How do you get back eligible? Several of my abandoned games were completly unitentional.
Moon

@Moon Please try back in a couple days. It's based on frequency of recent penalties but will reset after a few days if no more instances.

@Josh it's been 4 days now?

It's been 4 days now.

@Josh
@Moon
What calendar do y'all operate and live off?...lol. Date of your two correspondences show in the months of July & August of 2024 but today is only Friday, May 24th, 2024.

Also, I cannot keep quiet any longer regarding this "Expert Table" and "Penalty" system it now contains for leaving games early whether the reasons are any of the following:
A) Intentional Quit
B) Unintentional - game server drops us
C) Unintentional - game freezes bringing in A.I.s
D) Unintentional - phone battery dies or power out
E) Unintentional - player's network carrier drop

I feel it is unfair to saddle a player with a ban on playing because any combination of the possibilities I listed above will land you in hot water. I have been banned from playing on the "Single Deck Expert Table" because of a combination of enough of the above shown causes of dropping out of a game.

The last cause, I will admit honestly, was in me quitting on a partner who is not of "expert" level and I did not want them to have the satisfaction of performing the idiotic performance they were doing on purpose. In fact, Josh although you mentioned that early on this low rating of 100 equating to being an "expert" was to soften the sudden changes to the overall systems and player perceptions of letting this idea take root.

In reality, after a minimal amount of games under their belt a brand new player can easily fit in to either table category of "Expert" or just Standard. Basically, there is no expert area or arena still for real players to play in and seek out serious good talent and game play. We are still burdened with the new or the needy or the bizarre or the stinky.

The idiocy I dropped out on recently that I guess tipped me in to being banned is having a partner who bids on round as well but bidding after me. Only one player of the competition is bidding right along from the start too. I had been dealt cards that were better than the garbage anomaly that has hit again recently where ALMOST ALL HANDS cannot be bid on or rarely matched up with your partner to create any resemblance of meld in either hand. So I continue to bid especially since I was the lead bidder. My partner was bidding right along after me but never signalled an increase of +2 in the bid to indicate to partnership that he was taking over. And although the competitor kept on bidding along too the number was getting high and I could not shake off my partner off MY "bid first" bid with no request take-over bump up bid by them. I did the team thing and dropped my bidding to the STUBBORN partner so the bid number would not be totally out of reach. But this rank newby, mind you.. who is bidding right after, drops the bid right away too!!! Well, WTH? WHY??? Why keep bidding over me only to drop the bid after I did the sensible thing a bowed out before number got too high? I would have stayed in if they were dropping and if they were dropping then why hound me and keep bidding over me?

EXPERT? Hell. No. This is only a small sample of the idiocy we put up with...
But don't confuse this with there are genuine new players that just need some coaching and some situational explaining done wherein they would be much better players. Right now I am ranting about the players who are allowed to play in the "Expert Table" level but have win-loss records that are ridiculously slumped in to the loss column by hundreds... If not thousands!!! That player I abandoned recently for their obvious ignorant play had a record of playing hundred and hundreds of games but guess what the majority of them were...

Maybe a more fair and accurate view of the older established players with extensive records is to revamp the rating system to evaluate their performance on the last 50 or 100 games. Then a player, whether noob or existing, would have to legitimately qualify for the Expert Table. Right now a player can amass a ranking of 100 to qualify to play up to Expert but so many of them are no more expert than ...(biting my tongue). Again, in other words, there are two table choices that have extremely similar players whether you just started today after going thru the tutorial or have an overall records of a few thousand total games with two-thirds of them as losses. Neither one to me is an expert yet both can practically play on either table now (give the noob a week to amass the 100 points).

So here I am banned for quitting on a creepy player that doesn't deserve to play in the expert table with the kind of play they perform (there was more to them). Part of my ban is from the game app freezing when someone quits and it tries to bring in an A.I. bot but sometimes gets hung up.

Ironically, though I was banned for quitting on the horrible play of that player...I can still play on the "Standard" table that has players with possible lower ranks and maybe unintentionally worse play.

BTW...
Since the advent of the new Expert 100 table I have seen a lot of new names I never saw before but I have noticed that there are some missing good high level players who used to be around all the time yet I don't see them any more.

@Mike-Ox-Big

Fixed the date format...it was showing day/month instead of month/day 🙂

Anyway...good points. The ban for too many penalties is temporary and will be lifted after a few days. I will consider scaling this back a little perhaps.

I will also think about long term ways to discern different scenarios for how/why someone was removed from the game and consider different penalties depending on the circumstance.

The biggest problem I think is people who start a game, get upset because they're losing (either because they got bad cards or they overbid) and they abandon the game without finishing. The penalty system is primarily intended to discourage this type of behavior. I appreciate other circumstances that are not intentional, but these too contribute to a poorer game experience for the remaining players. If someone has a bad internet connection or an older phone, I understand this may not be intentional, but it's nonetheless annoying for the other players if they drop out in the middle of the game.

