You said the timers were too fast. You were right.

A week ago we put a Help button in every room. This post is about what players have told us since, and what we changed because of it. The thing we heard most about the timers was simple: too fast. Even on Chill.

Our first reaction was the wrong one. There's a Pace control in the lobby, it has a Chill setting, surely the host just didn't use it. Then we went and read what Chill actually did.

Chill was only chilling half the round

Most of our games have two halves. You write a lie, then everyone votes on the lies. You give a clue, then everyone guesses. The Pace control was supposed to stretch every timer in the game, and the code that opens the first half of a round did exactly that. The code that opens the second half, the vote, the guess, the steal in Imposter, each turn in Fuse, never read the setting at all. It just used its fixed clock.

So on Chill you got twice as long to write your lie and exactly as long as before to read eight of them and vote. Nothing failed, nothing logged an error, and the timer bar on your screen agreed with the server about the wrong number. Two games happened to do it right. The rest didn't. If you play in a second language, or on a call with delay, or with someone who reads slowly, that second half is the one that hurt, and no setting could help you.

That's fixed now. Every stage of every game listens to the pace, and the top setting went from 2× to 3×, because 2× was still getting called fast once the whole round counted. The default is Relaxed, which is 2×. Fast is a little under normal, not a lot, because reading a fresh prompt takes the same few seconds however quick the room is.

The lobby now tells you how long

While we were in there we fixed the thing that made the Pace control hard to trust in the first place: it never said what it meant. Chill, Relaxed, Normal, Fast. Fast at what? So the lobby now shows the actual numbers under the dial, and they change as you tap it. Pick Relaxed in a Fibber room and it says one round is roughly Write 1:30, Vote 50s, and a full game of eight rounds with four people is about twenty minutes. Pick Chill and both go up in front of you.

That's a real estimate, not a guess. The numbers come from the same clocks the server runs, multiplied the same way. Games that run until somebody wins, like Cabal or Fuse, don't get a made-up total; they get the length of one turn and the words 'until one side wins'. If the lobby ever quotes a number the timer bar disagrees with, that's a bug, and now it's one you can see.

A few games used to bake a duration into their rounds label, '8 rounds · 45s each'. Those labels were only ever true on Normal, and were quietly wrong on the default. They're gone, and the estimate under the dial is the one number to read.

Where's the invite code?

Hosts have told us they couldn't find the invite code, usually from a lobby with one person in it. The code was on their screen the whole time, large, at the top. What the screen didn't say was what it was for, or that a friend types it on the home page to get in. If English isn't your first language, 'Room code' is a label, not an explanation.

So the lobby now says it in a sentence: friends type this code on the home page to join, or scan it, or take the link. The home page got the other half: if you've got a code, type it here, and if you don't, you can host, for free, without an account. That last part wasn't obvious anywhere before, and it turns out to be the thing a lot of people landing on the site alone needed to hear.

Arabic, Japanese, Korean: not yet, but we're counting

Players have asked us for Arabic. Feedback reaches us in Japanese, Korean and Arabic too, sent to a site that only speaks English.

We're not going to promise translations we can't deliver. A trivia bank, a word-race dictionary and sixty games of prompts don't translate by swapping the button labels, and Arabic means laying the whole screen out right to left. What we've done is start measuring: each new room now records the host's browser language, and in a few weeks we'll know whether the people asking are a handful or a crowd. If it's a crowd, the drawing and puzzle games, the ones with almost no words in them, are where we'd start. We'd rather say that plainly than say 'coming soon'.

One ask

Most of the feedback we get arrives without an email address, which means most of the people who take the trouble to write get no answer. The email field on the Help sheet is optional and it should stay optional. But if you're asking a question rather than reporting something, leave one. We reply. In your language, if we can manage it.

• Pace now applies to every stage of every game. Chill is 3×, Relaxed 2× is the default.
• The lobby shows how long a round and a whole game will take at the pace you picked.
• The lobby and home page explain what the room code is for and that hosting is free.
• Translations: not yet. We're measuring browser languages before deciding.

Then open the Pace dial in the lobby and watch the numbers move. Or browse all the games.