I think most players are reasonably good with this, especially the more experienced players. If anything, I think too many players are too quick to pull the Draw, especially in winner-takes-all games, but that's another topic.

Common courtesy? Yes. But not everyone follows common courtesy.

Mods won't normally force a draw. If they'll do it at all, it would only be after several years of getting nowhere. I wouldn't email the mods unless it has been several years at least.

Good luck.

If it is truly a stalemate line and there are only 2 players, I would email the mods. I think deliberately waiting for someone to miss a move in this case would be considered metagaming. If there are more than 2 people, it's not a true stalemate, so you probably should battle it out.

If you email us as mods and the game is stalemate, we are likely to post in your global chat asking for clarification on the situation. Depending which mod deals with your complaint clearly you will get a (slightly) different reaction, but my personal choice would be to post in global asking the non-drawing player to email me explaining why they weren't drawing. Thus they could outline their intentions and show why they were refusing your offer. Clearly this could be because they have a tactical method that is too devilishly clever for us to have thought of in all our combined gameplay, in which case we are likely to leave it alone. However, if it seems the game is not being drawn out of spite or whilst waiting for a missed order we could well intervene.

A nice feature that would help combat this problem would be "standing orders". Have a button that would allow a player to save his current orders to be executed every turn and thus eliminate the possibility that somebody might miss the turn. If would be opportunists knew that the other players had all entered standing orders for a stalemate they would be a lot less likely hold games up needlessly and we would have to bother the mods.

sorry, ...wouldn't have to bother the mods.

Problem with that SunZi is that you can break through any stalemate given enough time.

You can also check out the rules page linked on the help page, written by the mod team, which has some of the basic principles that will steer you clear of problems and keep the site fun

Kestasjk is here! WOOT!

@Iceray0
Sorry, I don't understand your comment. Some stalemates can't be broken as long as everybody makes their moves. The problem is that some players refuse to draw even when faced with an unbreakable stalemate and this requires moderator intervention. I think the game feature I suggested would solve this problem 99%.

We used to play that if the no supply centres had changed hands for 3 game years - it was an automatic draw for all remaining participants - I thought that was in the rules.

Looking at the OPs games, I'm not sure I can find a stalemated game. Was this just an informational question?

You can't see anonymous games, though, DJ.

And he has 15 unaccounted for points, so 15 in anonymous games...

"Problem with that SunZi is that you can break through any stalemate given enough time. " - No you can't.
I'm also in favour of standing orders, and I've had some idea's for possible implementation as well, which I'll bring up on the development forum.

I like the idea of standing orders but if the player with the standing orders is actually an inferior player, the opponent may find a flaw in those orders and exploit it for the win.

That is true, Draugnar. But it is better than just waiting for someone to not turn in orders. Not perfect, but better.

Turned out I'd already suggested this last week :P
http://forum.webdiplomacy.net/viewtopic.php?f=12&p=2414

Hmm, think I'd change the wording of the tool-tip if I implemented it.

I was just pointing out the possibilities. If someone chose to take advantage of the standing orders and hadn't worked out all the possibilities then they deserve to lose.

I agree. It does become a little boring if you just have two units left, and are being assaulted on all sides, to have to issue orders A sup B and B sup A. This would take care of that.

The standing orders shouldn't automatically finalize though, as the person may want to come in and change them.

And there shouldn't be an indicator to the SO players opponent that these were standing orders. Too many coin-tosses that the player may want to come in and change slightly to a new set of standing orders every two or three turns.

True. I wonder if this would be a huge change to implement. If not, it would be useful.

I'm not sure how the orders database works nowadays. I know in the old format this would be really easy to do, you'd merely have to copy over the data for an order from the last phase to the next.
Clearly it shouldn't finalize, or you would also risk having a game rush off in an adjudication loop - if every player finalized persistant orders it would never break out.

Is five turns locked in an unbreakable stalemate long enough for the mods to consider intervening?

Yep, let us know.
Note: consider != do