[Deanrover]

From BBO Lobby News:

"We have lots of exciting plans for BBO in 2005"

What, may I ask, are these?

Also, perhaps this could be a thread for wishes for 2005. I will bump it at the end of 2005 and see how it looks.

Wishes:

i) Dramatic overhaul of the Teams Match system
ii) The ability to play bridge for $
iii) Improvement to the UI. E.g. clicking on user's name and going to their table, signing up for tourney whilst playing in MBC etc.
iv) BBO to hit the 10K mark.

[hrothgar]

My Top 3 Wishes:

1. Creating a tiered series of lobbies for organizing teams games
2. Implementing the "permanent floating indy"
3. HTML based convention cards

[joker_gib]

Yes, I confirm that an improvement in creating team games would be great !

Merry Christmas and best wishes for all !

[Resaz0]

I really hope team match will be improved, it is my favourite feature

Thanks in adavance

[OrShoham]

A change of the default color scheme. Down with yellow!

[fred]

The next release of BBO (like the last one) will be mostly about performance. Logins will be faster, connections faster and better, and we have come up with a new trick that will result in (most) profiles appearing again immediately after you have logged in without any adverse impact on performance (in fact, performance will be improved as a result of this trick). There will be a few new minor features as well. Expect a new version to be available for testing within a week or so (but no promises).

Some time within the next month or 2 we plan to do a general rewrite of both the client and server programs. BBO's membership has doubled in each of the past 3 years and, if this trend continues, the current architecture will eventually be unable to handle the load. We do not have a clear vision yet of what the "new BBO" will look like from the user's point of view. No doubt Uday and I will spend some serious time planning this, reviewing suggestions from our members, asking for opinions in Forums, etc... before we get to work on the coding. Chances are good that requests that many people have made (such as making it easier to set up team matches) will be implemented in the new BBO. I would also like to hire a real artist to help with things like colors, fonts, new images of playing cards, etc.

That's about all that I feel comfortable about revealling at this point in time, but stay tuned - I think you will like what you see. We will certainly continue to try our best to make BBO as good as it possibly can be.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[Deanrover]

v) The ability to cut and paste BBO chat.

[Rain]

hrothgar has his hypertext cc wish. I have my own fervant wish. I've suggested this before. Really would like a standardised alerting format.

I was thinking something like:

1) User makes a bid that he wishes to alert.
2) He clicks "Alert".
3) At the top of the screen (or bottom), he gets to fill in:

Point range: ____
Suits: ____
Forcing to: ____
etc

I think this is a simple improvement to current alerting methods used in Bridge, and will quickly teach players what a proper alert consists of.

Rain

[Deanrover]

Rain, on Dec 27 2004, 05:24 AM, said:

hrothgar has his hypertext cc wish. I have my own fervant wish. I've suggested this before. Really would like a standardised alerting format.

I was thinking something like:

1) User makes a bid that he wishes to alert.
2) He clicks "Alert".
3) At the top of the screen (or bottom), he gets to fill in:

Point range: ____
Suits: ____
Forcing to: ____
etc

I think this is a simple improvement to current alerting methods used in Bridge, and will quickly teach players what a proper alert consists of.

Rain

That is a good idea, but there would be many variable fields to fill in. Not all conventional bids show something, rather they ask (Blackwood, Stayman etc.) Furthermore, some conventions get rather tricky, e.g. I think it is called "WAlsh), but in 2/1 1♣-1♦ denies a four card major, unless game forcing. Thus for a convetion to be fully explained using your system would require the use many logic operators which might be too much for the casual user.

[joker_gib]

Deanrover, on Dec 26 2004, 09:05 PM, said:

v) The ability to cut and paste BBO chat.

Would be great too !

[luke warm]

yes on the cut/paste chat, that's frustrated me in the past... i'd (mentioned before, i know) like to be able to choose when a friend comes online, selectively... maybe it'd be nice to be able to go visible/invisible without logging off

[uday]

Hrothgar, forgive me if this has already been explained ( a quick search turned up nothing useful) but

-- are there any preexisting, decent, html based CC editors today?
-- what did you mean by "Creating a tiered series of lobbies for organizing teams games"

uday

[hrothgar]

uday, on Dec 27 2004, 06:45 PM, said:

-- are there any preexisting, decent, html based CC editors today?

Hi Uday

Depends on what you mean by "an HTML based editor"

Right now, there are a wide variety of Convention Card Editors intended to allow players to create Convention Cards for face-to-face play. These editors produce GIF or JPG files that players can then send to a printer and bring down to the local club.

As you noted during a previous round of discussion, web browsers can be used to display GIF files.

From my perspective, the "best" way to design the system would be to leverage existing third party programs. Editors are available that support a wide variety of Convention Card formats including WBF, ACBL, EBU, ... Players should use these programs to create their own graphical Convention Cards which they can then save to their PC. BBO's convention card utility will provide a pointer from the application to the appropriate Convention Card.

I see three main advantages to this system:

1. BBO serves tournaments that are sponsored by a wide variety of different organizations. This structure provides the ACBL with the ability to require ACBL format convention cards while the EBU can use an EBU format caqrd.

