Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[4est]

Hello friends!

First, thanks Stef and SCSN for all the hard work on making Dominion Online run smoothly--it's a fantastic implementation and I've been impressed with how quickly you all have been releasing updates for various fixes, etc.  Keep up the great work!

Not sure if others have experienced this, but I've had multiple games recently where my opponent stops responding and I see that they've left the table, then I have to wait until the client gives me the option to force them to resign. 

Now I know it's possible for people to have connectivity problems and drop off momentarily, then reconnect to the game shortly after (which is a really cool feature for instances of actual connectivity issues), but I've also noticed many times where it appears that someone leaves the table when they were intending to resign and abandon the game, and drops the game into this state where I'm the only one in the table, my opponent hasn't actually resigned, and I have to wait five minutes until I can force them to resign.  It could of course just be connectivity issues like I mentioned earlier, but it seems suspicious for people "have connectivity problems" right during the middle of my long engine turn when they're behind ("weird, they're taking a long time to discard for my fourth Envoy--oh wait, they left the table").  My guess is that people are somehow able to abandon the game (probably by closing the tab or browser) without giving a formal resignation to end the game, thus leaving their opponent hanging in a frozen game-state. 

Have others noticed this sort of thing?  I personally do not make a habit of resigning games with other players (vs. bots), unless it's a particularly demoralizing game and even in those cases, I always try to wait until it's my own turn to resign respectfully.  This might be a long-shot, but would it be possible to somehow enable the client to recognize when a player is voluntarily trying to abandon the game without formally resigning and prompt them to actually resign before they leave?  Alternatively, perhaps the resign button could be made slightly more visible or another visual cue added to encourage players to actually click "resign" when they're trying to leave a game instead of just exiting the application.

Just some ideas!

[LastFootnote]

I haven't personally had this issue. My opponents have all actually clicked the "Resign" button so far.

My proposed solution here is to quicken the timeout when the player isn't at the table. Normally it's 5 minutes, but if they're not present, it's 1 minute. Either it should count down 5 times as fast or it should just be a separate 1-minute timer (but keep the normal 5-minute timer ticking so that a user can't log in and out repeatedly to cheese the system).

[Chris is me]

I understand the value of a 5 minute timer, to allow a computer to fully crash and reboot and all that.

I think if you were allowed to play >1 game at once, or if you could hit some sort of "leave, and take the win if they don't come back, and take the loss if they do" button, that would be cool.

[UmbrageOfSnow]

It can take me longer than 1 minute to reconnect if I'm on slowish-but-still-able-to-play internet and my browser crashes.

1 minute is too short.

[jsh357]

This happens to me frequently, probably at least once every day I play, especially on quickmatch. It also happened near-daily on Goko and MF.

I am really hoping there is a customizable timer in the future (that works with automatching). It's generally quite obvious when someone has abandoned the game vs lost their connection, so only having to wait a minute would be cool. I suspect a large number of players don't actually realize the game is left in this hanging stage when they quit (or just don't even think about their opponent's situation when they do).

[aku_chi]

How about adding a dialog prompt when a user closes the tab during an active game to ask if they want to resign?  They could still maliciously choose not to resign, but this might catch some cases where a player rage-quits (or has to leave in a hurry) but doesn't actually feel malicious towards their opponent.

[pingpongsam]

How about adding a dialog prompt when a user closes the tab during an active game to ask if they want to resign?  They could still maliciously choose not to resign, but this might catch some cases where a player rage-quits (or has to leave in a hurry) but doesn't actually feel malicious towards their opponent.

Seems you could make the choices resign (ok) or forfeit closing the window (cancel).

[Chris is me]

Is there a non-extraordinary reason you would wan to manually close a Dominion tab during a game without resigning?

[4est]

Is there a non-extraordinary reason you would wan to manually close a Dominion tab during a game without resigning?

Unless many users are far more inherently evil than I'd like to imagine, I doubt that most times this sort of thing happens people are actually being intentionally malicious, and thinking, "Ha, I'm going to close the tab instead of resigning and leave my opponent hanging for the next five minutes!  That'll show them for playing a better game than I did!" 

Of course, there will always be trolls (who probably are inherently evil), but I'm guessing that in most instances this occurs, people just aren't aware of the Resign button or are indeed ragequitting by angrily closing the tab (without actively desiring to inconvenience their opponent). 

