I'm excited about this thread kestas - thanks again for your continuing efforts to solicit feedback and act on it. That's what is making this site great! =)

The biggest problem I have seen is people leaving the games prematurely. It is awfully hard to find someone to step into a live game after someone else leaves. Oftentimes the nation going into CD has a kingmaking effect and ends up throwing off the balance of the game. In cases like that players will sometimes play on or sometimes just cancel the game.

You can pretty much count on at least one player going CD during a live game.

I have a couple ideas for how to fix that:
1)Create a FAQ for live games - people often don't realize the time investment they are getting themselves into. If there could be a little box that pops up asking you to check a box to continue saying you have read the FAQ before being allowed to join a live game this might help. There might be a better idea for getting people to read it than this, but it's an idea anyway...

2)There needs to be a consequence for going into CD - I still think it would be good to implement a stat on each person's profile that indicates the number of times they have gone CD (is this what the "Left" stat already is??). This could be combined with an option on the create new game screen where you restrict people who can join to those whose CD number is below whatever threshhold the game creator chooses. With a system like this it would be important to have a mechanism for people to remove CDs from their profile. Perhaps something like one CD drops off for every 5 completed games without a new CD.

Those are my ideas for starters =)

Left is only a measure of whenther you end a game in civil disorder status.

If you fall into Civil Disorder and get taken over, there is no record made.

i think an option could be made for live games to be played with the normal 10 min turn time but to be automatically paused for most of the week apart from an allocated time.
For example, a game could be have 10 minute turns and be played from 9-12 GMT every week on a sunday, so everyone entering could plan and make sure they wouldn't CD.

I second dave bishops' idea.

Also perhaps for live games (and maybe others games) we could have the option "are you sure you wish to continue?" just before the game starts and all players have signed up. If the last player to sign up is someone you don't want to play with or fear will go CD you can opt not to play.

or, just have a time limit, such that after 2 hours, the game ends...that way people could know what they are getting into.

or time limit, after which the game becomes normal, like 10 mins per phase for 4h, then 24h phases

I also second alamothe's idea

My only suggestion (I play them rarely) would be to remove live games from game notices on the home page. The only one I played flooded it...

i third my idea and alamothe's idea, but don't like tantris' idea so much... how would points be awarded?

I like alamothe's idea better too, just like the time limit on how long it is live.

This isn't at all related to live games, but I didn't want to make another suggestions thread:

Can you remove the quotes from peoples "comment" on their profile? Sometimes people put quotes in there themselves, and it puts ""blah blah blah...""

also unrelated, what happened about the idea where you can only bet a quarter of your points, so the risk of a high level game aren't so high?

umm, these suggestions should really go to the other forums...

http://forum.webdiplomacy.net/

Kestas, how about when someone NMRs, don't proceed to the next phase yet, give them another phase length of time, and then if they still NMR go ahead and proceed and also put them in CD. That way if someone is just a minute late due to negotiating it doesn't mess things up. But it still puts someone in CD pretty quick if they really aren't turning in moves. Maybe limit how many times each player could get an extension so they don't do it over and over, but that might be too complicated.

Disclaimer: I haven't played in any live games yet so don't know that my suggestion is any good.

I think the best way to make live games better is to add ONE more option to the buttons (draw, cancel, pause). That button should be some thing like "24h phase." If everyone choses that, then the game becomes a 24 hour phase game. I think that makes the most sense, since it is a single option solution that would work in most cases.

As for messaging. If the new message indicator popped up without refreshing the page, that would be the most wonderful improvement in the history of improvement. I'm sure that would be VERY complicated to do though.

id have to agree with jacob's suggestion. ive played other games where this was implemented and it had a few effects, one positive, two negative.

in the positive: it definitely reduced the number of drop-out players in a game

in the negative: it alienated people from many games since the threshold was typically set to 0% when games were created. the difference was that in those games, if your internet connection was lost, you went "CD" in effect, so this problem would be reduced. with an ability to remove CD's from your record, it helps this problem.

additionally, the other problem it created was that when people had these negative remarks on their account, they simply created a new account and could then enter a game and quit again. this forced other measures to correct which made the site worse

overall, i do agree with the implementing of an option of allowing players into a game as long as they meet the host's CD requirement.

@ friendly sword's ancient post:

I'm pretty sure "left" means you went CD, and "resigned" means you finished as "left"

Thanks for the suggestions guys, some stuff I hadn't thought of here :-) Might be worth having a vote on which one to go for when push comes to shove

Two things:

1. We had a bug in gameID=14207 where one of the phases was randomly 10 mins instead of 5. Dunno what's up with that.
2. I believe part of the most recent update was that live games retreat and build phases will process automatically when everyone has finalized. That isn't working properly.

I get this message when I'm the last person to finalize a retreat or build:

Processing.. The board will refresh momentarily.

But it never processes. It just waits for the next tick. :-(