About the non-processing I have these options in mind:
a.) If the process-time is at the weekend extend the phase by 48 hours.
b.) If the process-time is at the weekend extend the phase by 24 hours till the process time is no longer at the weekend.
c.) If the process-time is reached and one or more players have not submitted orders extend the phase (process if there are saved orders).
d.) pause the game at the weekends.
Or something better I missed...

What would be the best time for the "weekend". We have players from all over the globe, how should we define weekend.
Is Friday-evening weekend too? Or Monday Morning?

Should this be the default setting?
Most of the time such special-settings are left to the default, and this defaulting to off would not save many games...

Not to mention playdip again, but they have an option in game setup to not process games on weekends. The game creator can choose to check that box or not.

How does it work there ?

When you create a new game, you choose all of the typical options, and then there are two checkboxes: one for "Don't process on weekends" and another for "Don't process on these holidays" and it lists a couple of random holidays like Halloween. The holiday one isn't as useful.

Personally, I would favor the option to only extend the phase length if a play has not submitted orders. It would let the game continue if all players had the time to submit their orders.

As for a default setting, would it be possible to have a drop down box (yes or no to playing on weekends) that the game creator must select an option for before the game will be created?

Lastly, I think the definition for a weekend globally would be hard to handle. You could do Friday evening (Asian-time zones) spanning to Sunday evening (American time zones). For some players it would then span Friday evening to Monday morning/afternoon, while for others it would span Friday morning to Sunday evening.

Vote in favour of this, I don't know how to implement it, sadly.

Maybe every Friday at 5pm GMT, 72 hours is added to the phase.

Oh please no Mapu. Can you imagine what will happen to games with 2+ day phase length? Imagine a turn advances at exactly 459 pm GMT with 2 day phases. The next phase wouldn't process until Wednesday at 459 PM! And then again on Friday at 459 PM, at which point the cycle would repeat. Many games take a very long time as it is, making only 4/7 days of the week playable time seems like a poor idea to me.

Personally, I like Spartan's idea where the game creator needs to select an option before the game can be created (if possible).

Drano -- I absolutely did not mean automatically add it. I was stating how it might be implemented if someone chose the option during game creation to not process on weekends. But yeah -- my idea would not work for long phased games!

I am for this being an option in game creation. I do not think it should be the default option though, just an option that should be around the same location as phase-length and such so it will be easy to see.
As for the definition of the weekend, I would say what Spartan said would be best.

Its tough because doesn't timezone have to be taken into consideration? Like wouldn't the weekend technically starts earlier in Asia then in North America.

@fasces- thats why Spartan's suggestion works best... It would start Friday Evening(Asian timezone), which would be Friday morning-ish In North America, and End Sunday Night/Monday morning(North American timezone) which would be Monday afternoon for Asia/Australia... It may take some time out of the play-week, but for those who need weekends off of diplomacy, may be worth it.

As for how the mechanics would work, I think pauses make more sense then extends.

Most full press games I enter are 36-48 hour phases. I enter that length not because I check diplomacy once every 36 hours, but I generally find 24 hours is not enough to conduct sufficient diplomacy. I like 10-18 hour gunboat phases since no negotiations are needed but in full press I am frequently left guessing allies orders because we didn't have enough time to fully plan out the turn. As a result for the pause, I don't want any of the time in the phase to go down while I am absent.

Lets look at two hypotheticals. In both cases I'm not here from 5pm on Friday to 10pm on Sunday.

Case Study #1: Turns are every 36 hours, and the next one is set to progress on Friday at 2pm. This one goes through however since its not yet the weekend. Next one would go through Sunday at 2am, I'm not here for this one, but luckily I don't need to be because its on the weekend and so will get extended. Assuming using your a, b or c methods here is what would happen:
Option a: Phase gets extended to Tuesday at 2am
Under this system I have 31 hours to enter time. Not too bad, the difference stems from the fact that I was gone for longer then 48 hours.

Option b: Phase gets extended to Monday at 2am.
Under this system I am only given 7 hours to conduct diplomacy and enter orders for the turn, even though the turn is suppose to be 36 hours.

Option d: Phase gets paused for the length of my absence.
Under this system I am present for the full 36 hours of the turn.

Case Study #2: Turns are every 72 hours and the next one progresses Friday at 12 pm. Next one progressed Monday, also at 12pm

Option a and option b: Phase length doesn't get extended since no turns progressed on a weekend. As a result I had 19 hours to enter orders and finalize, or less then a day for a 3-day game.

