I postes on discord but i think nobody noticed New games are not starting, they’re stuck on a loading page, the chat though oddly enough works, here’s a link as example https://www.boardgamers.space/game/Fast-game-EU

I'm liking a lot the new layout, just a small thing that I noticed is that turn order icons are much bigger than needed, maybe they could be scaled down and map and technology could be scaled up a bit, I don't know if others feel the same... anyway thanks for all the work you're putting into this!

So, seen how participated this thread has been, I want to offer my point of view on the subject, mostly to reply on some things I read so far.
First of all I've seen someone mentioning TM and how well auction works for that game, well I used to think that too, that auction was great and let you vary a stale meta a lot more but... there are two big "buts":
the first one being that TM has a few fixed maps, with few viable starting positions and fewer paths to score, therefore it's much easier to predict how much better a certain faction will score compared to another, the same thing doesn't apply to GP, most games I played with auction here ended up either with biddings that didn't matter at all or biddings that were far off (like the extreme case where the faction bid the most loses and would still have lost without the vp subtracted from the auction). All of that is simply much more likely to happen in GP because the game is much more sandboxy than TM and the line one player decides to follow in the midgame is just not predictable, and that can cause very big swings of points for another faction (so you could say: this faction is worth this many points more than this other faction unless that third faction does that thing in the midgame, than it would be the exact opposite... so how much do you bid? and for who?). In most games I've seen aucton be useful it ended up just being a mean to nerf those factions which are known as stronger overall, and that to me means recalibrating the factions would make for a much more elegant and definitive solution .
The secon "but"is that even in TM when there's a matchup where one or more of the factions have two or more viable options for starting placements, the evaluation for another factions might change drastically depending on what the starting positions end up being. Therefore the auction becomes just some sort of gambling game (that I'm liking less and less even in TM), and while this issue doesn't arise as much in TM (and auction at this point has settled as the definitive way to go for competitive play) it's pretty much always the case in GP, even in a table of all exepert players the auction is still gambling, it's just not possible to make a correct assumption of what the vp offsets will be.

In conclusion for the way I understand it auction in GP is merely a way of putting the more high tier factions to level with the weaker ones. In table of experts the rotation can already do a lot for that and frankly i never percieved a game with rotation option (when the person rotating knows what it's doing) to be unbalanced and never yelds a predictable result after faction selection, otherwise why bother playing the whole game?
If there's an issue with factons relative strenghts that is something to be solved with further tweaking of the faction, and for all those who think faction balance is untouchable, that is simply a silly assumption, I mean look at all the online games: they get balancing patches all the time, because players evolve, discover new things change the meta, etc... A boardgame simply doesn't get that much playtesting before release, I don't know how you imagine the playtest to be but I can assure you that it's not that thorough and eventually designers have to meet deadlines. The game played during playtest aren't even a small fraction of the game that have been played on here. That said changing the factions would require the approval from the designers followed by a thorough tesing which is very unlikely. They're designing an expansion which makes me think they're not interested in reviewing the factions at the moment.
There are many ways you can tweak the auction system but the game will never be objectively better than with the good ol' rotation, just longer. It may meet your tastes better, I won't argue with that, but most of the time you'll just be playing a small gambling game before the actual game, and that's perfectly fine, I'm just not intersted in it anymore. Just mind that no auction system will improve your chances of winning a game.

@El-Temblo show the world how it’s done!

I found a really small bug... when opening the chat it still shows an X on the upper right to close the window that doesn't work, just a small aesthetic thing more than an issue i guess, I really like the bigger Map and Tracks!

One complaint i often heard from newer players is the absence of building costs displayed on the player board, maybe that’s something you could think about adding in the graphic update, also i would like to add that giving the option of switching between the more abstract layout and the more realistic one is something i’ve never seen on any online boardgame implementation and it’s really great !

I can participate!

