Tuesday, June 16, 2015

block chats and kick players

A number of players have requested that they be given the ability to completely block chats. Maybe they find them distracting, or just don't type fast enough to chat effectively. They just want to play cards, that's all.

That's fine with me, and I hope that they are not being given a hard time if they don't chat... it's everyone's right to remain silent, isn't it, after all?!

Now, these players can easily ignore chats by checking the "Hide All Chats" checkbox in their Settings area. You find your Settings by clicking on your user name in the upper right corner. The new checkbox is encircled in green in the screenshot below:
use "Hide All Chats" to block chats at World of Card Games

Other players tell me that there are one or two players whose chats annoy them. They'd prefer to avoid these players' chats. There's something for these players, too. There's now a little "volume" control beside each player other than yourself. If you want to block a single player's chats, click that volume control. It stops the player's chats from being shown.

If you want to undo this action, use the "Manage Chats" area shown under your Settings in the screenshot above.
use the "Hide Chats" icon to block an individual player's chats
Please keep in mind that just because you cannot see a player's chats does not mean that they are not chatting!

Kick Players

 

Finally, there's also a new feature that has been added specifically for players of the game Twenty-Nine [and other team games]. I've had a number of people tell me that they want to be able to kick players from a table. This is the internet and there are times when someone comes in who is extremely ill-behaved. Everyone at the table agrees that this is the case, and wants them out, but their only recourse is to dislike the player and leave. This is more painful in Twenty-Nine than in other games because Twenty-Nine is a very long-lived game. Imagine playing at a table for 1 hour, when a troll comes in and starts harassing you...

For these people, I've added back the "kick player" feature. If there are four human players at a table and three players have all disliked the same, single player, then that player is ejected.

If you wind up being ejected, you may very well know why. I expect that this may get used to eject slower players in addition to trolls. I'm sorry that this can happen, since I don't think slow players should be penalized. Personally, though, I'd rather not be sitting at a table where 3 other players don't like me. So I think it's fair enough to add this feature now.