2. BBO no longer needs to develop/support a Convention Card utility. You get to simplify client side development

3. Players who wish to go to the time and effort to manually code a hypertext based Convention Card will have the option to start experimenting. If these experiments prove successful, then you'll probably see the evolution of some editors designed to support this utility.

In short, I'm hoping to deliver some immediate tangible benefits while by-passing the whole Chicken and the Egg problem...

[jillybean]

My wish,
Chat from lobby (noise), tournament sub requests and team sub/play requests could be individually filtered.

jillybean

[hrothgar]

uday, on Dec 27 2004, 06:45 PM, said:

What did you mean by "Creating a tiered series of lobbies for organizing teams games"

Hi Uday

I spent a bit of time considering a number of radical changes to the design of the BBO client. From my perspective, the most "interesting" changes revolved around providing better mechanisms by which players can find partners and opponents.

I should note: The following system presumes that players are going to spend a bit effort to match themselves appropriately for a game. From my perspective, players whose main interest is simply to play bridge with a minimum degree of hassle should be steered towards the hypothetical Permanent Floating Indy.

Today the most typical mechanism to match players involves a combination of serving tables and bombarding the main lobby with advertisements. For example, if I wanted to play some pickup bridge, I could go, serve a table, and then wait for players to join me. Alternatively, if I needed a pair to compete against, I could send messages to the main lobby noting we needed a new expert pair or some such.

I believe that this type of player matching could be accomplished more efficiently if BBO created a series of specialized lobbies for players who were actively looking for partners and/or opponents.

One lobby would contain a set of “singletons”. Singletons are individual players who are looking for partners. Players who need a partner's can move from the main lobby to the singleton lobby. Each player in the “Singleton lobby” will have a profile describing providing basic information: level, systems played, preferred language, what type of game they are looking for (tournament, team game, IMP pairs, etc). Ideally, players will be able to filter profiles. If two players in the Singleton lobby determine that they are compatible, they have the option to form a partnership. Partnerships are “formed” by agreeing to a new joint profile describing the partnership.

Players who form a partnership can move from the Singleton lobby to one of a variety of different locations: On occasion, players will use the pairs lobby to find a partner for a tournament. In this case the pair will be added to the waiting queue for the their preferred tournament and get dumped back into the main lobby. Typically, players will move to the “pairs” Lobby. The pairs lobby contains sets of pairs looking for either opponents for MP/IMP play or, alternatively, team mates for a team match. If two pairs are able to reach an agreement, they will automatically migrate from the pairs lobby to a table where they can complete against one another. Alternatively, two pairs who have agreed to form a team will be automatically moved to the Teams Lobby. By now, the idea behind the Team Lobby should be perfectly intuitive. The Team Lobby contains lists of Teams looking for opponents for team matches.

From my perspective, this tiered Lobby structure should be viewed as a complement to BBOs existing facilities. While I believe that this system is more efficient, there is no reason why players can't continue to use the existing “Play Bridge” options to create new tables directly. Equally significant players who are simple interested in spectating will want to use the traditional facilities to find table where they can watch.

As always, comments are more than welcome:

[pclayton]

I'm totally with Richard on the cc thing. BBO has made leaps and bounds in improving their software, yet the cc is pretty much the same as it was 3 years ago. I like the idea of a 3rd party cc. Personally I like Lee Edwards' editor.

Psssst; the OKB card isn't bad either but was unstable.

[DrTodd13]

Here is my wish list in no particular order.

1) Skins. One of the biggest complaints I hear from OKB people about BBO is the general layout and color scheme. Implement a skin system with the current layout as the default skin and you can alleviate some of these complaints.
2) Revamp of team game system. Trying to organize a team game is a lot of work. Don't have too much in the way of a suggestion other than "make it easier."
3) Add the ability to click on a defender's card to ask about carding agreements just like clicking on a bid asks about bidding agreements.
4) For both bidding alerts and carding questions, use more structured fields rather than free-form text and then translate those structured fields into the various supported languages.

DrTodd

[scoob]

further to the formatted alerts.. the ability to pre-program the alerts and then choose them as appropriate from a drop-down list of some kind would be handy as well

[andych]

Currently in the lobby and table list (in e.g. MBC), we can see the star symbol without mousing over the players. Could the other symbols ('2' - 'A') be shown also without mousing?

About interface and performance, I recently notice OKPlus has a nice interface but bad performance. Please avoid that for BBO. Personally I feel performance more important than interface.

The bidding box in BBO needs 2 clicks. Would be grateful if the bidding box could be changed to 1 click only.

THANKS !!!!!

[fred]

When I first introduced the new symbols I did some tests as to how they would look in the lobby.

They looked horrible (not just to me, but to several other people I showed my test version to for opinions). It wasn't just a matter of aesthetics - it was also a matter of noise and information overload.

If more people ask for this, I might be willing to make it an option one day (one day that I am really bored), but there is no way that this will be the default.

I haven't played on OKB for years, but I seem to recall that they also required 2 clicks for bids (one for the bid itself and one for OK). I personally never liked OKB's interface for bidding because I don't like the idea of having so many little buttons on the screen at once. Just my view - I am sure many would disagree.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com