New lobby (integrated to game page)

[carnepazza]

For you, yes, but our tests shows that for a majority of players, this information is much less important than the other. For players like you who really want to have an immediate access to the whole informations, we can only recommend to continue to use the old lobby.

Again, if you want to have everything displayed and accessible in one click, we can only recommend to continue to use the old lobby.

I always try but it’s not so easy to use the old lobby, BGA sends you directly to use the new one, it’s really difficult to use the old one.

But then the old lobby will always stay with the new one?

Isn’t the purpose to implement the new lobby so that it satisfies all players and not just the majority?

Perhaps your feedback from the majority of players comes from those who do not use much BGA, but those informations are really important for a regular player. It would be nice to give value to the feedback of the players who use this site really much.

thanks

[Janabis]

Long time since the last post, since we took time to process your feedback and upgrade the new lobby.

Feedback on your feedback

I do not like the new lobby. It is ugly, confusing, has poor flow, and works poorly. BGA typically has excellent design and user interfaces. Something weird has happened here.

Thanks a lot for your remarks on the previous designs. I should mention that ALL our previous designs have received hundreds of bad feedback, so it is nice to see that at the end they are considered excellent

Est-ce que vous ne pensez pas qu'il soit possible qu'en réalité, la majorité des gens mécontents ne trouvent pas que l'ancienne version soit excellente, mais juste qu'ils soient obligés de s'y habituer parce qu'ils n'ont pas d'autres choix & qu'ils aimeraient ne pas encore une fois "régresser" ?
Bon, j'y vais certes un peu fort, parce que il y a pas mal de bonnes choses améliorées, mais au fil des modifications, je trouve qu'il y a toujours de bonnes idées qui ont disparus au détriment de choses moins bonnes & qui me manquent toujours. Certes je m'y suis habitués, mais cela ne veut pas dire que je la trouve mieux que la version précédente & encore précédente. Votre raccourci me semble un peu trop raccourci. Juste pour l'exemple, désormais, pour créer un partie, pour jouer une partie ou pour faire n'importe qu'elle action sur le site, il faut cliquer deux, trois voire quatre fois avant d'arriver à notre but. Avant, c'était plus rapide. Le bandeau où on voyait directement qu'on avait des parties en attente & qui nous y conduisait en un clic a disparu pour cause de gain de place, mais quand je vois la place perdue avec la nouvelle mouture aujourd'hui, je me dis que l'excuse était assez mauvaise & qu donc ce bandeau pourrait très bien revenir. Non ? Tout comme les explications sur le retrait des parties illimitées qui me sembleraient au contraire justifier de conserver l'option ...

[muddypawprints]

I just need to make one clarification. What has been created, is NOT a lobby persay... A lobby is a gathering spot for SEVERAL DIFFERENT destinations. What has been created are waiting rooms. Waiting rooms for each individual game.
Which is fine. Now can we work on the actual LOBBY that is in place? The one that you refer to as OLD Lobby? If we can get them to work together, I really think that would be something that everyone would happy with.
The Lobby would show us each game that is waiting for players, we can join them, sort them, possibly group them, etc.
The waiting rooms are for creating games.

Thoughts?

[Arnott]

Add me to the list of people who would like the "no time limit - Friends only" option to come back (and/or be easier to find/implement). There are 5 of us - 2 on the U.S. East Coast, 3 on the West - that have been playing 90-120 min of Die Crew Deep Sea almost every Tuesday for the past year+ ... and those sessions often contain the need to deal with off-screen children, dinner, laundry, bathroom breaks, etc. And our ability to talk amongst ourselves while these things are happening without not just the potential ELO hit, but to not have to LATER hear that time music OVER and OVER again while we're playing the game (using Discord to com) is a huge part of what makes it fun for us. Most of us don't care about actually "earning" the ELO, but one of us does... and we think that's a fair thing to care about so we semi-suffer through these moments when they come up.

Co-op games, IMO, are hurt the most by this change. I would not want to play Pandemic, for example, now, if players can't also talk about stuff out w/o having to be on the clock. And being drowned out by the time-music.

Another point (and I could be wrong about this), but training games also don't count as part of your "official" Games Played total, right? I mean, they're there as "(+ N)" I think (right?), but that now can't actually be differentiated from REAL training games. For people who've actually been using that stat distinction.

