Board Game Arena

I love BGA and am super grateful for it, having enjoyed it for 10 years. But this the least stable service I use on the Internet.

I'm a software engineer myself who has made my fair share of mistakes, so I can empathize. However, more careful planning is needed before changes are rolled out. More time should be spent on scalability.

Thank you!

Or at the very least, BGA should return lost ELO after they mess up/the servers fail. I was blocked from joining a table I was actively in, and BGA treated me like I was at fault when I was expelled. I don't care about reputation points they reassure me will be restored. Those are easy to get back on my own. I care about the fact that I've been working for a couple years to get to the #1 all-time slot and I just lost 30 points through no fault of my own, and I can only earn +4 per won game at best.

Old_Man_Willow wrote: ↑08 June 2026, 22:28 Or at the very least, BGA should return lost ELO after they mess up/the servers fail. I was blocked from joining a table I was actively in, and BGA treated me like I was at fault when I was expelled. I don't care about reputation points they reassure me will be restored. Those are easy to get back on my own. I care about the fact that I've been working for a couple years to get to the #1 all-time slot and I just lost 30 points through no fault of my own, and I can only earn +4 per won game at best.

Exactly. With not so uncommon crashes, almost no one plays real-time arena games anymore. Its to easy to lost your points. All games that ended by kicking someone during BGA crash, should either have all results canceled, or all games like that should be auto-changed into TB with option to turn it back to real-time after bug is fixed. That should be done by BGA, not on players request like now.

Now you have report that tables and then you will get ELO and Arena points back. But still bad person will have unfairly one gained too. So it is still encouraging bad behavior. As site which claims to encouraging friendly atmosphere, your policies do exactly opposite. This is only 1 of examples.

Member for 10 years, premium since 2021

I've never seen as many service issues with the site as have been happening lately.

Yeah. I recognize it's likely an incredible challenge to maintain. And having been a member for 12 years, I'm sure the architecture is creaking/groaning under all of the updates made. I know they have a relatively bootstrapped team working on this.

But the one thing I'd say would be: mistakes happen and some site downtime is inevitable. But more communication and transparency would be appreciated, especially considering that this is a paying subscription service for many of us. Just a summary news article after significant outages: "Hey, we had significant downtime yesterday and today. We investigated and the cause was ____ and we've implemented ____ fixes to address this moving forward."

squarerootofthree wrote: ↑09 June 2026, 16:53 Yeah. I recognize it's likely an incredible challenge to maintain. And having been a member for 12 years, I'm sure the architecture is creaking/groaning under all of the updates made. I know they have a relatively bootstrapped team working on this.

But the one thing I'd say would be: mistakes happen and some site downtime is inevitable. But more communication and transparency would be appreciated, especially considering that this is a paying subscription service for many of us. Just a summary news article after significant outages: "Hey, we had significant downtime yesterday and today. We investigated and the cause was ____ and we've implemented ____ fixes to address this moving forward."

Basically if they followed their philosophy at the bottom of their outage page: https://boardgamearena.com/serverstatus ... ves_played

Our philosophy
Having a gaming service available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week is not something easy to achieve for a (very) small team like ours. In addition, BGA is a realtime service, and any service outage may ruins games in progress.

Our philosophy is to be transparent on service outages, by explaining why it happens, what has been impacted (and how long), and what we did to make sure it won't happen again. Explaining all of this is the goal of this page.

Note: If an incident is in progress, live updates will be available on our x feed https://x.com/boardgamearena and/or on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/boardgamearena/.

Yesterdays outages they didn't post anything about why it was happening, how long the service was impacted and what they did to make sure it wouldn't happen. Today's they're not even posting - I find it more frustrating to get a message whenever the site is down that I should go check their twitter and facebook pages for updates and see no updates.

Nob Leader wrote: ↑08 June 2026, 21:22 I love BGA and am super grateful for it, having enjoyed it for 10 years. But this the least stable service I use on the Internet.

I'm a software engineer myself who has made my fair share of mistakes, so I can empathize. However, more careful planning is needed before changes are rolled out. More time should be spent on scalability.

Thank you!

Absolutely agree. I work in UX research in a tech field, and I can't help but wonder what propels adding new games to the system while the servers can hardly handle what they already have to deal with? Plan regularly scheduled maintenance instead of having routine crashes leading to negative user experience. Each time this happens 'unexpectedly' leads to more negative feedback. Ideally, you want to avoid negative feedback.

Scalability and trust from users should be paramount. Build responsibly.

P.S. As an addendum, update how you communicate about the site being down. The 'we'll be back in 10 minutes, but if we're not, check out X for details' is unfortunately a) evasive (no real time frame provided), and b) inaccessible to folks without access to X. More practices we want to avoid. Be specific, actionable, timely, and realistic.

sarellem wrote: ↑09 June 2026, 18:10 P.S. As an addendum, update how you communicate about the site being down. The 'we'll be back in 10 minutes, but if we're not, check out X for details' is unfortunately a) evasive (no real time frame provided), and b) inaccessible to folks without access to X. More practices we want to avoid. Be specific, actionable, timely, and realistic.

I came here to say this. X is virtually unusable now for those of us who don’t have/deleted their account. Could updates be posted to Bluesky, or failing that, FB, Instagram, etc?

It's simple BGA. STOP ADDING NEW GAMES, put that time into reducing the technical debt that I'm sure has piled up.

I think most premium users would be ok paying a bit more if it meant site stability. Or maybe they need to put an end to free users (or do more to encourage getting premium).

They just need to figure out something, because I don't think I've ever seen a site this dysfunctional.