Board Game Arena

We are happy to introduce 3 new features for BGA :

Tournaments creation

This feature has been requested for a long time by many of you, and we are very happy to make it available now. We introduced tournaments on BGA a long time ago, and from the start we were thinking about allowing everyone of you to create tournaments, but tournament management is something which is particularly difficult and we couldn't do it until now.

To answer all your questions about tournaments we just started a FAQ on tournaments. Please don't hesitate to ask questions there.

Club membership markers

Every Club members has now a little mark on its avatar, to thank them for their support.

We announced some weeks ago that we'd like to give more visibility and more functionalities to BGA club members, and we will regularly introduce new stuff & features like this

Offer a BGA Club membership

Your friend/wife/husband is asking what would makes you happy for Christmas and you don't know what to answer?

Well, now using this link and your BGA username, you can (kindly) suggest them to offer you a BGA Club membership, so you can enjoy BGA a lot more and support this service at the same time

Enjoy!

Thanks really, really, really, REALLY a lot for the tournaments... great improvement for the site!
I'll gonna post some questions on the FAQ immediately

THANKS AGAIN !!!

Tournaments are an amazing addition to the site and help make me want to become a member - huge thanks for that. But am I the only person who is demotivated to join by the membership flag thing? I don't want an ugly yellow banner covering up 10% of my already tiny icon... what is the point of this 'feature' exactly?

the feature is to promote memberships by making the option visible to all users, pointing them to the fact that there are users that got the membership already and they could, too.

But, yeah, I, too, dont like that thingy too much. 'But it's for sure better than the crown

And, for what it's worth: In the translation headquarters there is a new snippet "Do not display", I have the big hope that it is meant for those yellow banners, at least the existence of that snippet prompted me to gain membership again

Tournaments... nice implementation!!

I also don't like that visibility too much. I'd rather have only the functionality and not be used to (maybe) get more members. It was visible before by the smileys at mouseover when you look for more information of the other players of the game. Is it really necessary to show more than that?

Tournaments are a great idea. But the implementation is so flawed that it should be withdrawn until it's fixed. (what I'm saying here may apply only to Swiss System tournaments since I don't have experience of the others.)

Specific example which should make the problem clear, at least as I've seen it. Last week I entered "Backgammon • Dice to death The First One', the first BG tourney. I was uncertain, because to a tournament newbie the explanations were completely unhelpful and I wasn't at all sure what was going to be happening, but in for a penny....

13 signed up, so six games at a time and one sitting out. I drew the short straw in round 1 and so I was sitting out, but keeping an eye on results as they came in. Five games finished and one taking its time, but a seven-day limit so plenty of time left, but on Day 4 I decided to see how the last game was going. Getting towards the end but one player was way out of time - I think by 19 hours or so. Alarm bells rung because there had already been comments in the tournament about snags if a player dropped out. Then lo and behold, a few hours later that player has won the game.

And this is where the fun starts! I haven't found anything in FAQ or elsewhere which tells me what is supposed to happen when a player runs out of time, but there seem to be several possibilities.

1. the player loses the game as soon as he's out of time and the tournament carries on;
2. if the other player skips him then he wins the game but the tournament carries on;
3. the player is thrown out of the tournament which then carries on without him according to some rule or other;
4. the tournament is ended at that point (this is what I had understood from the discussion was happening, though there were suggestions that the scoring was a bit screwed)
5. the whole tournament is abandoned without declaring a winner.

What actually happened is that the tournament ended when that game ended, with no information about what or why. The player out of time was awarded the point for winning the game (fair enough) and the winner of the tournament is declared as - ME! On 2 points whereas everybody else had either 0 or 1 (and, of course, I've yet to start a game.)

The only good thing about it is that I don't seem to have the Beautiful Green Winner's Badge alongside my other badges! But this is all ridiculous, and as I said earlier, the system should be withdrawn until it's sorted (and, please, an idiot's guide to the groundrules of tournaments.)

PS - the winner's badge has now appeared. If a Mod can remove it I'd be grateful - if ever I earn one I'd like it to be real!!

Hi,

Same happened to at least 4 other Swiss turn-based tournaments: they ended after the first round while 6 were planned...

Hi,

I agree with chrisa and Pedros. I created the tournament mentioned above, giving 7 days for a game due to the possible time difference. But I had the same in 2 NWP tournaments even if all the games were completed in the first round in one of them. Then battlesheep tournament also and I think the same will happen in the targi tournament that I started.

Is this because of the total length of the tournament? The scoring is another issue. But it all seems to function in a real-time ones.

Thanks,
Andrey

It's ridiculous that this bug can't be investigated until enough players vote for it. Tournaments are a major new feature of the site and many players are wanting to play. With this bug it isn't worth playing a Swiss tournament until it's fixed. The Mods and Admins should make this a priority just to keep the site credible! I am not playing any tournaments until it is fixed (especially since there's a bug report that a similar problem affects knockout tournaments as well!)