The good news is, Bridge Base is upgrading their infrastructure! That means they should be in much better shape to handle the huge influx of online players that have joined while sheltering-in-place.
Your Friends Might Be On The Casual Server
As with all technology roll-outs, there are some quirks to work out. Right now the weirdest one is finding your friends. Normally, the people tab on the right shows you whether your friends are online.
Turns out the “Casual” section takes you into a whole new server, with a completely separate set of friends who are online. So if your friend starts a casual table, you won’t find them until you poke your head into the casual section.
Hopefully messaging and chatting will work across the two servers, but I haven’t tested it out. For now, the only thing to know is you aren’t getting the full picture of whether your friends are online or not. You or they might be on the other server, so for now you need to pop back and forth between the two.
Invitations Do Not Cross Servers
Also, the most common way I set up a table is “Start a table with 3 robots”, which apparently is on the Casual Server. If you reserve and invite your friends, they won’t receive the invitations until they click into the Casual Server. Confused yet? Let’s hope this doesn’t last too long…
The worst part is that I have to use the new HTML version of BBO if I just want to play some casual games with my partner. No matter whether I join the “casual” server or not, she cannot find me. Somehow this “just works” on the new version.
Thankfully, the old flash version seems to default to the competitive server, so I can play my SYC games there, more easily add/remove my convention card, more easily track and review the bidding without accidentally asking people to explain, more easily see who’s signed up, more easily review past hands, etc.
Oh yes – you bring up a good point and I should have mentioned it. Not all versions of BBO support the mysterious casual server.
For example, our 4th player a few weeks ago had the BBO iPad App, fully updated, but it seems completely incompatible with the casual server. She had to resort to the iPad mobile browser (for example, Safari), in order to log in to BBO and find us. That isn’t TOO bad, except I’m wondering how many people just give up and assume their account has a problem. It took our group of fairly tech savvy folks quite a while to figure out.