[Chris is me]

I agree, I just wanted to make sure that there wasn't a reason to close a tab manually without resigning - the prompt solution proposed above is fine in that instance.

[pingpongsam]

Is there a non-extraordinary reason you would wan to manually close a Dominion tab during a game without resigning?

There's a bug right now that occasionally pops up where the first player can't do anything. Closing the browser and re logging into ShIt fixes it. It's happened to me maybe 4 or 5 times and I've seen it happen to the other guy 2 or 3 times. I've probably played 150 games for reference on the frequency. I'd say this bug should be addressed before instituting this policy.

[ackmondual]

If someone actually did have to take a break (e.g. grab water, bathroom, deal with kids, etc.) a pause button would help to let others know that that person will return (but even then, that should have a timer too if longer).

[AdrianHealey]

I'd like an option where I can say that if I leave a table, I automatically resign.

[serakfalcon]

For what it's worth, I'm often playing on unreliable wifi, at home, my ISP is fast but not entirely stable so every now and then it craps out, and my mouse has a few extra buttons on the side, which trigger the "forward" and "back" actions in the browser, so basically if I hit one of them by accident I lose the page. One of the above things happens at least once a day (also, the way the site is configured, if your internet drops during your opponents' turn it looks like they are thinking, so it's not so obvious that it's your problem not theirs).

 I'm quite happy I can rejoin games. 5 minutes to wait for someone who doesn't have the courtesy to resign is annoying, but it's not the end of the world for me at least.

[pingpongsam]

For what it's worth, I'm often playing on unreliable wifi, at home, my ISP is fast but not entirely stable so every now and then it craps out, and my mouse has a few extra buttons on the side, which trigger the "forward" and "back" actions in the browser, so basically if I hit one of them by accident I lose the page. One of the above things happens at least once a day (also, the way the site is configured, if your internet drops during your opponents' turn it looks like they are thinking, so it's not so obvious that it's your problem not theirs).

 I'm quite happy I can rejoin games. 5 minutes to wait for someone who doesn't have the courtesy to resign is annoying, but it's not the end of the world for me at least.

The solution being discussed would still respect failed connections and just generate a dialog on the stray attempt to leave the page.

[Chris is me]

If someone actually did have to take a break (e.g. grab water, bathroom, deal with kids, etc.) a pause button would help to let others know that that person will return (but even then, that should have a timer too if longer).

There already is a way to communicate this - just type something in the chat box saying what's going on. 95% of people will understand.

[Haddock]

For what it's worth, I'm often playing on unreliable wifi, at home, my ISP is fast but not entirely stable so every now and then it craps out, and my mouse has a few extra buttons on the side, which trigger the "forward" and "back" actions in the browser, so basically if I hit one of them by accident I lose the page. One of the above things happens at least once a day (also, the way the site is configured, if your internet drops during your opponents' turn it looks like they are thinking, so it's not so obvious that it's your problem not theirs).

 I'm quite happy I can rejoin games. 5 minutes to wait for someone who doesn't have the courtesy to resign is annoying, but it's not the end of the world for me at least.

This is my single biggest issue with the client as it stands.

I have several times had to apologise to opponents who think I've taken ages to do anything when AFAIK they are the ones taking ages making some decision or other.

[ben_king]

In Javascript it's possible to listen for window.onbeforeunload.  Usually developers do this to prompt the user whether they really want to leave.  But maybe it could be used to send a "resign" signal to the server, so that the client can differentiate between the user losing their connection or the browser crashing (in which case we should wait for them to reconnect) vs. the user actively closing the window (which should be a resignation).

[LastFootnote]

In Javascript it's possible to listen for window.onbeforeunload.  Usually developers do this to prompt the user whether they really want to leave.  But maybe it could be used to send a "resign" signal to the server, so that the client can differentiate between the user losing their connection or the browser crashing (in which case we should wait for them to reconnect) vs. the user actively closing the window (which should be a resignation).

The user actively closing the window absolutely should not be a resignation. Sometimes you legitimately need to close out of the tab and reload to get back into your game. You could prompt the user whether they want to resign when they close the window/tab, but you shouldn't force them to.

[iamsparticus]

This happens frequently. I don't mind it happening once, what I do mind is that there still isn't a ban list. I should be able to ban these players from playing with me again. This (to my knowledge) was a promised feature, and I would love to see its implementation quickly.