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Private tables - A solution?
EvilPingu
Member Posts: 3,462
Over the last month, there's been a lot of requests for private tables on here so that people can play with their friends.
From what I've seen previously on other threads, the drawbacks of adding private tables are:
1) A Stars-style club would take forever to build and probably isn't possible with current software - Definitely not possible for the current lockdown.
2) Password protected games require someone to set up the game in the first place, which is a problem when nobody actually enters (as it just clutters the lobby and wastes people's time) or someone decides they want a game with their friends at short notice.
3) Stars already have home games, so sinking any significant amount of money/resources into private games isn't worth it.
Assuming Sky wants to do something but can't, rather than choosing not to - How do you get around those issues?
Have a private cash table which spawns with no password. When the first person sits at a table, they are asked to choose a password in addition to the options currently available when you sit at a cash table.
This just needs an input field added to the options when sitting at a designated 'private' cash table, and a simple piece of code to say "if there's no password, instruct the user to 'set password' instead of 'enter password' and set the password to whatever that person puts in the password box".
I think this would be a super simple thing to implement, and it allows for some form of private tables to satisfy recent demand without Sky having to do anything manually afterwards, hence the suggestion.
For this to work:
- A new private table spawns if no empty private table exists at that stake
- Private tables despawn if 0/10 are seated for >15 seconds and the password field is non-empty
- The password is removed on table spawning and/or table despawning (to avoid a previously used table spawning with a password already set, which would break everything)
The rest of these aren't super important, but
- Private tables could simply be named "Private 100-199" at 4nl, "Private 200-299" at 10nl etc, as this allows the lobby to be put in alphabetical order to make tables appear together and in numerical order for easier finding, as well as uniquely identifying each table.
- Players have 60-90 seconds instead of the usual 30 when sitting at a cash table before their seat reservation is cancelled, allowing people to input the password.
- A longer period of allowed inactivity before players are removed from tables - Maybe 15-20 minutes with no fixed number of hands played before auto-standing? This allows people to tell their friends which game to join, or wait for people to join if they don't want to play short handed.
- For a private game, people can self-police how shallow/deep they want their group of friends to be sitting in the games, so you can loosen up the min/max sit down amounts. I'd suggest 10-200bb or 20-200bb.
- All private tables are 10-handed. The software already has this capability as it's used for the Orfordable deepstack on Fridays, it reduces the # of games where there's not enough seats for everyone, and it makes it easy for other people to filter out in the cash lobby by simply unchecking the '10 players' setting in the filters. If people want to play 6-max they can just spread out across more tables. Obvs if the mobile app still can't do full ring tables then you might need both 10-handed and 6-max, or you can just limit private games to the desktop client and browser.
Thoughts?
From what I've seen previously on other threads, the drawbacks of adding private tables are:
1) A Stars-style club would take forever to build and probably isn't possible with current software - Definitely not possible for the current lockdown.
2) Password protected games require someone to set up the game in the first place, which is a problem when nobody actually enters (as it just clutters the lobby and wastes people's time) or someone decides they want a game with their friends at short notice.
3) Stars already have home games, so sinking any significant amount of money/resources into private games isn't worth it.
Assuming Sky wants to do something but can't, rather than choosing not to - How do you get around those issues?
Have a private cash table which spawns with no password. When the first person sits at a table, they are asked to choose a password in addition to the options currently available when you sit at a cash table.
This just needs an input field added to the options when sitting at a designated 'private' cash table, and a simple piece of code to say "if there's no password, instruct the user to 'set password' instead of 'enter password' and set the password to whatever that person puts in the password box".
I think this would be a super simple thing to implement, and it allows for some form of private tables to satisfy recent demand without Sky having to do anything manually afterwards, hence the suggestion.
For this to work:
- A new private table spawns if no empty private table exists at that stake
- Private tables despawn if 0/10 are seated for >15 seconds and the password field is non-empty
- The password is removed on table spawning and/or table despawning (to avoid a previously used table spawning with a password already set, which would break everything)
The rest of these aren't super important, but
- Private tables could simply be named "Private 100-199" at 4nl, "Private 200-299" at 10nl etc, as this allows the lobby to be put in alphabetical order to make tables appear together and in numerical order for easier finding, as well as uniquely identifying each table.
- Players have 60-90 seconds instead of the usual 30 when sitting at a cash table before their seat reservation is cancelled, allowing people to input the password.
- A longer period of allowed inactivity before players are removed from tables - Maybe 15-20 minutes with no fixed number of hands played before auto-standing? This allows people to tell their friends which game to join, or wait for people to join if they don't want to play short handed.
- For a private game, people can self-police how shallow/deep they want their group of friends to be sitting in the games, so you can loosen up the min/max sit down amounts. I'd suggest 10-200bb or 20-200bb.
- All private tables are 10-handed. The software already has this capability as it's used for the Orfordable deepstack on Fridays, it reduces the # of games where there's not enough seats for everyone, and it makes it easy for other people to filter out in the cash lobby by simply unchecking the '10 players' setting in the filters. If people want to play 6-max they can just spread out across more tables. Obvs if the mobile app still can't do full ring tables then you might need both 10-handed and 6-max, or you can just limit private games to the desktop client and browser.
Thoughts?