Timeouts, Eliminations and Ghost Players of the Night

[bigWham]

What are people ideas about how to deal with players that timeout and miss their turn. Currently we have a system that eliminates them (brutally!) from the game on 1 missed turn.

We took this approach since players that miss turns can cause frustration, waste time, and also mess up games. However other solutions are possible, and give that this is a casual gaming site, should be considered.

I'd like to collect any ideas that people have.

[orangeblood]

I don’t think the current implementation is sustainable for you… a lot of people are going to get frustrated with frequent player eliminations and stop coming to the site.

And maybe player elimination works in some games, but not ones I’m familiar with. In T&E what happens if I attack an eliminated player? Does the advantage in the game tilt to someone who’s close enough to attack such a player? It ceases to become a real T&E game at that point.

I’m guessing that, like it or not, the best solution may be to have no time-outs and just have stalled games disappear after a certain number of inactive days. Email reminders may help after a certain number of days. And not allowing the non-active player to come back to site.

Just some thoughts.

[bigWham]

I don’t think the current implementation is sustainable for you… a lot of people are going to get frustrated with frequent player eliminations and stop coming to the site.

And maybe player elimination works in some games, but not ones I’m familiar with. In T&E what happens if I attack an eliminated player? Does the advantage in the game tilt to someone who’s close enough to attack such a player? It ceases to become a real T&E game at that point.

I’m guessing that, like it or not, the best solution may be to have no time-outs and just have stalled games disappear after a certain number of inactive days. Email reminders may help after a certain number of days. And not allowing the non-active player to come back to site.

Just some thoughts.

Problem is... most of the players getting eliminated due to not playing turns are never coming back. They come, they try something, they get bored in 2 seconds, or after 1 turn, and leave. If we had no timeouts, then these games would just stall... and I can't believe that that would not create at least an equally bad experience.

Re: the impact of eliminating players. I agree that that is an issue. With T&E I had to make it remove all eliminated player leaders from the board which I think largely resolved the issue. Obviously in 3+ player games one player bailing is never going to be good for the integrity of the game.

[orangeblood]

Problem is... most of the players getting eliminated due to not playing turns are never coming back. They come, they try something, they get bored in 2 seconds, or after 1 turn, and leave. If we had no timeouts, then these games would just stall... and I can't believe that that would not create at least an equally bad experience.

Well yeah, I wouldn't come back either if the one-day thing was giving me problems. (And it's possible it just has.)

I do know that when BGG had T&E, sometimes a player would disappear and games would stall and finally disappear from your games list. But it didn't seem to be much of an issue... I played over 500 games on there and only remember a small handful of them stalling (perhaps less than five). What's happening here is a bigger issue.

Just brainstorming: Have some criteria for both provisional and "established" players... with established players having the option to select games only with other established players. The provisional settings could be as you have them now (player eliminations, etc.). Established settings would have no time-outs.

Just trying to give you more work.

[orangeblood]

Another thought:

SuperDuperGames has user-defined options for each game for setting time limits. This is in the start-increment-maximum format, so that, quoting directly from their help page: "3/1/10 is the current SDG default. It starts your clock with 3 days, increases your bank by 1 day each time you move up to a maximum of 10 days banked."

But as I said, users can change those values when they initiate a game.

EDIT: SDG users can also choose "hard time" when initiating a game, whereby players who run out of time are eliminated. Otherwise, if a player runs out of time the other player(s) can choose to let it ride as long as they want in hopes the player will return. Or at any time, they can click a "force surrender" button to eliminate the offending player.

Of course, SDG does mostly 2-player games... though it does have some multi-player variants.

[Nemrod]

Only been playing a few days but I would +1 this 3/1/10 system. Most of the time a 1 day limit is no problem but if you go away for the weekend and a game is still on it could be a problem.

[bigWham]

Only been playing a few days but I would +1 this 3/1/10 system. Most of the time a 1 day limit is no problem but if you go away for the weekend and a game is still on it could be a problem.

It's a good idea, but a pretty major change to the system. We will definitely do something, I'm just waiting to accrue a good amount of feedback.

[Silly Knig-it]

My two cents: If possible, hard time outs until you pass 5 games completed (number pulled from thin air), then just a missed turn.

i.e. the other player(s) doesnt have to wait, they get two turns in a row. Also no award of troops or supplies missed. One misses, one misses and that is the penalty.