Board Game Arena

Hello, nice community of BGA.

I've recently joined this site, and its pretty awesome so far. I'd like to see if i can help out with translations to Dutch. But i'm still to low rank! (your account needs to be 3 days old first)
Anyway, as from time to time i'm stuck with tables that do not accept me due to noobish level, i started to create my own table.

Question:
Why is the timer before it goes live so short?

30 seconds is enough for a pro BGA user no doubt, but i have a hard time creating a table without a little panic . For me the interface, of table creations, takes a bit longer than 30 seconds to understand and to find options needed. It will also not be the first time that i'm just looking on the options, where they are, what they do etc, with someone suddenly jumping in on the table. Then as i'm still trying to get a glance at the option i become harrassed for starting the game already . Annoying, and sometimes in panic i just close the table, leading to ackward and unnecessary situations.

As there is a button to go live, would it not be an idea to increase the timer a little? That way new members (or well me ^^) could create tables in a bit calmer fasion with all the options they want. I understand that the community is already quite used to 30 seconds creation. I guess the timer is there to prevent people from holding tables/server resources. But yeah just wondering .

Also how many characters can you type in the sub title, at table creation? Each time i try to write some nice sub title, but i get cut off in the middle due to table going live. Erasing my sentence!

I admit maybe i'm a bit slow. But i like to write original somewhat funny sub titles, however doing so in 30 seconds, foreign language and while also determining what level players you want is difficult!

Greets, and love the great work on this site.
Sawyer

PS: i'm sorry if this is already discussed somewhere, couldn't find it with the search function.

It's interesting that this never got addressed.

I was going to post the same comment/question, but wanted to see if anyone else had asked about this.

I started to make a "table" last night after finally joining, because I just wanted to see what an invitation looked like, and assumed it would be easy to just cancel it. I was taking my time looking around at the options, when I suddenly noticed a clock counting down and I had 11 seconds before this thing would go live. Huh? That was a bit of a surprise. I just wanted to look and did not want to put this invitation out there, so then I was in a bit of a panic trying to find how to stop the thing. (And found the button to quit just in time.)

I honestly don't understand why making an invitation would have a timer to begin with. But assuming there's a good reason for that, why so short? As the prior poster said, the experienced people can maybe do that quickly, but for those of us who are new, we cannot go so quickly. And how are we to take our time even looking at the options if we've never made an invite before, with that clock running? How would someone new even know it was there? (It certainly surprised me!)

And yet... I'm being warned that being new to a game I really should not join a table but create my own, but if you're new and don't know what you're doing, creating your own has a clock ticking.

One thing you seem not to understand is that you can still change the options after the timer went out.

Of course, people might join as soon as the timer run out, and changing the options afterwards may (sometimes) cause players to leave (because they do not like such option being ON or OFF, for example).

Anyway, it's not a real problem, because you have as much time as you want to check the options and change them before you ever choose to start the game (only the "creator" of the game can do so, even if other players also have to give their consent).


I recommend you to first create a game and take your time to look at all the possible options. And then, once you feel ready, (and if there are no players left because they did not want to wait), just quit this game, and create another table. The second time, once you know where is which option corresponding to what, should be much quicker.

Moreover, once you have, for some specific game, a "perfect" set of preferences, it will be set automatically each time you create a table for this game.


I don't think this timer should be removed, but maybe it should be increased to, like, 1-2min instead of 30s.

It would never have occurred to me that I could change options once an invite was out. (In fact, if I'm accepting games I guess I better pay attention for possible changes.) I also figured it would be bad etiquette to quit the game after people have accepted. But I can try those.

I guess I could see where you don't want the system clogged up with a bunch of invites that no one ever finished, hence the timer, but I would suggest making it a bit longer... those who are quick can start it once they're finished.

Thanks for the response.