Also I'd vouch for different ELO rankings for 2p, 3p and 4p 'cause GP (and almost every other game) is a very different beast if played 2 or 3p rather than 4, I think of it a bit like as in chess there are different ELO rankings for Blitz and normal time chess since one can be very good at playing one while not being good at playing the other...

Hi, I noticed that with the latest updates the replay feature on finished games has disappeared, personally i quite liked to have the possibility to rewatch games and learn stuff, would it be too much trouble re-implementing it. I thought that since it already existed it wouldn't be that hard to do (but then again i don't know anything about coding so i might be dead wrong).
And also I wanted to ask if some other player would be interested like me in a post-game VP breakdown feature, as on snellman, something like clicking on the final Vps on someone it would show how many he got on round scoring, how many on final scoring, techs, etc. etc. I find it very useful when playing TM on snellman.
Anyway I want to thank once again coyotte and whoever else is involved in the developement for this site, the updates are coming very frequently the bugs are fixed super quick, in other words you're doing a terrific job we can't ecer thank you enough !

As title says here’s a link to a game i’m in that doesn’t load https://www.boardgamers.space/game/FastPlayHighKarmaBigMoney

honestly i think that points difference impacting ELO makes sense only in auction based games because in normal faction selection, assuming everybody is at the same level, someone can end up in a very advantaged/disadvantaged position from the get go through no merit/fault of his own. So even though this is true in theory and in the reality of things probably skill matters a lot more, I'm not sure how fair it would be to have score difference impacting ELO

Hi this has just happened to me, I created a game to play with my friends but i wrongly set it to 2 players instead of 4, so now the wrong game has started but we don't actually want to play that one but if we leave it be we are now gonna lose karma, so i was wondering if it was possible to add a feature so that people can leave the game without losing karma if everybody agrees to it.

yeah i think it's too early to implement any faction balancing variant since they're still being reworked and they're not really tested on a big enough sample size to be sure they're all really valid and better than original balancing, though if this site grows it could be a nice platform for actually tesing these things on a larger scale

I agree there needs to be the possibility to abandon a game with no penalties after someones drops!

I think live games don't really require a specific time setting as much as organisation among the players, there is a forums section called games which was meant to be used to organise live games but that nobody really uses, it could be much more useful to post there to arrange meetings between players, agree on settings etc. and start the game at a specific time agreed by all players

@trojanrabbit Sorry but I really don't get your second point, why should you gain more ELO when winning in lower player counts? since it's a lot harder to win a 4p game than a 2p it seems to me more fair the other way around, also that would incentivize even more what i said above about people only playing 2p games against weaker opponents just to skyrocket their ELO

I think in this site there are many people coming from the same gaming group or who know each other in real life that set up their live games privately otherwise it's mostly turn based.
I made an attempt at using the game section of this forum to try and set up a live game but i got no reply... so i don't know how many are interested in doing that but it would be cool if all those who are interested would organise together.
Also there has been a discussion on this forum about live game timer settings so i'm guessing there must be some people who are intersted.
and btw i'd say a live game here takes definetely less than 4h

@zuli the only reason for having different ELOs for different player counts is that once there's a ranking system and people start to care about it, someone that only plays 4p with other equally ranked players could complain about somebody else who only plays 2p and mainly plays weaker opponents therefore easily getting a very high ELO through less effort and puttin himself through a lot less risk.
I've seen a lot of people complaining anout this on BGA.
But still it's not of vital importance anyway, also another solution would be organizing season based tourneys since in that case competitive players would probably value a trophy more than their ELO ranking.

yes it's still happening

I'm not sure how fair it is to drop someone's ELO for inactivity, I mean there are reasons that may cause someone to stay away from the game for some time other than just wanting to sit on top of the ranking ( also it would mean that that someone will stop playing a game he/she really likes just for that reason which seems a bit weird).

Anyway ELO ranking is very volatile by nature, so I still think that the most rewarding thing for competitive players would be to organize tournaments!