The advantage of pauses is that it guarantees that nothing will happen for the extent of my absence.


My other suggestion for this is to rather then make it a weekend only thing, you could have the option to create a weekly pause. The creator of the game gets to decide when the pause and unpause date happens.

Say I wont be able to log in at all on every Wednesday, I may chose to create a game that automatically pauses 10pm Tuesday, and unpauses 10 am Thursday. If I'm gone for the weekend, I can decide how long that weekend is, so there is no chance I will miss a phase.

Thoughts?

Okay, opinions were solicited on this. Every time I give one half the moderators and/or their apologists get their panties in a bunch. Hopefully that can be avoided this time, but I doubt it.

My first reaction to this is that there's a massive amount of effort going towards the elimination of CDs/NMRs, which while well intentioned fails to target the real problem. The chief cause of NMRs and CDs in Diplomacy is apathy and a general lack of respect for the game and the community of players. It's not weekends, emergencies, oversights, absences of extensions and pauses, etc. It's a lack of commitment to the hobby form many of out fellow players, and absence of any encouragement/sanction from the rest of us. If you're really serious about reducing their frequency and minimizing their effect on the games, you'll attack it head on. I'd give suggestions for doing this, but it's not the main subject of this thread, and it would be counterproductive to see one of the moderators go ballistic again and start five more snotty threads to antagonize me over it. If anyone is interested is attacking the issues of NMRs and CDs, I'd be happy to share thought on that specifically.

With all of that said, I think that there is some merit to the idea of designing the system to avoid weekend due dates. It is common practice in the PBEM communities not to set deadlines on weekends for various valid and noble reasons. In general people tend to be away from desks and computers over weekends, and taking a break from our daily rituals (including Diplomacy) is a healthy thing. If you're married, have a girlfriend/boyfriend, have children, or even just live an active lifestyle, weekends can get very clogged, and it's difficult to pay proper attention to your games. More so that limiting NMRs and CDs, I think that the overall quality of the games would improve by implementing weekday deadlines by giving players a regular rest.

The downside of this feature is that doing this every week would be tantamount to having an extend/pause every week. Repetitive pauses in game play creates apathy, which leads to poor play, NMRs, and CDs. Perhaps in time people would get used to this, and incorporate it into their typical game playing routines. But one of the attractive attributes of this diplomacy interface is the speed at which games are played. PBEM typically games last from 6-12 months played on a weekly turn schedule. I mention this because games here tend to start losing player interest after a calendar month elapses. Players routinely start lobbying for a draw once 1/3 of the players are eliminated, and anytime a game hits 50% attrition, you start getting browbeaten into voting for a draw, and declared an ogre for not doing so. That issue starts to wind it's way to another issue entirely (public voting), but it is a factor affecting games.

To offset the possibly increase in delay apathy, what if the weekday play concept were augmented by the implementation of 24 hour periods for retreat phases and build phases? This way a 2 day/turn game could still get (approximately) two turns per week, and you would not have a four or five day gap in play waiting for one player to submit his (disband only option) retreat when it falls into a weekend because the moves post on Wednesday or Thursday.

if the games be designed to

NO ! NO ! NO ! Games will last forever !

What' more, what does "weekend" mean ? We have players from all around the world !

At the very least, PLEASE, this should certainly not be a default setting !

Also, please consider that many players have more time to play during the weekend because of work that happens most of the time during the week and that not everybody can play Diplomacy at work !!!

If players really miss more Phases during the weekend, maybe they should simply play games with a Phase a little longer ?

I am fine with the new system to a certain extent:

First I would like to echo (part of) Ruffhaus' opinion on this - some, or even most, NMR/CD are attributable to players forgetting to check in or simply losing interest when they are almost eliminated. It is all about our gameplay mentality, it is a matter of principle that we should not alter the system too much to suit those players as characterized above, because their mentality is simply not justified.

However, practical concerns still have a stand since it's the reality that we're talking about. I recognize the minority of NMR/CD is due to random accidents/incidents and emergencies that suddenly come along and you have no choice but to miss phases. This is where the pause and extension act as a remedy.

So the only justified purpose of this new system, it seems to me, is a way to get around the harshness of having enough votes for the pause/extension in case of emergencies. That said, I am strongly against the idea of making it a default setting, and option C as proposed by Oli is the best to me.

