This is interesting. Personally, I'd rather see a Pause for XXX amount of days.

And at the moment it only needs 2/3 of the active players to take effect.
And because it just change the phase-end-timer the game continue as son as everybody hits ready. And you can extend the phase more than once, pushing the date back 4 days each time...

@abgemacht: I failed a few times to add a "Pause XXX days" because my programming skills are not that good and I try not to change too much of kestas code. This was a rather small change...

@Sleepcap,
If it only requires 2/3 of the active players, then doesn't the "extend feature" run the risk of being used as a negotiation or blackmail tool?

hear-fucking-hear, goldfinger

Does seem like 2 or 3 people trying to stop the big guy from soloing might use it to stall the game. Would it be better if it was based on votes representing 2/3rds of the centers?

Also seems like it wouldn't be appropriate for live games.

Extend (maybe by one or two phase lengths, not a fixed number of days/hours) sounds great. However, I agree with Alderian's objections. A blocking-minority of 1/3 of the centers sounds reasonable.

If people abuse the voting it|s a clear metagaming issue and you can ban the users in question from the site (or dock their points or do anything that seems suitable).
It's very easy to spot metagaming for voting to extend the turn, but if some people deny a pause because of metagaming it's much more complicated or not possible at all to catch...

Do the mods/admin really care about meta-gaming? I've reported a blatant case, nothing happened.

haha... well their policy is that if the friendship was made in the game, then it's not an offence for some reason. so you can pretend the relationship was made in-game. as long as you're not using the same allies everygame. so maybe that's what happened.

What about if the guys in the global chat admit to being class mates who joined the same game and worked in alliance and you can see that in every game they play a group of them do exactly the same thing. I'm not Sherlock Holmes but I don't need to be to see such blatant flouting of the rules. I don't care if they do that in private password protected games but why spoil the open games

maybe they don't always help each other in all the games. who knows. i don't trust the mods much either, but there probably is some reason for them not to ban the users.

Yes, the mods care. No i don't think you should add work for them. As such i don't know whether 2/3 is better than all players agreeing, but having this option is better than just allowing pauses, imho.

I don't want people to be banned, I'm just ripping it out of them on the global chat which in a perverse way is as much fun.

vDiplomacy is way ahead of webDiplomacy technology-wise, thanks to Oli. Hopefully, they can add some of the features (more variants, the NEW PM! warning, etc.) on webDiplomacy.

I've tried to get my head around that site but I just don't like it and I'm not sure why. It just does not seem as user friendly ........ or is it just me?

It just has a lot more features, Nigee, that's all. This site is much more simplified.

But I wasn't aware that the "Extend" button only required 2/3rds of the votes. Perhaps we could add it here and require all of the votes? I mean, there's no clear-cut way to prevent people from taking advantage of it. No matter how you structure it, it can always be abused. That's why there are mods.

Also, I find that the mods do care. If you present a clear-cut case to them in an email with game citations and press quotations, then usually it gets done quick. You just have to be selective on which cases you bring up.

Also, the "New PM!" button would help a lot in regards to tournament notifications and game invites

I agree with zultar. A game-altering feature that can be passed with only 2/3s of player's approval sounds ridiculous.

What if this four day pause feature required a vote of all people still alive minus one? So, if there are six people playing, and some person NMRs and looks like they will CD, you could get a four day pause for that situation as well, with 5 of 6 people voting for it.

I think the problem some people suggested was that if its down to three people. then the two opposing the one going for the solo could indefinitely pause the game

"What if this four day pause feature required a vote of all people still alive minus one?"

That puts a person close to solo at a severe disadvantage.

This feature, just like cancel, pause, and draw, should be unanimous.

I'm sure there's a way we could figure this out, but I'm not a coder, so I don't know what options are available to us here. Perhaps there is a way to code it such that if there were an NMR it would allow it to be 5 of 6 players needed.

But overall, I think this feature would be a good one for the site

We are experimenting if we go with 2/3 or an unanimous vote. The idea behind this feature is that one of the top requests for the mods on vDip is that one player needs a short pause because of RL issues and maybe one player does not vote for the pause (esp. in gunboat games). A forced pause always give some problems for the unpause, but no pause always results in a screwed game. So we hope with this small extend-feature to avoid such situations. Also the mod-staff is much smaller over there...

Sleepcap, what do you think about doing 2/3 of centers rather than 2/3 of active players?

The feature is only a few days old. We'll see how this turns out...
@Alderian: I'm not that good at PHP and to base the voting on the SCs is not that easy. Kestas need to do the really cool and big changes... :-)

Is this change in your code on github? I can take a look at it and see how complicated it would be to base it on centers.

What about all but one active player required for the four day extension (or double the game's phase lengthy?) *with* a minimum of four votes? Suppose you could add that if less than four votes it must be unanimous?

Couldn't you also "hide" this feature under the "advanced rules" option when creating a game?

I also agree with abgemacht that pause for X days is best. Although, I am aware that some players prefer pausing (hiatus-ing?) for XXX days...

I've pushed the code to github.