system and it's a little confusing for someone is fairly new to this site as far as what the implications are of "avoid for myself" vs "others should avoid" (since even the latter doesn't generate a report, what's the difference?). But since team private talk is cheating AND since some of them were being toxic in chat I figured "others should avoid" was the most fair assessment.

So then I find out, even though going with "others should avoid" leads to a report link which has options to report players both for collusion and for playing to help team win, these are essentially fake options that say "sorry, we won't do anything about this". This effectively means that collusion and private chats are openly allowed on BGA.

So then I get to the ones who were insulting as well as cheating, since I can at least report them for insults even though I can't report them for cheating/colluding and give them red thumbs so I won't get matched against them again (and so - hopefully, although it is very unclear - other players might end up avoiding them too). But I can't because I've been handing out too many red thumbs! Umm; it's not my fault there were 4 colluders at one table. All that this system accomplishes is encouraging me to go play other quick games and hand out a bunch of green thumbs so I can make a report while it's still fresh in my memory who did what. I'd rather not use green thumbs that way, but that is how the system is designed.

Ok so I don't want to say after a couple of weeks here I'm an expert on how all the systems should work, but there's clearly some issues there. Unless this is just the sort of place where people can openly collude with no consequences, but from the culture that it looks like they are trying to encourage, I have hope that this won't be true.

Aye, your grievances are quite valid. Much can and hopefully will be improved upon.

You can report anyone by going to their profile page and clicking on the "Report this Player" button to the upper right of the page. Maybe changing the button to a bright red one would help. Or attach more easily accessible report buttons, though the userbase seems to be in opposition to such.

Would you say that the nested option to report a player after giving them a red thumb created the assumption that this would be the only way to file a report?


Kingmaking was a category of its own in the past, but most all of them resulted in 'not guilty' verdicts due to insufficient proof of such. These reports are also highly work intensive, and there were a lot of them. The category was therefor left to be community moderated by using public red thumbs.

I think they only do something if somebody gets a lot of red thumbs.

asd123321 wrote: ↑06 May 2020, 05:26 I think they only do something if somebody gets a lot of red thumbs.

Red thumbs are largely unrelated to moderation.

Would you say that the nested option to report a player after giving them a red thumb created the assumption that this would be the only way to file a report?

It gave me that impression at first.

Kingmaking was a category of its own in the past, but most all of them resulted in 'not guilty' verdicts due to insufficient proof of such. These reports are also highly work intensive, and there were a lot of them. The category was therefor left to be community moderated by using public red thumbs.

But they openly admitted to it in the chat in this case.

And just had another guy deliberately throw a game today. No idea if he was kingmaking or not, maybe he was "just" trolling or being a dick for no reason, but that stuff completely ruins the game and wastes everyone's time and makes me less likely to play in the future.