On second thought, I'm going to have to side with Ruffhaus on this one. I looked back at most of the games where I have nmred (both this site and webdiplomacy, not counting live games, and only counting games in the last year for this site since I didn't want to go too far back). NMRing and CDs is normally caused by apathy, the most frequent NMRs happen from people who get bored of the site a week into joining and so quit all their games. The next frequent is by the sore loosers, who stop checking the games they are loosing, the 3rd is from those in a really long game that people lost interest in a while ago.

Looking at my past games which I remembered NMRs occuring. The frequency (# of nmrs each turn) of NMRs between the 50th and 70th days of a game is more then twice as high as the frequency of nmrs between the 30th and 50th day.

It seems that around 50 days into a game, people start getting bored of the game and will start forgetting to send orders more and more. I am no exception to this.

If we want to reduce NMRs, the best way to do it is to reduce the time each game takes, that way fewer people will lose interest and less NMRs will happen.

In that case it goes with the status quo - you go for fast games if you want, but the correct mentality is that once you join a slow game you should stay committed.

At the very least, PLEASE, this should certainly not be a default setting !

Agreed - default settings should not change. However it would be a nice option to add to games if it is easily implementable.

Also, please consider that many players have more time to play during the weekend

IF a week-day option is programmable, it would be an easy thing to reverse said programming, and make a week-end only game option, if people would like that. I personally wouldn't, but hey, whatever floats your boat.

Many interesting ideas in this thread, but most of them don't consider an "overall view" [I hope my translation be correct] to the many features already existing on VDip.

I agree with the first part of fasces' last post: in my experience, most of NMRs are from:
1) Beginning of the game. It's mostly by Newcomers who joined a game and then leave the site or don't feel the importance of commitment yet. This issue is already solved by the "NMR Policy" option, that let you have the time to find a replacement without letting the NMR screw the game. If you create or join games without this option enabled it's your fault, so don't complain about NMRs screwing your game.
2) Later in the game. It's mostly by "sore losers, who stop checking the games they are losing". There's nothing you can do about it. No new feature will make these people willing to check their games more than RR-system already do. If they NMR anyway, then they deserve a bad RR.

What I don't agree with fasces is "It seems that around 50 days into a game, people start getting bored of the game and will start forgetting to send orders more and more."
Personally, I'm interested in any game I'm in alive & fighting. No matter whether it started yesterday or 6 months ago. To me, it's a mystery how someone could, at one point, lose interest in a game.
Anyway, whatever the reason be, I believe that people having problems with games lasting more than, say, 50 days should just pay attention to what game they are joining. There are already several features on this site helping these people:
a) http://www.vdiplomacy.com/variants.php The 4th column tells you the average duration of a game in that Variant. So if you're going to join a karibik (20.88 turns) with 1day/phase, it will last AVERAGELY 50 days. Probably more, so, if you have this interest-decreasing problem, don't join it!
b) another VDip's feature, helping you and making things even simpler, is when you join a game a box appears and asks you:

>>The game will start when all 12 players have joined.
>>Looking at our stats this game might take (roughly) 5 months, 8 days to complete.
>>Are you sure you want to join this game?

so if your interest-decreasing problem makes you hate games lasting more than 50 days, WHY THE HELL DO YOU CLICK "OK" ?!?!?!

c) EoG feature. If you want to play a (usually) long Variant but you don't want the game be too long, you can enable the "Alternate winning conditions/Max.turns" feature when you create the game. This way you'll know your game won't last too long.

I believe that people who know they'll lose interest in a game after a couple of months, but pay no attention to the games they're going to join, are not much different from people who lose interest when they're losing the game. They all have a problem, but it's not our problem until they can NMR and have the bad RR they deserve.

So, I totally agree & quote Podolski:
"you go for fast games if you want, but the correct MENTALITY is that once you join a slow game you should stay committed."

This site got already many fantastic features provided by Oli. Just learn to properly use them.

After Newcomers and "sore losers / interest-decreasing", the third issue is that there are NMRs on weekend?
Well, we already got a feature. Most of extend-requests I see in my games are on Fridays. They're usually from committed people who care about not-NMRing. But most of other players don't vote for them. You've got to conclude that MOST OF PLAYERS DON'T CARE ABOUT NMRs.

- - -

This was my "overall view".
IMHO, we already have enough features to handle all these issues. What we don't have, is enough people caring. It's a mentality issue, you can't solve it with a new feature.

I've joined several games on webdip that I was committed to, even winning, but missed moves at the weekend and then quit playing because what's the point? I can't be the only person who's experienced this.