Can we please penalize players who queue up for games and don't join?

[Snowcrash000]

It's the most annoying thing on this platform. You wait for a game for 5 minutes and then some guy that queued up refuses to join or times out, what a waste of time. As far as I can tell, these players get off scot free, which just encourages this behaviour. As soon as you queue up, you should be commited, full stop. You are wasting everyone's time by not accepting a match that you're in queue for. This should incur a karma loss to discourage this sort of behaviour.

[MrBeardy]

Why? It's a site where you can queue for multiple games at once. People disappear from tables when other games start. This can happen when you get invited to a game, in those cases it's out of the players control. Penalising then for that would be silly.

Some games have very small pools of players and it can take a long time to get a game started, eg not alone where getting 5 players can take 15 minutes or more. It's quite reasonable for that to be the difference between having enough time or not to play the game so some people have to decline.

You also get to see where people are from, what language they speak, what their reputation is and decide if you do our don't want to play with them. I have declined several games where their experience/karma is too low for me to want to spend time/risk of them quitting.

Then there is the opportunity to confirm what game settings you have signed up to. Not all settings are shown in the summary. Eg race for the galaxy where options for goals/no goals are not shown and that can alter the game play. Learners of the expansions can quite reasonably want to learn the new cards first before trying to tackle goals and similar add-ons.

I've even seen a few games where the host changed settings last minute before the game started. It's quite reasonable for people to decline then

The system is fine as it is. Embrace it. Arena mode doesn't have the confirm and it's worse for it. You can get kicked when you don't even realise a game has started. Your proposal would have people penalised for leaving a table when they get called away before a game has even started, or force then to play with Barry quitter 25% karma, or with sweary Mary who's been banned from using chat, despite the chat being an essential part of a game etc etc. If a player has those sort of bans they're not someone I want to spend my game time with.

[Snowcrash000]

Can we at least select people who refuse to accept a game in the lobby and block them? Currently, there's just no way to deal with these people at all.

[Remkar]

Easy solution that works for both of the above positions...

Karma hit if a person doesn't accept/decline after a set amount of time. That way people can leave for other games, decide they don't want to play with someone, etc., but if they don't go to another game and ignore the accept/decline option, they get a penalty.

Don't know how hard that is to add to the site, but I think that is fair.

[Dr L3cter]

Would love if there was an 'Accept' button after finding a match. I frequently wait for 30+ minutes to find a match. If I happen to be in the bathroom or getting a drink, I miss the first 120 seconds and get expelled. It's really a problem when the queues are long. I've been in a 60+ minute queue before, and when it finally popped there isn't a good enough sound to notify.

Many other games implement this, and I think it'd be a great way to prevent this frustration. If not all members ready up, then remove the non-ready members and keep the others in queue. League of Legends does this, since they had similar issues.

[MrBeardy]

Would love if there was an 'Accept' button after finding a match. I frequently wait for 30+ minutes to find a match. If I happen to be in the bathroom or getting a drink, I miss the first 120 seconds and get expelled. It's really a problem when the queues are long. I've been in a 60+ minute queue before, and when it finally popped there isn't a good enough sound to notify.

Many other games implement this, and I think it'd be a great way to prevent this frustration. If not all members ready up, then remove the non-ready members and keep the others in queue. League of Legends does this, since they had similar issues.

Standard mode does have an accept screen already. Are you playing Arena mode? I've had the same problem with Arena. Wait ages for it to find enough players, only to get no warning the game has started. I don't know why it can't have the confirm screen of standard mode. I get they might not want people to be able to duck certain opponents when it's arena and so a ranking thing but to say "we have enough people to play now (names anonymised) are you ready to start?" would be reasonable. Speaking of reasonable, decent players abort if there's been absolutely no action/gameplay but i think a lot of us have had people kick us instead so they can get the easy Arena ranking points.

[MrBeardy]

Can we at least select people who refuse to accept a game in the lobby and block them? Currently, there's just no way to deal with these people at all.

From what I've seen if a game doesn't launch because a player doesn't accept in a lot of cases the player is auto ejected from the table when it returns to lobby. If they're still there, or they rejoin, then expelling them seems to prevent them from coming back (at least for a while, I'm not sure how long). If you launch a new table then they can join that, unless you redthumb them too. The comedy ones are where someone is trying to leave the table but the host keeps clicking "start" creating a long cycle of accept screen->decline->lobby->accept screen etc. There needs to be a "decline and quit table" button to bypass this, I raised a bug/improvement suggestion for this a while back but it didn't seem to get actioned and is probably mothballed now sadly.

[Dr L3cter]

Standard mode does have an accept screen already. Are you playing Arena mode? I've had the same problem with Arena. Wait ages for it to find enough players, only to get no warning the game has started. I don't know why it can't have the confirm screen of standard mode. I get they might not want people to be able to duck certain opponents when it's arena and so a ranking thing but to say "we have enough people to play now (names anonymised) are you ready to start?" would be reasonable. Speaking of reasonable, decent players abort if there's been absolutely no action/gameplay but i think a lot of us have had people kick us instead so they can get the easy Arena ranking points.

THIS. I'm glad i'm not the only one. And yes, i'm referring to the same functionality that standard mode has.

I'm also 100% sure it's people who want free points... seems like an abusive system.

Happy to buy the devs a beer once they add an accept button to Arena!

[FSKFSK]

The solution to OP's problem is to play Arena mode. In Arena mode, you can't quit once you get paired for a game.

In regular mode, people can quit or go AFK without penalty.

If you queue for Arena mode, there is a chime when the game starts. I also check the window every 2-3 minutes. If you're in the queue for Arena, you should pay attention. If there's a problem, it's your own fault.

[Dr L3cter]

The solution to OP's problem is to play Arena mode. In Arena mode, you can't quit once you get paired for a game.

IMO - it shouldn't matter if you are playing Arena or Normal.... when queues take over 30 min to find an Arena game, and your opponents are able to get free karma/elo if you are 2 min late

If you queue for Arena mode, there is a chime when the game starts. I also check the window every 2-3 minutes. If you're in the queue for Arena, you should pay attention. If there's a problem, it's your own fault.

checking every 2-3 min can mean that you get booted and karma dropped.

In my experience, most opponents are abusing the option to force game end. If I'm even 1 second late, I can get booted and docked points. I'm pretty sure of the 6 games i've been booted from, at least 3 were because I as late for less than 30 seconds.

I had a game yesterday where I wasn't late 1 turn, until literally the end of the game (90 Minutes in!). I was booted for being 24s late (i had to pee...)

I'd also say, I basically just come here to play Agricola. It will take me10 games and 15 hours!!! (average 90 minute games) of playing to make up the karma I lost for being 24s late on the last turn of a 90 minute game... Combined with missing the start of an arena or two, and I'm now 34 hours away from being able to compete again....

All this has taught me is that the system reward being a jerk (guess i'll get reported for calling people a jerk, but at this point my karma is already so low i'll probably have to create a new user or just abandon BGA entirely....). I'll just plan on reporting and forcing game end at every available opportunity moving forward...

If this is what the system is supposed to be like, it definitely isn't fostering a supportive community.