Board Game Arena

I had a comment about one of the items that appeared in the recent Alpha Review guidelines:

When the number of points is secret, we recommend to use a question mark "?" instead of a hyphen "-" (because the hyphen can be misunderstood to mean "0" instead of "secret")

Shouldn't this be handled at the framework level? The dash is what is displayed by the counter whenever the 'score' property of the players in gamedatas is undefined. In Off the Rails, I've recently followed the trend set by For Sale, Kingdom Builder and Thurn and Taxis, which show the score as a dash by unsetting or never defining the 'score' property of the players in gamedatas until the scores are known. This seems to be the most concise and elegant solution for developers.

I don't see the dash as ambiguous at all, especially if a player understands the rules well enough to know when scores are known. It's a great improvement over '0', which was confusing in my first game of Troyes, where I thought I was the only one scoring any points. If a question mark is indeed a better solution and the preference of the admins, there should be a standard and consistent way to do this with documented framework features (a property of the counter, perhaps). Developers shouldn't each be writing their own solutions to overriding the score counter's value.

Actually, this item is taken from emails given as an example of the type of remarks made during a review process.

It doesn't mean that all of these items were completely correct, and some of them were abandoned in the ensuing dialogue with the developer (who put forward the same arguments than you did, and in the end we left it to an eventual change of the score counter component).

Is that confusing and should I remove this point in the example or somehow make it more clear that the remarks are only examples and not to be considered as absolute?

Thank you. I think a clarification about the intent and origin of the remarks would be helpful.

I strongly agree with the intent of the post, and hope that BGA will continue pushing on quality. It has been frustrating and discouraging to see games getting rushed into Beta and valid feedback being ignored because the developer is able to campaign for approvals instead. There are a couple games in Beta now with dozens of unaddressed bug reports and no updates to the project in several weeks. It seems the publishers, designers, and developers are getting all they want out of the public beta release and have no incentive to fix or improve anything after that.

paramesis wrote: ↑24 September 2020, 20:59 Thank you. I think a clarification about the intent and origin of the remarks would be helpful.

Ok, I tried to clarify.

paramesis wrote: ↑24 September 2020, 20:59 I strongly agree with the intent of the post, and hope that BGA will continue pushing on quality. It has been frustrating and discouraging to see games getting rushed into Beta and valid feedback being ignored because the developer is able to campaign for approvals instead. There are a couple games in Beta now with dozens of unaddressed bug reports and no updates to the project in several weeks.

Interesting. Would be curious to know more about your feelings about the process and specific games if you care to send me a private email with details.

paramesis wrote: ↑24 September 2020, 20:59 It seems the publishers, designers, and developers are getting all they want out of the public beta release and have no incentive to fix or improve anything after that.

That judgement is maybe a little too quick (and doesn't really match my personal sentiment from the exchanges with everyone). Many things may happen in people's lives (especially this year...)

Thanks for the clarification. You're right, I may be overgeneralizing my frustration at a few specific situations. Sorry about that. I don't want to cast a shadow of cynicism and negativity over the awesome work and innovation happening among the community here.