PlanetsCentral

What is the reason in waiting for so much time (5 turns)? As I see, the idea behind automatic dropping is to minimize damage to the race, so that the new player will not get a big disadvantage. Of course in the manual mode it is too hard to track all missed turns from all games. But in automatic mode (if it will be implemented) the waiting time should be set to a minimal reasonable value, such as 2-3 turns.

I want players to be able to "survive" an accidental miss (i.e. forget to submit a turn, unplanned travel, illness), so a week's worth of turns (2-3) would be the absolute minimum. No matter what, it will be configurable, even per game, so I'm taking suggestions for the actual value.

I think pc.com also needs an auto function for pausing games. At the very least planned holidays should be possible to set up without admin via forum and voting with the usual "when turns are in condition".

And personally I'ld suggest a one way ticket for skipping the next host run. Everyone gets one and if there is a dire need (crashed pc, sudden death , whatever) everybody is able to make the host skip the next run all by himself but just once per game.

btw there is even a manual alternative which is worth a second thought. We could set up a referee for every single game which gets admin rights for this very game to do such stuff. That way you as admin would no longer be bothered with requests from each and every game.

What you're describing needs rules and GUIs. I have a half-baked design for setting up holidays (in the form of a "survey/voting" plugin to the forum). Needed rules are: what options do we give (just pause? change config option X? change schedule permanently?), how are surveys set up, how do they interact, and what type of vote turnover do you need for the change to be accepted?

The server core can already manage what you call "referee", but there's no GUI for that feature. I have mixed feelings for that, because I have seen it fail at PlanetsServer. There, the referee (master player) had the power to exchange players, which lead to games where two players play against a master player and eight of their sockpuppets. I blocked this at least partially by not allowing an exchanged player to take their score with them. Still, it has abuse potential.

The ticket idea is neat. In the beginning of this site we tossed around the idea of "karma" to linearize it somehow, so you'd get, like, one ticket per 50 turns played.

--Stefan