Why do people join a game and not take a single turn?

[flyingcow64]

Hi all,

Im new to bga but already I have had people join games to then not take a single turn. I could see that it showed them as online, and even the number of games they were playing would change but they would just let the time run and the game ends up abandoned

Why do people do that and is it common?

[Meeplelowda]

Hi all,

Im new to bga but already I have had people join games to then not take a single turn. I could see that it showed them as online, and even the number of games they were playing would change but they would just let the time run and the game ends up abandoned

Why do people do that and is it common?

This used to happen A LOT in Arena before they changed to requiring you to accept an Arena match.

As for why it happens at all, the type of people who are engaged in the forums and devoted to the overall health of BGA are not the types of people who would do this habitually, so we'd be speculating. I can imaging that occasionally someone will click to accept a game, then immediately get distracted by something pressing. But that shouldn't be all that common.

I personally haven't seen this at all since the change to Arena, so that's either a data point that it isn't common or that I'm very lucky.

[FrankJones]

Unusual in my experience. Friendly or ranked game?

[AndreaGot]

This used to happen A LOT in Arena before they changed to requiring you to accept an Arena match.

This happened to me several times during the years, especially with games that don't have many players online at once.
I start the game search, put the browser tab in the background waiting for the bell sound.. Until for some reason I found myself kicked out of a game because I didn't notice it started at all.

[lefalaf]

This used to happen A LOT in Arena before they changed to requiring you to accept an Arena match.

This happened to me several times during the years, especially with games that don't have many players online at once.
I start the game search, put the browser tab in the background waiting for the bell sound.. Until for some reason I found myself kicked out of a game because I didn't notice it started at all.

You may already know this, but for the benefit of others reading too, I know Brave/Chromium (so maybe all chromium browsers, and perhaps other browsers as a general convention) will disconnect tabs it considers inactive. I do not know, or no longer recall if this is on a time limit (probably) or what other criteria are in play. I recall there being a browser setting to override this, but either it didn't really work or got reset on updates and I gave up trying to fight it. It's been a while since I last looked into it. This was on macOS FWIW.

[Jellby]

I can imaging that occasionally someone will click to accept a game, then immediately get distracted by something pressing.

Not necessarily "immediately" and not necessarily "something pressing". Some games take hours (ok, 1 hour max in real-time) to find people to start. It's not unusual to queue for a game, wait for a while, do something else in the meantime and eventually forget about the search in progress. Or count on seeing/hearing the notification when the table starts, but completely missing it when it appeared (in case it appeared at all).

However, that would explain people joining a table and then not clicking "Accept" when it starts. It doesn't explain people who accept and don't make a move, or people joining turn-based games (where there is no accept screen) and never making a move.

[tbhp]

Well if you see them being active in other games and they just let their counter go negative in that one game, the only explanation I can see is that they lost interest in that game.