Thoughts about and problems with session concept

[tooomm]

MTGADraft allows users to enter games and form parties via unique session ID's.
After changing the ID in any way manually, the user leaves his current "room" and shortly after automatically joins an existing one (or creates a new one) according to the altered ID.
Also, when opening the page you always get automatically assigned a random session ID and join that game if it's your first visit. Otherwise you join the last known ID (saved in a cookie), no matter if that information is outdated or no longer relevant.
There is no check and you might crash a foreign party which e.g. happens to use the same simple name you used a few days ago for your own draft.

The page just doesn't allow you to be not part of a session and the concept of leaving a session on your own will is not known - which feels highly unintuitive. In general, I guess most players might not be aware how things work exactly. They simply use it and work around issues as they arise.

I realized that when I first got newly introduced to the page. (No doubt, I value the service and enjoy it a lot.
Some things are handled differently though and can be quite confusing for players.)
For me, the most natural way to leave a room was to empty the session ID as I saw no other possibility after a draft. That worked fine for the moment. But then, I ended up in another party where somebody else used the invisible session "" too when reconnecting to the page later. Or some random people joined mine in a different case.

I talked with @Senryoku already about that issue. Putting this up here as reminder and for discussion.

I think there are two problems:

1. Users automatically reconnect to the last known session on page load.
   Just by opening the default mtgadraft main page, a user probably doesn't expect to actively join something.
   I mean, the possibility to rejoin is amazing and a great feature as it makes reconnecting to a draft easy or allows to restore your connection after a browser restart during draft etc.
2. Users are allowed to empty the id field and by that enter/create a new session "" without knowing.
   The only reason why users empty the field is not to enter an empty string session, but to leave the current session AND possibly end up alone in no session with no persons joining. Like a leave button - they just don't know that it doesn't work like that. :slight_smile:
   In both cases giving a hint to the users can help.

Thoughts regarding those points:

1. On reconnect you could ask if he likes to a) rejoin last session "abc" or b) create a new one.
   Or redirect to the url "..../?session=x" at lest to show that something is going on. If the URL shows you only "https://mtgadraft.herokuapp.com/" it's really confusing as no session id is shown in the url to give a little hint. But still the user doesn't learns that emptying an sessions is bad practice as he does that 100% with different intention. Once a user changes the session id manually, the url is changed - but not on reconnect! Even though you still join a room.
2. On emptying the id field you could mark it red and e.g. give a hint "Invalid name. Minimum length is 3." etc. (Maybe you really want some min length as well the same as you have a max length for chat for example)
   That leaves you still with the problem that the user would join the empty string session in between. I feel that allowing an empty string session might be the main issue and you want to prevent that. A min character value could just be that?

Ideas from Senryoku:

• Maybe the first step would be to only save the id during an actual draft to help reconnecting when it really matters, or restore automatically only if the session is drafting and use the prompt solution otherwise
• Just never save the empty session in a cookie :)

[tooomm]

Adding to the "empty string sessions are allowed" problem:

Looks like playing in such a session throws an error when trying to access the bracket link.
https://mtgadraft.herokuapp.com/bracket?session=

Edit:
Looks like I'm also not the only one who did not understand the idea behind it right away... probably not so intuitive as you might think. :)
While tinkering with a Sealed pool during an event at Arena (the deck builder there is awful, thankfully there are alternatives like mtgadraft!), quite some people thought the same and went for the obvious "empty" session ID instead thinking of a most likely unique one to be on their own for playing around with an imported card list (a quite niche feature, but still so many people crushed into each other):

Edit2:

[tooomm]

Adding to the list of problems caused by "empty" session names:

• When playing in a session with empty ID, you can no longer change your user name. It simply doesn't update.

Can you please put at least a minimum input length on the field or something?
A minimum of 4-5 characters for the session ID should be good.