Best Practices When a Game Is Stuck

[Meeplelowda]

I see this issue come up from time to time, but now it has happened to me. I'm in a game of Pandemic and it's my turn but I can't find a path into the game. I don't even get the "opening the box" animation.

Neither clicking on the icon in the main navigation bar, nor clicking on the list under my avatar, nor clicking from the Game In Progress page, nor directly pasting the URL into the address bar is working. Eventually I get the following error:
504 Gateway Time-out
nginx

Should this be reported as a Pandemic bug or a site bug?

[RagnarLT]

Same happening to me in a Castles of Burgundy game

[Meeplelowda]

Whatever the issue was, it has resolved itself.

[BarnardsStar]

From the URL it looks like your game is on Server 15, which somebody else observed was down this morning. Server status page shows it was offline from about 06:05 to 06:50 Paris time.

As for what you should do, I don’t know. It’s not really a bug, but I don’t know how to raise the red flag on something like this.

[Meeplelowda]

From the URL it looks like your game is on Server 15, which somebody else observed was down this morning. Server status page shows it was offline from about 06:05 to 06:50 Paris time.

My issue occurred in that window. I'll know to look for single-server outages if this happens again.

[RicardoRix]

Any 500 http error is a server error, and in other words a BGA server problem. No game dev can fix or cause that kind of error.

[FrankJones]

I see this issue come up from time to time, but now it has happened to me. I'm in a game of Pandemic and it's my turn but I can't find a path into the game. I don't even get the "opening the box" animation.

Neither clicking on the icon in the main navigation bar, nor clicking on the list under my avatar, nor clicking from the Game In Progress page, nor directly pasting the URL into the address bar is working. Eventually I get the following error:
504 Gateway Time-out
nginx

Should this be reported as a Pandemic bug or a site bug?

I agree with RicardoRix. Those are always site bugs. Unfortunately, the specific-game forums (such as Terraforming Mars) get endless "access/block" bugs when something like this happens.

The code for a long-running functional game would not likely suddenly have something in the code that causes the game to be inaccessible or non-functional.

[LaidBackAries]

I see this issue come up from time to time, but now it has happened to me. I'm in a game of Pandemic and it's my turn but I can't find a path into the game. I don't even get the "opening the box" animation.

Neither clicking on the icon in the main navigation bar, nor clicking on the list under my avatar, nor clicking from the Game In Progress page, nor directly pasting the URL into the address bar is working. Eventually I get the following error:
504 Gateway Time-out
nginx

Should this be reported as a Pandemic bug or a site bug?

I agree with RicardoRix. Those are always site bugs. Unfortunately, the specific-game forums (such as Terraforming Mars) get endless "access/block" bugs when something like this happens.

The code for a long-running functional game would not likely suddenly have something in the code that causes the game to be inaccessible or non-functional.

You would think so, but Cloud City is an example of a game stuck on Opening Box. It's been 10 days now and no response to any of the bug reports. No response from my DM to the developer yet (though it was just recently a holiday weekend in the US, so maybe there's still hope).

I wish there was an easier way to force quit when this happens. Or an alert to the appropriate people when multiple bug reports are filed like this. Server issues are obvious and not uncommon. This is an issue I've never dealt with in my 6+ years of membership (fortunately).