Are points forfeited if a player leaves a game? (regardless if another player takes over)
That could be one penalty. Furthermore an additional points fine should be imposed.

Points fines are okay, but won't hurt the worst bracket of players who leave, those with less than 100 .

Game creator could designate a maximum percentage of resigned games, and if your resignation percentage is higher than that you are not allowed to play. Harsh, but effective.

For an immediate solution, you can always pw your games and chose who you allow in.

The problem is that after a (D) penalty or join-limit for CDers is introduced there is nothing stopping a CDer from creating another UserID and going right back into games with their bad habits unchanged.

In 36 games only once have I exceeded 100 (D). I have 1 win, 2 draws, 10 survived and 23 defeated, but I have never CD'd. Perhaps, instead of a penalty, there should be a reward for fighting on to the bitter end?

One possibility that has been mentioned is to have a deposit. Another is to have a no-NMR game type, where if a player NMRs, the phaselength is reset without processing, and if they do it again in the same game, they are booted, and the game auto-paused.

Both require someone to do some coding.

I think we're all in agreement that the "worst" offenders are in the 100pt bracket.
As such, if you fine them: they get a refund.
If you discriminate based on number of forfiets: they'll make a new account.

Its a hard line to set.

what about the pro's who riskily join a 12 hour game, only to find their internet broken down and a practically "forced" CD?
my suggestions: play longer game lengths. password protect, this one may be a bit radical, but if a play NMR's, the game is autopaused. the active players will vote unpause quickly, and then they will wait for the NMR'ed player. another option would be to auto-kick NMR players, but that is risky for live and fast timed games

Going back to my idea (and I hate to bring it back up once it's been shut down), but surely if it's based on percentage, rather than number of CDs, creating a new account would only work for a couple of games before their old habits start to show? It would either create a plague of players creating new accounts every two or three games, or some of them would stop CD'ing, and the others would just play amongst themselves.

I liked the reliability-rating at goondip.

You could add a filter on game-joiners - they must have a minimum number of completed games. You could decrement that count every time someone CDs, possibly with a multiplier - (NumberOfCDs - 1)^2 perhaps.

How about only being allowed to play one game at a time until you complete ten games succesfully? And then, if you dropped out again, the clock being reset?

I don't like the idea of punishing people based on the number of CDs they've clocked up. Some CDs are much worse than others. If someone was to CD, for example, from a game where they are a minor player and it's obvious that the big two powers are working their way slowly and smugly to a 17/17 draw, then frankly I wouldn't blame them in the least. CDing from a closely fought live game because you have somehow managed to forget that you have to eat dinner an hour after the start, however, should be a capital offense.

imo the above reason is not an excuse, however there are some very good reasons for cd such as internet connection problems in a live game. i like speaker to alien's idea, except how would a player ever play their first few games to be able to satisfy the filter requirements if everyone uses them? sure, all the newbies could play together, but all that will happen is the leavers will be concentrated in the games with players new to the game making it an un-enjoyable experience when a player first starts out.

I don't know about you guys, but my first week on the site involved joining about 10 games. I didn't CD a single one. Forcing people to play one at a time would be a bit unfair. However, it is a very good point that some CDs are not the player's fault, and some are completely a totally stupid. Perhaps (and this isn't a very elegant system) a simple vote (somewhat like the current Draw vote) could be held on a CD to report it as unreliable, which would detract from the player's reliability rating. Alternatively consider that if a reliable player does have an internet fault, this will be a rare occurence and so based on percentage will be an insignificant portion of games. The only position where this system comes into trouble is resignation from when a player is clearly going to lose (say when I had one SC in Memphis as Egypt sandwiched between Carthage and Persia) I fought it out and survived for the stats, but most players would just leave. Perhaps a system which detracted reliability based on the number of armies/SCs you control at the time of resignation would be a more effective means of determining whether a CD is fair or stupid.
Too long, didn't read. I know. Just my four cents.

@Gig - If it was done on percentage they'd be even more likely just to dump a bad account and restart.

While I have no intent of dropping form a game - how do you drop from a game? The "draw" option and the "cancel" option are obvious - but these are not drops.

Stop playing. Trouble is, it wrecks the game for everyone else

This is an old problem and is annoying all of us. It probably can't get solved entirely, but instead of speculating what we could do and how would this influence the game we should do some research. Without knowing the reasons for the problem we can't prescribe the solution.
So here are two questions for mods (or somebody else in the position to analise the CDs and NMRs), just to get an idea what I was thinking:
- what is the pattern of leaving the game
- why do people leave the game (I would suggest a survey among people who had left)

Early game: People who've just joined and get impatient with how long diplomacy takes.
Mid/late game: People who're loosing and don't have enough pride to play it through.
Pauses: Particularly at this time of year, people who've gone away when their games were paused and don't return. Often its not the person who asked for the pause.

Good. Do you know, what is the percentage for those games? And I guess (sic) that the percentage is a function of pot level - did you find out on what levels percentage change significantly?
I hope I'm not too annoying... this is certainly not my intent.
My idea is that we probably should address each of the reasons differently.

password your games, recruit via the forum.

Percentages of CDs might work if there's also a parameter for minimum of finished games.

Looking at figles segmentation I have this ideas:
Pauses: should be time limited. After that the game should continue automatically.
Mid/late game and Early game: when orders are not entered the game should not proceed, but should get another (time limited) "seeking for a new player" status. While in this status new player could jump in or all the rest could vote for CD.
Early game: we could think of some additional help for new players and/or a better way for them to find out if they like the game or not then to enter a real game. On the other side... this last one is not so important. When you gather more points you can join higher pot games or you can join pw protected games - this significantly reduce CDs. But we are loosing potential players if they despair to soon...

@Kamen - Those are based on my experience looking round games, and the ones I'm asked to unpause (which is because someone's left). I can check, but I don't think CD data is available.

Pause: Agreed, would be nice. However, would also be much more complicated - how would it work? If I want a 5 days pause and you vote 7, does it pause for 5 or does it wait for us all to agree?

No NMR: Completely support this. Should be an option at game creation.

Early: When joining the site, I think players should be shown an introduction page. This would have the site rules, the basics of diplomacy and some FAQ-like questions.
Personally I'd like to go one step further than this even and have a mini-quiz within this. Wouldn't be at all hard ( the answers would be written just above the questions after all) but it would mean that anyone who started playing on the site knew exactly what they were signing up for.

I like the idea of time limited pauses.

@figle - Let me explain my idea about time limited pauses from the users perspective. Of course I know that it is a lot (probably too much) of work to realize this and I'm sorry that I can't help coding.

When I want to pause usually I know the time frame when I will not have a chance to play. So I should be able to ask for pause in the "from - until" form. And all the rest should vote for the pause to become active.
I can extend this idea: we could allow more pauses at the same time. So I could ask for pause from Friday, 8:00 until Sunday 16:00, while other player could ask from 1.7.2011 until 14.7.2011 because he knows that he will go on vacations.
If additionally we would add "the comment" field in as an option at game creation, then I could warn other players that I will need a pause in advance.

One more remark: votes should be visible at the top of the screen so that if you are playing anonymous gunboat you don't overlook them...

One more idea for the newcomers. It would be nice to make a short movie of a "real" play. We all know that when we read instructions for any game we like to play (or observe) the first game just to get a real idea how it goes.