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1

Tutorial, training, online play / Bug in "access limited : play with friends option" ?

« on: 01/04/18, 10:29pm »

Hi,

I'd like to report what seems to be a bug. That or I am really missing something.

I just started a game of Lost Cities and wanted to play against a bot, so I chose "access to the table is limited" and then "only friends" (of which I have none). And sure enough, within barely a second, I was playing against another user. How does that happen ?

It is not the first time I notice this. So far I have observed it only with Lost Cities but I do not know whether this bug is present for all games, or just Lost Cities.

My assumption is that the players I am matched with chose the simplified interface (from home/games and not the inn). I assume that a human player in the inn wouldn't join a table as quickly and casually if there is a lock icon on top of it, but a human having chosen "play" via the simplified interface would just let the program find a match and would not know how the opponent was found. This program could "forget" to check the accessibility options of the currently open tables waiting for a game to begin, and thus send the player on a supposedly limited access table.

I didn't ask the player I just played with (on the other hand, he didn't even reply to "hi !"). Next time I could try to investigate with my undesired opponent how he or she ended up matched with me. Though I'd rather just not have the problem at all.


Since I'm reporting about this issue, I'd like to ask : what is the use of the option "access to the table is limited", sub-option "all players" ?
I understand "friends", "selection of friends" and "link only", but "all players" sounds contradictory with "limited access", and redundant with "the table is open to everyone". Also, from a code perspective, I can see how this would open the door to bugs. If there is no good reason for it (perhaps there are some that I just can't think of), perhaps it would be preferable to remove it. It could even remove the bug I reported.

2

Tutorial, training, online play / Being penalised for crashed games and "Leave game" option

« on: 22/03/18, 05:16pm »

It's not the first time this happens to me, but it is getting really, really frustrating. So I write this post in hope that some changes can be made in order to solve the issue. Which leads to a more general request.

Often enough, games crash. Not very often fortunately, but often enough that it has happened to me about a dozen times already.
When that happens, there is no way out except by logging out of the website. This triggers several penalties:
- Successive wins is reset to 0, as the game is counted as lost.
- ELO score is lost, as happens in a loss.
- It is sometimes not possible to reopen a table within seconds, as penalty for leaving.
Out of these, the one that really frustrates me is the first one, but that does not matter much. The fundamental problem is that players are penalised for a failure of the game's code/the Happy Meeple website. (Just to specify: I checked and my connection otherwise works fine.) It is very unfair.

I suppose it is not easy to automatically detect a crashed game and cancel it (inducing no loss for either player). But this raises another, more general question, which has also been in my mind for a while: why is there no way out of a game apart from logging out ? It's like unplugging a desktop computer to switch it off —there's usually a less radical way to do that.

Could there not be a "leave game" button ?

Upon clicking it, one could have several options : "I want to leave because the game crashed" (this might lead to submitting an error report), "I want to leave because the human opponent is writing inappropriate/offensive comments" (this might lead to blacklisting him or her for me so that person could not play with me again), "I want to concede the game for my own reasons". I would argue that only the third example should really be counted as a loss.

This would be a most welcome new feature !