Board Game Arena

A few years ago I used the replay function quite regularly. I never had any problem with it. But in recent months I've noticed that most games I go to look up, there archive has been lost. Is anybody else finding this?

This has happened to me a few times. Often, if you search again, or reload the page it will work. It might be a timing issue.

Seems to happen a lot with games in Beta.

The archival process is resource intensive. A lot of games are being played. That's a lot of archives to manage.

Sometimes, something goes wrong and an archive is lost (either retrieving it from a game server, or storing it) but the process has been reviewed and improved some months ago, and as far as we can see it happens rarely now.

What happens frequently though, is that there can be a some contention on disk access to retrieve an archive for replay (we group archives in big packages and accessing these packages can temporarily lock them). We may improve this in the future, but in the meantime, usually it's only a temporary lock, and refreshing the page or clicking search again will bring the archive (unless it has really been lost, it still happens sometimes).