Issues with inactive kicks in private and paused games

Auto-Kicking inactive players has some issues as currently implemented.

  • It’s not explained, before or after, and surprising to us at first.
    We had no idea why we were suddenly out of the game and had to rejoin. It just seemed like a horrible bug to everyone involved. In fact, it was only on our second game that I thought to search the forums and found out there’s an auto-kick feature.
    Suggestions:
    ** Explain the kicking feature somewhere when the game starts (e.g. in the initial game start email)
    ** Warn a player through email before you kick them (give them a chance to act)
    ** Let them know through email that they got kicked and can rejoin

  • Our Game is paused. It seems clear that the game should not auto-kick anyone when the game is paused. This is a bug, right? The whole point of pausing is that I’m going to ignore the game entirely for a few days.

  • I’m the admin! I’m the premium user who created this private game. Shouldn’t I be exempt from being kicked?

  • Our Game is a private game with a very set group of four people who are not going anywhere and who needed passwords to get in. We’re in constant communication about the game, and we don’t want anyone getting kicked out.
    Suggestion:
    ** Lighten up the autokick rules automatically for private games
    ** Let the admin configure and/or disable the kick timer

Thanks.

Thanks for the feedback Stay, all good suggestions.

Perhaps as a quick fix I could let the admin disable the auto kick feature in the options panel?

Yeah, that’d eliminate all the problems in our case, now that we know what’s going on. And while I didn’t know about the autokick feature, I did use the options panel a few times, so I would have seen that option there, so that’s one good partial way to make that behavior known.

Thanks!

I vote for also allowing the admin to kick players manually.

coming soon for sure!

I think giving the admin the option to disable auto-kicking is good. I don’t like automatically being more lenient for private games. I have joined a number of effectively public games that were actually private games with the password posted on the forum here. If someone still goes AFK in one of those, I want them kicked just the same as a public game.

I also don’t like the admin being immune to an auto-kick, although it would be very fitting for this to be true. I can see an admin starting a bunch of open games and going AFK in them, but since he or she isn’t kicked, they would still collect the coins for the win at the end. This is probably an edge case though.

Pausing the auto-kick timer while the game is paused does seem natural. I hope that also gets put in.

I like @Eshal’s suggestion, but it would need an abuse counter. I have been in many other online multiplayer games (not Blight, I mean) where an admin kicked everyone just when a game/dungeon/whatever ended and rewards were about to be given out. It didn’t matter that in most of those games, the person still in the game/party/whatever still didn’t get anything more as a result; they just did it for “fun” I guess.

1 Like