Bugs and Feature Requests for PlanetsCentral and other VGAP software
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.
About pauses in games, I offer to add "tokens" for each player in game, that can be used to skip the next hostrun. We can give such token for each player at the game start, and add one for each 20 turns played, so, if player don't miss his turns, at turn 60 he will get 4 tokens, for pause game for 2 weeks (vacation, holidays, etc.) by himself.
About end condition of North Star games - think, it need formal rule to end the game unconditially. For example, if one player has more than 50% of total players PTScore, or more than 250 planets, AFTER turn 60-80 (to prevent unexpected end at turn 15 or so).
Also we can use tokens to prevent the game ending, for example, if I played 80 turns without missing, and collect 4-5 tokens, I can "invest" them in longer game (move end condition from turn 80 to 85, if I need few turns more to complete my tasks, or prevent the game ending for a few turns if my opponent gets 50% of stuff in North Star).
All operations with tokens player needs to do manually at site.
Good idea, but hard to implement.
Good idea, but hard to implement.
idk, Streu says nothing..
I was hoping for some more opinions 
The idea of having some sort of site-wide currency to do things is not new, e.g. here. It needs some thought and some computation to balance, and I must admit I haven't done either yet. I originally even thought that the Reliability score (or something very similar) could be the currency.
The other idea was to have some sort of voting, i.e. make it possible to create a forum thread with a survey form on top, and if people vote to stop/skip/whatever, that will be done. Voting would prevent the problem that for popular holidays (e.g. Christmas/New Year) everyone hopes for the others to spend their tokens on a host break.
Regarding end conditions of the North Stars: those now spawn with an end condition by default. It can still be changed if you wish, but if nobody does anything, they will end and not run until infinity.
I am not yet convinced of using tokens to unilaterally prolong a game. Essentially this means you obligate 10 others to play for you. So, this would have to have a high price at least. Voting would solve this, too.
Voting would also need rules, e.g. at least one week lead, only players can vote, majority wins.
--Stefan
The problem if many players have the right (and enough tokens) to stop a game may be that the game can become too slow if different players holds it for a turn. But hey, they earned it with reliability.
My question is: is there a way to make the host hold from the player side, without contacting webmasters? Let's say my game will host in 4 hours and it's 1AM in my country, I have no time to make my turn (a good played turns needs 2 hours minimun around turn 30) and I need to sleep. Let's say I can not contact Streu right then, my only hope is to send a message and pray he opens it before the hosting. But perhaps the tokens may enable a button in the game page to hold the next hosting, is that possible?
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Re: Maintenance-free functions
The idea of having some sort of site-wide currency to do things is not new, e.g. here. It needs some thought and some computation to balance, and I must admit I haven't done either yet. I originally even thought that the Reliability score (or something very similar) could be the currency.
Reliability scores are site-ultimate, but I meant tokens that earned each game separately.
The other idea was to have some sort of voting,
Voting is a problem here, 'cause most of players ignore votings.
Voting would prevent the problem that for popular holidays (e.g. Christmas/New Year) everyone hopes for the others to spend their tokens on a host break.
It is yours to choose, spend or wait. Or open forum discussion about and ask all players to give one token for holidays. But if nobody answer, it'll still be yours. All players should see, if somebody already spent token to skip. And, if all trns are in anyway, token may return back to the player.
And, it'd be good to have the auto-delay option, if you have tokens >0, and your trn is absent, you may lose one automatically, and hostrun will be skipped.
I am not yet convinced of using tokens to unilaterally prolong a game. Essentially this means you obligate 10 others to play for you. So, this would have to have a high price at least. Voting would solve this, too.
Yes, if I played 80 turns to make others fun, I can ask 5 turns more to get fun for myself. I think it'd be acceptable for anybody.
Voting would also need rules, e.g. at least one week lead, only players can vote, majority wins. --Stefan
As i said before, majority stays quiet. It's predictable you'll have 2 opponents, and 8 players that's not interested in you task, so you'll always lose in voting.
My question is: is there a way to make the host hold from the player side, without contacting webmasters? Let's say my game will host in 4 hours and it's 1AM in my country, I have no time to make my turn (a good played turns needs 2 hours minimun around turn 30) and I need to sleep. Let's say I can not contact Streu right then, my only hope is to send a message and pray he opens it before the hosting. But perhaps the tokens may enable a button in the game page to hold the next hosting, is that possible?
I think the basic idea of token-based "maintenance-free functions" is to eventually allow that.
However, I don't consider that an action that needs support. That's the equivalent of that guy who always calls half an hour before your party that he won't come, so you now have too much pizza and too little beer.
Personally, I do most of my turns at the earliest possibility. My Operating System Theory class taught me that this scheduling method is called Earliest Deadline First and gives me the same amount of processor utilisation spare time as doing it at the latest-possible time.
Even if I don't complete the turn on the first try, there's the "this is not my final turn" checkbox, and if I fail to finalize my turn, I still have something done instead of missing the entire turn.
--Stefan
The idea of having some sort of site-wide currency to do things is not new, e.g. here. It needs some thought and some computation to balance, and I must admit I haven't done either yet. I originally even thought that the Reliability score (or something very similar) could be the currency.
Reliability scores are site-ultimate, but I meant tokens that earned each game separately.
This would mean you cannot postpone turn 10 because you haven't earned a full token yet. Therefore I'd like these to be portable between games.
On the other hand I wouldn't want people with 2000+ turns be able to dominate the non-game aspects by being able to do what they want, whenever they want. Therefore, tokens need to have a fixed limit.
The reliability score is built by similar principles, therefore the idea to use it. But it would also be possible to compute tokens using a similar formula but a separate score.
The other idea was to have some sort of voting,
Voting is a problem here, 'cause most of players ignore votings.
That's why my voting explicitly didn't include a quorum. If you don't vote, you don't care.
On a second thought, I wouldn't expect any sensible "no" vote to a game pause. What are they gonna do, pin them to their chair and have them make their turn, while the family is heading for the train? However, sometimes we get feedback like "I'm traveling as well, and would like the pause to be 3 days longer".
I am not yet convinced of using tokens to unilaterally prolong a game. Essentially this means you obligate 10 others to play for you. So, this would have to have a high price at least. Voting would solve this, too.
Yes, if I played 80 turns to make others fun, I can ask 5 turns more to get fun for myself. I think it'd be acceptable for anybody.
That's easy to say from a top place. Some are getting their ass wiped and only keep playing because quitting wouldn't be fair play.
--Stefan
This would mean you cannot postpone turn 10 because you haven't earned a full token yet. Therefore I'd like these to be portable between games.
I wrote about give all players one token from the start. And if you need more days of pause, you may ask other players to set up pause with their tokens too.
Yes, if I played 80 turns to make others fun, I can ask 5 turns more to get fun for myself. I think it'd be acceptable for anybody.
That's easy to say from a top place. Some are getting their ass wiped and only keep playing because quitting wouldn't be fair play. --Stefan
If you don't care, you can send empty trn. It's not hard to do
If you care, you can play your best still.