Why was my table automatically closed for being abandoned when it definitely wasn't abandoned?

[SquireKeladry]

Has anyone else had issues with games being treated as abandoned and closed when they shouldn't have been?

In your FAQ it says: "A turn-based table is closed automatically if no move has been made in 40 days." (https://boardgamearena.com/faq?anchor=f ... cleangames)

I had a solo game of AFFO that has been treated as an abandoned table and closed automatically by BGA even though I made a move in this game during the past week. Why?? (https://boardgamearena.com/table?table=784706119).

For a moment, I thought that maybe I'd misunderstood what the FAQ actually meant but it hasn't even been 40 days in total since this game was started - the table itself says this game was started 35 days ago. So regardless of whether I did misinterpret the FAQ, my game was still treated as abandoned days earlier than it should've been.

Is this some kind of bug, or is the information in your FAQ out of date and inaccurate? Are solo games handled differently to other turn based tables or something? And if the FAQ is inaccurate, can someone please update it with the correct information?

I know that I was playing pretty slowly but I fully intended to finish this game. (Stuff came up which meant I couldn't concentrate on my games much recently but I still made a few moves during the past week). I thought I'd have plenty of time to come back to this game again once life had calmed down and I'm able to concentrate better again. If I'd known my game was going to be treated as abandoned out of nowhere, I would've at least attempted to fit in finishing it before the table was closed. It's really annoying to be 2/3rds of the way through a game only to discover BGA has automatically closed my table, especially given that your FAQ led me to believe that it was fine to take my time with it so long as I didn't abandon it for 40 days. I don't suppose there's any way to get my game back now?

Also I'd like to know if my other tables going to be closed at random too? I was thinking about getting premium permanently (instead of just to try it out), but I'm not going to waste my money on it if BGA is going to randomly close games in progress on me like this. If I had actually abandoned the game and then it was automatically closed after 40 days, I'd consider that perfectly reasonable because the FAQ had warned me about it, but that isn't what happened here.

[HarrD]

I don't know if this matters, since it looks like you had it set to no time limit, but it does say 'real time' in there also. Might make a difference if it's set to turn-based. I dunno.

[SquireKeladry]

I don't know if this matters, since it looks like you had it set to no time limit, but it does say 'real time' in there also. Might make a difference if it's set to turn-based. I dunno.

I always set up my tables as turn based. And I know I didn't accidentally mess that up for this one because real time tables close automatically after 4hrs (even when set to no time limit - I've experienced that a few times in the past), and this table stayed open for 34 days.

[Shivaware]

I also can't understand why the game was abandoned.

It looks like your premium subscription may have expired during the course of your game. I wonder if BGA stopped your game because of that. That seems like a questionable policy if that's what happened.

[SquireKeladry]

I also can't understand why the game was abandoned.

It looks like your premium subscription may have expired during the course of your game. I wonder if BGA stopped your game because of that. That seems like a questionable policy if that's what happened.

If they did do this, that's a really good way to further discourage me from signing back up to premium, especially when I'm already on the fence about whether I'll use it regularly enough to make it worth it for me. However it does seem unlikely to me because I have some other premium games that are still open, including two AFFO games with different starting setups to the one that was closed. Surely if BGA closed this particular game because I just decided to trial premium for a month and it's now expired, they would've closed all my premium games, not just one of them?

I'm beginning to think that it's mainly that the FAQ is inaccurate. Since writing my original post a few hours ago, I came across someone else who had a solo game which showed it was abandoned and automatically closed at 35 days. I know two examples really aren't enough to draw any sort of conclusion from but it did make wonder if it's just coincidence that it was the same number of days. Maybe it's actually 35 days that triggers the game is abandoned script, not 40 days, and the FAQ hasn't been updated. Though that doesn't explain why making moves in my game didn't make any difference but perhaps there might be some quirks in the system related to solo games... Honestly I'm just guessing here but I think I'll attempt to get some of these other games finished before they reach the 35 days mark and maybe also leave a few of them to see what happens (in the spirit of scientific inquiry! )

[nik592]

It does sound like a bug. I've definitely had turn-based games running for more than 35 days (not solo, but still). I'd report it, but that probably won't help you next time it happens.

[Jellby]

It's possible that a "move" is detected by a change of active players, at least in some games. In that case a solo game never completes any move. I doubt BGA considers it a priority to have a consistent behaviour for multi-week solo games, or that many game developers have thoroughly tested such situation.

[Arjuna92]

The 40 day cutoff may also just implicitly only apply to multiplayer games, since they consider them standard. They might have set up a different limit for solo games and neglected to mention it anywhere. I've never had a solo game go anywhere near that long so can't comment from personal experience.
Looking forward to hearing about those experiments, Keladry

[SquireKeladry]

It's possible that a "move" is detected by a change of active players, at least in some games. In that case a solo game never completes any move. I doubt BGA considers it a priority to have a consistent behaviour for multi-week solo games, or that many game developers have thoroughly tested such situation.

This theory seems very plausible and I agree that it's not going to be a priority to fix. They could update the FAQ though - adding in 1 extra line to that answer to cover solo games surely wouldn't take more a few minutes.

Looking into this more closely, I've discovered that the game duration listed on the closed game table doesn't necessarily match how long the table was open for. Going by the actual time stamps, I've discovered that my AFFO table was actually open for 41 days despite the fact that it now says that the game duration was 35 days.

I managed to find 3 other solo games and also 3 multiplayer games where the table was closed because of abandonment. All of them have the game duration listed as 35 days, but if you go into the game replay and look at the the actual timestamps, they show that all 3 of the solo games were open for 41 days, and all 3 of the multiplayer games were open for 41 days after the last move was made. I guess the system must overwrite the actual duration of the game with 35 days any time it automatically closes an abandoned game. I'm assuming the listed game duration is accurate if a table ends normally but I haven't actually checked that.

So mystery solved, I guess. (Assuming Jellby's theory is correct which seems pretty likely). At least I should be able to know exactly how much longer my other solo games will have until they're considered abandoned and automatically closed by the system.

[dschingis27]

We can launch a whole detective game about these oddities on BGA.

Who can find out quickest that:
- Automatically closed games show a duration of 35 days even though in reality they close only after 41 days since last activity (and the FAQ says 40 days).
- The game type of friendly-mode games shows "real-time" even if it was created in the turn-based lobby.
- Ties in multi-elimination games are resolved by the lower player-id number ("oldest account advances")
- Ties in the Arena ranking are resolved by who has finished the last game (normal mode or arena mode).
- Number of trophies shown on profile page is different to the number shown on the trophies page.
Bonus points: How to find out who gave me a red thumb?

To name a few... (To be clear, I take it with humor, it is relatively normal that web services like BGA have such things.)