Board Game Arena

Can we have an official announcement for the server issues and what is being done to mitigate them?

Although it is obviously not realistic for the server to have an uptime for 100%, especially given that the BGA team is very small (the server status page says as much), I think paying members at least deserve to know what is happening if the servers are down too often.

Aging infrastructure. They're shoveling xxxx against the tide.

From another forum...

"BGA was bought by a publisher a while ago. But then Covid RTO tanked their numbers. They have been trying to modernize, but I saw glimpses of their old architecture. It was not enterprise quality, by my standards.

I'm sure it's a combination of keeping legacy infrastructure online and trying to rebuild the engine while the plane is in flight. It's literally what I design on a daily basis and it's _hard_ to do. Things go wrong left and right and your higher ups want good estimates that you just can't give with reliability.

And the real bulk of their value is in the third party development of games. So no one is still maintaining those meaningfully.

So it's doubly hard to upgrade away from old tech."

If you play Turn based game only, having a 15 min server reset and major site update isn't that bad, you have enough timer on that game to wait a little.

But it really bad when it happens when you play real-time, especially playing the games which takes very long time to play. I play mostly play real-time and it's really annoying when you get kicked when you return and I wish kicking should be disabled during server outage, since its almost always certain you are kicked when you return to the game after server reset.

I signed up here recently and mostly played turn based or short real time games, so server issues were no problem for me except for arena game that showed me I’m waiting for my opponents first move only to kick me for not making my move. Lost a few points in my rank and 20 karma which I quickly built up again. Shot happens.

Today I played two rounds of Formula D, a longer game, in real time. In the first game we had to wait long for one player but it seems the problem was on their end and we were able to finish the game. In the second game one timed out, one left and at about 75% of the game the servers stopped and me and the last remaining opponent got an error on our table.

Waiting like 20 minutes for 3 other players to start a game just to end it with a server error after more than an hour of play time is extremely frustrating and I kinda regret paying for 12 months premium in advance. I think the best one could do currently is to stay away from real time games that take longer than 15 minutes until the servers are fixed.