PlanetsCentral

streu in Re: Missing players at the b...:

If I understand this correctly, you would send out initial result files, and if there's some no-shows, scrap those along with the received turns? This probably gives a very bad user experience if someone receives an awesome starting location, plans their turn, invests some time and love, and then it turns out all was for nothing.

No, that's entirely not what I was suggesting.

You explicitly underlined the "start from beginning", I guess I took that the wrong way.

I was suggesting that all the players that submitted turns stay in the game, that their turns are still valid. Only the slots for the players that didn't submit their first turn are recycled and put up for joining.

Here it could happen that long time passes between turn one and turn two, and someone loses interest during that time.

On the other hand, I agree that your solution is much simpler than mine because it doesn't need new UI interactions.

I shouldn't have to say it, but once the game has started (in that turns have been handed out), players shouldn't be allowed to quit one race and rejoin the same game as another race. Hopefully nobody would do that, but better to have it hardcoded than rely on honesty.

+1

This is a game. Other players invest their time to play for your enjoyment, so it's only fair if you spend some time for theirs.

streu in Re: Missing players at the b...:

It had been suggested that the host periodically send out emails "are you still interested"? I've been playing with this idea in my mind, but didn't end up at a solution that wholly satisfied me.

When I first joined PlanetsCentral, I missed the first 10 turns of my first game because the game-has-started email(s) went into my spam folder (probably fixed because of your SPF changes). If the user doesn't get the real game-starting email they likely wouldn't get your are-you-still-interested email either.

That would unsubscribe them from the game.

This kind of solution would fix the problem I think. Fixing the problem before the game actually starts is preferable to after it started. I would personally be less generous with the 7 days (both opt-in and first turn), but the principle is sound.
Note of course that your solution doesn't preclude the original situation still happening (player says "yes I'll play" and then fails to submit first turn) but should greatly reduce it.

The idea was that we still know the last interaction with the server was recently, so we rule out technical problems, and things like "I'm on an 8 week backpacking trip and forgot to unsubscribe".

But unless we glue people to their keyboard, we cannot avoid people dropping.

Another solution could be to prevent people from joining if they don't have a confirmed-working email, but that would break the "oh, I want to play - click-signup-join" flow that I'd like not to lose...

--Stefan