I also admit that sometimes people are getting penalized/removed because of errors in the app or network errors. I'm focused right now on finding these errors and weeding them out and will see if there's ways to prevent these cases from getting counted as a penalty.

However, about 90% of the problems are related to people dropping out in the middle of the game. The system tries to replace people with a robot but there's a lot of problems right now with the timing of this if it happens at the same time they system is updating. Hopefully, this can be improved so at least if someone does drop out the remaining players can finish and won't experience subsequent errors.

Longer term, I want to do a lot more with the friends system, to allow people to schedule games with players they know, see who's online and invite people to join a table, etc. and add more chat/messaging. I have a roadmap to get there over the summer but for now am focused on reducing errors and will take a look at some tweaks to the penalty system.

@Josh
Thanks for the quick responses.

What did you think of my idea regarding evaluating a player's performance on their most recent 50 games and keep that as a sliding evaluation view. This may at first penalize some players who have been here for a while but if they have records of (hypothetically):
137 wins / 411 losses for 548 games total (25%) then at first glance in no way should they be allowed to play up at Expert Table. But what if they have finally turned the corner? ...The lightbulb has been lit overhead...
What if the last 50 games of that somewhat ugly record this player went 39 wins / 11 losses for their most recent 50 games (78%) ??

And maybe the threshold Expert Table is 75% winning record for your 50 game (or 100 game) sliding assessment...

This would give many of the old players something to achieve instead of a free ride to create the following:
1) We want ALL players to experience a satisfyingly good time in a positive manner.
2) The achievement of #1 should not be at the expense of directly or indirectly harming the play of others. Now I don't mean that handing someone a loss in the loss column qualifies as a "harm" or avoidable "bad experience". It is a game, after all, and players should expect to win and/or lose. I am referring to the horrible or bad experience the very good and expert players are still subjected to as well. Just as you pointed out that the player's experience is not fun and being harmed by all these games having players drop....for whatever reasons...there exists many reasons for the experienced players to have a really bad time too. Please put our shoes on and walk a mile to see our view too.

As disappointing, aggravating, disturbing are the quitting / dropping players there is a whole world of frustration for the real "expert table" players. We are saddled quite frequently with players that have been playing for quite some time that still:
A) Don't know what's best to pass especially if they don't have any of the called trump suit.
B) are rarely creative with regards to making meld happen in their hand or their partner's hand via the 4 card pass.
C) Either don't know which cards designate the "point cards" or don't know they should point throw the right cards to their partner as play goes on and the books develop.
D) Either will not or do not count how many trump cards have been played so they know how many are left.
E) Play cards out of hierarchy designations that obviously mess up the game info their partner is watching as game develops.
F);Pass you back Aces you send them for what reason still escapes me. Aces not sent back to cover low cards they may need to keep. They send back Aces to void them of that suit wherein I have seen several times now ruining 4-of-kind Aces...!!
G) Many, many more...etc. etc. but could take all night.

Now, again, these numbered comments immediately above are not about the new player who is learning the game and may lack many strategies or needs refining. I refer to having to play with partners who have so many games under their belt that they should definitely know better. In conclusion, that is just as bad but probably worse experiences for the very good players than the players who have to endure someone who quits a game or game server / their ISP drops.

The sliding most recent 50 or 100 game window would fast track the project and opportunity for defining areas or levels of:
1) Expert Table
2) Standard Table
3) Newbie Table.

And if there was some way to deter the potty mouths or the vilifiers from using a "Chat" feature in a negative way...we could teach and/or suggest so much to the newer players to refine their skills fast track.

Please let me know about these items and ideas I wrote about, Josh.
After all...I'm banned for quitting because of my bad experience caused I think directly by another....and I can't play my favorite Expert Table now...lol

@Mike-Ox-Big Thanks for the suggestions. I definitely like the idea of basing a rating on recent performance over the last 50 games. I also like the idea of eventually having 3 tiers instead of just 2, although not sure if there are enough players at each of the tiers to support it just yet. We have been seeing some modest but steady growth in recent months so maybe we can get there by the summer.

Why is this happening to me all of the time?? I will be first in line in the waiting room and 3 or 4 other players come in and knock me out and they play and i go back in the Q???

why if you have someone blocked they still play with you??? Also i have been playing with a lot of people that are lower scores like me and the other team out rates us by over 1000 sometimes?? I thought it tried to make it even
???

ok wow how did this happen AGAIN ???I am in the waiting room 4 players come up and the 2 lowest players get matched up together. myself 769 and partner 299 opponents 1741 and 302 What the heck??? most of the time yo
u just wait until you are more evenly matched.

OMG it just happened AGAIN 2 of the lowest players had to play together. What is going on????

OK this is CRAZY EVERYTIME i play now i am with the lower score like myself and play against usually more than 1000 points more than us. Can you PLEASE fix this

should be marked with a win, message SORRY GAME ENDED