Disconnects are infuriating

[Pam A.]

I had just started a game - Carto (which costs 11 food).  I was able to play my first 2 pieces, but on the 3rd piece, I began getting the message... 
Trying to reconnect
Trying to reconnect
Trying to reconnect

over and over

I tried sending a message in the chat, hoping that would spark a connection.
Just got error messages.

When it got to about 10 seconds left on the clock, I tried refreshing the page.
 That did reconnect me, but it took me out of the game and put me in the loading screen you see at the beginning of the game.


The game was lost.
The opportunity to play the game was lost.
The rating points were lost.
The 11 food was lost.


This is horribly frustrating.
There must be some better way the site can handle these little temporary disconnects.
I've never seen this problem on another site.

Why does it happen here?
Have you tried anything to fix this?

[Jimmy V.]

Pam,

I can certainly understand your frustration. It is very very annoying to lose a game because of a connection issue.

We have spent a lot of time trying to understand what is going on. We never noticed any clear reason during our many investigations.

We also wrote quite a few lines of code to try and improve what we thought could potentially go wrong. But nothing ever changed the stats.

The biggest improvement we did was to give the possibility to refresh the page. The game is then reloaded and usually the game can keep going then. However, even this major improvement did not seem to make much difference. The rate of abandonned/unfinished online games stays around 2.5%/3%. It seems to be the absolute bottom for now.

What you should know is that the game server has a session of 45 seconds. This means that you get disconnected from the gaming server after that time. The website sessions last much longer but for technical reasons related to the technology used, the gaming server has a shorter session length of 45 seconds. In practice, this means that after 45 seconds, the gaming server considers you gone and the game lost. For that reason, if you refresh the game page after 45s of disconnection, you will be redirected to the home page. I would therefore strongly advise you to refresh the page as soon as you suspect that something is not quite right.

We have started to work on a new gaming server with a more recent technology. We hope that this will make a difference. It is very likely that the current technology does not handle disconnection/reconnection very well. Unfortunately, that's out of our hands.

Happy gaming!

[Pam A.]

Thank you so much for your prompt and helpful reply.

It sounds like I might have been able to keep the game going if I had refreshed the page when I got the first disconnect message.  I was afraid to do that, fearing it would take me out of the game.  So I held off until the clock was so far down it was a lost cause anyway.


Your comment:
However, even this major improvement did not seem to make much difference. The rate of abandoned/unfinished online games stays around 2.5%/3%.

made me wonder if many other people have the same misapprehension that I had. 

If so, simply providing players with the information, might give you an improvement in the rate of abandoned/unfinished online games.
I would not be surprised if you see a drop in the rate for the next few days due to the information you provided in this thread.  But over time the thread will disappear beneath the surface of more current forum messages. 

People forget.
...and people new to the site, will not see it.

Perhaps the error message could be modified to include a short note to immediately refresh the page.  This would be the time a person would most need the information.  I think that would be better than trying to post some kind of permanent message on the home page or the Inn page.


Again, thank you for your help. 
You have greatly reduced my distress over the matter.

Thanks!   

[Matthias M.]

Just from my point of view, I can tell such disconnects don't happen for me. That doesn't mean they don't happen at all, but I've got no problems.

I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 ETS and Firefox in the respective recent version, currently 100.0.2.
Furthermore, yet in the past, I've had no problems, even on a Windows machine.

I guess it's something with the interplay of different clients and your server.

[Angel B.]

I am also getting them.  For me, it starts the game, I make a move - and then it just gets stuck.  But, it uses my wheat up, often penalizes me for ‘quitting’ a game, and I lose ranking.

It definitely happens more with some games than others, but has happened to most that I’ve played, and in particular really bad the last two - three days.  When I do try to refresh, occasionally it will start up again, but more often than not it considers me to have bailed on the game - even if I do it within 20 seconds of it happening.

[Huggable T.]

I most certainly agree with this.   It was part reason I do not come into play the games anymore as you lose so many points when disconnects keep happening and BT seems to be disconnecting me a lot recently - not for long, but its enough for me to lose the game by default!!!!

[Marlene H.]

I just had 2 disconnects in a row.  In one game I was able to reconnect and complete the game.  In the other, it didn't work.

Because they were so close together, I am concerned they will keep happening.  Given it's hard enough to rank up, I don't want to sabotage my efforts with more disconnects.  So I probably won't play here more today.

There was a message at the top of this when I first entered.  It reads:
Warning: this topic has not been posted in for at least 120 days.
Unless you're sure you want to reply, please consider starting a new topic.

I posted it in this thread because Jimmy provided some useful information that newer players might not have seen.  So this bump is also to get that information circulating again.  It might save a few games for players today.

[Marlene H.]

I have to laugh.  After posting my message, and heading back to the Inn to log out, I noticed a new lucky card and couldn't resist checking it. 

I got a small magic potion.

Now I can't resist playing a couple of games.

I sure hope I don't disconnect in any of them.   lol!

(I can't find a laughing emoji)