Board Game Arena

This has happened to me several times, on different games, in the past few years:

Someone is out of time. Someone skips that player's turn. But the game still acts like the skipped player is the one who needs to play next, so nobody else can play, and it gets stuck in this state forever. If you try to use the "skip players out of time" button again, you get "Unexpected error: No players are out of time at now" and nothing changes - that player is still marked as skipped, but it's still their turn, and nobody can play.

I submitted a bug report since this just happened to me again this week: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=85721

I also found a bug report someone else submitted about the same thing a year ago: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=60574
However, it seems like nobody looked at that one, and it got auto-closed due to inactivity (which is why I opened a new one).

If you've ever seen this happen, please comment on and vote for the bug so it doesn't get neglected for another year.

Yes, it's a common bug. Still not fixed. I just replied to your bug report with a link to the original bug report, which has the most votes and is still open. Vote for it there, add your comment to keep the report active.

I really wish admins would deal with this issue. Sometimes you have to wait until the end of a 30-day time limit for the game to finish, even though a player has been kicked out, just because other players have not quit the game.

Thanks. The original bug (which I did not find the first time) is https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=4479

This may be a game-specific issue, but apply to several games.
When a player is skipped, they are transformed into a zombie player. However, not all games are coded for zombie behavior. Even "do nothing and make it the next player's turn" requires coding.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but most if this is the situation it is most likely with a game that is not being actively developed, so it may be a while before a developer looks into it.

Jest, are you one of the BGA developers or admins, or do you know if they have looked into this bug and determined it is game-specific? That's not something players are going to be able to figure out, so players may not be reporting it to the specific games.

Cos- wrote: ↑03 May 2023, 20:41 Jest, are you one of the BGA developers or admins, or do you know if they have looked into this bug and determined it is game-specific? That's not something players are going to be able to figure out, so players may not be reporting it to the specific games.

I have developed some games for BGA and can confirm what he said is accurate. But there may still be a bug in the framework in addition to games needing specific coding for "zombie" players.

So I searched, and it looks like sometimes people ARE opening bugs about this for individual games, but then developers are closing those bugs as being duplicates of the general BGA bug, and saying that it's not specific to their game. This may be partly because this is happening on lots of different games, and it's also seems to indicate that this aspect of how to program for BGA is not known to most game developers - and they're not going to guess it on their own. They're just going to keep thinking it's a general BGA bug, and do nothing about it. I think this means it effectively IS a general BGA bug - there needs to be a more comprehensive way of preventing this problem, besides just hoping every single game developer will magically intuit some really subtle aspect of the platform that most of them clearly don't know about.

Here's an example: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=85721

Now, how do we get BGA's maintainers to finally notice and do something about this after all these years?

I confirm I had this bug on a game i made, and this could be fixed in the game. But i couldn't believe that the modification I made will fix the issue before seing it... it's very tricky.
But it could also be fixed in the bga framework, i think it would be better...

Tof63 wrote: ↑13 May 2023, 08:07 I confirm I had this bug on a game i made, and this could be fixed in the game. But i couldn't believe that the modification I made will fix the issue before seing it... it's very tricky.
But it could also be fixed in the bga framework, i think it would be better...

Can you elaborate on what your fix was? Perhaps in the developer discord to see if Tisaac missed it on Kingdom Builder?

Fletcheese wrote: ↑15 May 2023, 16:58

Tof63 wrote: ↑13 May 2023, 08:07 I confirm I had this bug on a game i made, and this could be fixed in the game. But i couldn't believe that the modification I made will fix the issue before seing it... it's very tricky.
But it could also be fixed in the bga framework, i think it would be better...

Can you elaborate on what your fix was? Perhaps in the developer discord to see if Tisaac missed it on Kingdom Builder?

In fact I'm quite sure it's not the same bug, because it's Tisaac that told me how to solve my issue
He is one of the developper that knows the framework the best actually.