Anyway... not angry Just wanted to add more feedback.

[ptreey]

Not sure where to post my feed back on this did not see any easy ways to do that. Si i will do it here, i really hate how games start from inside the games now and that no time limit games can only be played in training mode. It was already a pain enough before having to do extra clicks to restrict to friends only to be able to start no limit game. With new interface i keep starting multiple games with friends, with settings not as fine tuned and easily adjusted as old games. Also starting games with strangers by accident when i do not mean too. So far all other players i talked to also hate new lobby. Its fine to be able to start games like that for those that want to, but i wish the old lobby was still an option thats easy to get to which currently its not, i have to start new game from game screen then go jump in it and try to adjust everything from the old menu. Please roll back or improve these changes.

[tommymillerjr]

I created a bug report on this but thought I would also post here as well to get more visibility on the issue. I created a bunch of tables today and restricted them to a group I was in. I created these tables via the new lobby from the game page. If someone else crated a table of that game with the same settings it would throw me into that game and close my table. So instead of playing with my group I'm playing these games with other people. Even if I catch BGA throwing me into a game and I quit before the game is full it will keep adding me to that table.

[Aramoro]

The new UI is almost entirely unusable for myself and my friends. Previously we start a table, restrict it to friends then copy the table link to post in chat. That route has been taken away it seems. It's very hard to get the link to the table for people to join, for the player starting the table they can't navigate to it properly.. I tried to create a Barrage table earlier and after 2 of my friends joined I wanted to start the game, there were 4 spaces, there was no option to do so. I could cancel looking for players and essentially abandon the game or just keep waiting. No option to start.

It's absolutely killed our ability to create tables, invite people and start games. Redesigning the UI is fine but it has to cope with the basic use cases like this.

[EvanstonDeb]

The problem is, when you are invited into a game you are dropped on the new game page where there is a big "start" button over where your name is. People are clicking on that instead of waiting for the game to launch automatically and end up starting a new game that they are unaware of with people they were not intending to play with. Then there is a lot of confusion and Karma points lost and frustration.

[Patrick of the Isles]

The feeling you have using the new lobby is that it was created by someone who doesn’t often use or has never used BGA.

That is a pithy way of summarizing your feelings about New Lobby. I am reminded a bit of a situation that arose in 1985 here in the United States. The Coca-Cola Company, a worldwide purveyor of soft drinks, decided to reformulate their flagship beverage to a new flavor profile. They put vast sums of money into testing and then marketing the new formulation, in the hopes of drawing new drinkers and growing their market share. However, customers did not enjoy the new formula, and the outcry from longtime consumers was fierce. The company was forced to revert to the old formulation after just a few months. The product name, New Coke, became a byword for companies altering a successful brand in a way that consumers fail to accept.

With that said, I should be clear that the BGA staff is doing great work and is much appreciated! BGA is so much better for me than other board game sites in matchmaking and general usability - the difference is quite large. In the rare instance that I use one of the other sites to play a game that has not been implemented on BGA yet I am immediately reminded of how good BGA's features are. I do not think I will have the opportunity to make use of New Lobby because I start multiple games at the same time and the Classic Lobby is much more useful. However, I am glad that the people who enjoy using New Lobby will have it available to them as an option.

@Souris - On the subject of saving clicks, and speaking about Classic Lobby, something I have always wished for is that when I click the "Create" button in manual view it would make the table without automatically taking me to the table page. That way I can "click, click, click" to create several tables of different games without leaving the lobby page. As it is, I have to click create, then click Play Now again to return to the lobby screen, then create the next table, and then click Play Now again, and so on, meaning a lot of page loading back and forth to create several tables quickly.

[surfeur_dargent]

Bonjour,

Comme beaucoup, je ne suis pas forcement fan du nouveau lobby.
Je ne m'y retrouve plus, ce n'est pas très claire.
Je trouve sympa de voir des infos sur le jeu et le résumé des classements en bas mais la partie lisible qui nous intéresse est le nombre de personne présente et ce n'est pas toujours très claire.
De plus je ne comprend pas comment je me retrouve sur deux interfaces différentes quand je rejoint ou quand je crée un partie.
C'est dommage, c'était si simple avant.

Merci tout de même pour le super boulot que vous faite, c'est toujours un plaisir de jouer sur ce site.

Bonne continuation !