Or even pay attention. I don't want to be bothered voting to draw for games I was eliminated in 2 months ago...

abgemacht +1

@abge - gameID=333
I still feel hard done by for this one!

@figle

exactly my point. That is just ridiculous.

Someone enlightenme on the old game... That's older than my life on phpDip. How do you win with 17 of 31 centers (and where were the other three)?

The counter is wrong. If you count Austrian centers, you'll see he has well over 18.

This is some artifact of the server move or the fact that units used to be counted, not centers.

Ah yes, Rait has 20 SCs. So what was the issue, figle?

The issue is it's 1937. No one moved for two decades and Rait finally one when someone CD'd.

Ah, but the game doesn't reflect a CD in it and I wasn't wading through that many years of turns when I couldn't see the units on the map. Gotcha.

It may have only been a NMR, but the point remains...

Yeah, I see he took four SCs (and he only needed 2 of them), one of which was from you that last year.

The moral of the story is not having a draw feature is bad news bears.

I agree with everyone who is defending the draw feature! and the only problem i have with your declarations about the pauses is that... if your in my situation, you may only be a teen whos parents do not tell you when your leaving to go somewhere, so you start a game and than, oh guess what, next week we are going out of town... but i guess you could explain that on global and convince people to pause....

I would like to see the automatic pause put in place, for sure.

I would be inclined to agree with butterhead.

This is a game that typically lasts 1-2 months. It's unrealistic to plan that far ahead around a game and it would be a shame if people couldn't play because they need pauses.

Of course, I am of the opinion that a pause is something to be requested, not demanded and it should never be expected of anyone to pause a game.

I think draws and pauses and cancels should all be something you can turn off/on during the creation of a game. Don't want draws or pauses? Make a game with no-draw and no-pause turned on.

I'm of the opinion that options like that lead to more confusion than benefit. So, now every time I join a game, I have to make sure that draw is enabled? What about a new player who joins and is now frantically screaming on the Forum "ARG! I NEED TO PAUSE? WHERE"S THE BUTTON?!!?"

The questions then become...

Would anyone actually play games like this? Enough to add the capability to the website and all that entails (enhancing the database structure to hold the flags, adding code to the game processing to ignore votes if the flags are set, updating the UI to hide the buttons for the non-valid options, and adding code to the UI for game set up, just off the top of my head, a couple dedicated days worth of work and testing)
And more importantly, would it damage the community by splitting us even further apart then the WTA v PPSC drama that goes on here on occassion?

NO MORE OPTIONS STOP IT STOP IT YOU'RE TEARING US ALL APAAAAAAAAAAART

/obligatory troll in serious business topic

Having just escaped the trap net of total dependency on parents (and moved on to ~99.5% dependency, squee college), I empathize with butterhead's point. I'm inclined to answer Draugnar's question (about playing the games) to "yes, but unless someone wants to code it and put it up, it won't garner enough interest to bother the mods over."

I don't see what is wrong with draws. I think they're an important part of the game: my personal style includes quick decisive wars that don't leave my enemies dead, but rather just crippled to the point where it's against their interest to try to fight back.

For example, say you're England, and you've just pwned France: fleet in mao, army in Brest, about to take Paris. Let's assume no big northern Russia; maybe Germany and Russia have started fighting. Once you have Paris the dividends of attacking France fall dramatically, since taking Marseilles would cost you a whole year of positioning, and you may very well be locked out of the Mediterranean by then.

At that point, the rational decision is to "vassalize" France; fighting benefits neither of you two (opportunity cost), while working with France allows you to either take the Mediterranean by storm, or stabbing Germany if you feel like it. And rationally France should go along with it as well, as its clearly the best option.

If you take draws out of the game, France in that example would have a much lower incentive to work with England; fighting against England gives it a say 1% chance of solo victory, and fighting alongside England gives it a say 5% chance; there is very little difference between those two scenarios, so France would probably just give in to emotion and try to make sure England can't win.

Isn't that a really bad thing?

And I mean sure, that's a somewhat extreme example, but less extreme cases pop up in almost every game, where a "vassalage" is in the best interest of both parties.

I think many of the hundreds of face to face games I played for most of my life ended in some kind of draw, when we'd played for 6 hours and just couldn't take it anymore, or there was a stalemate of sorts, etc ...

I think many people would love to have the option to choose. Some people here have trouble because they fear they'll lose an extra second checking to see if the draw and pause options are enabled (which should be the default so there shouldn't even be a need to check it), but the truth is that extra second is nothing compared to what the availability of this option gives to innovative ways of playing the game with the no-draw option and the benefits it gives to have the pause option to both people who tend to ask for pauses and those who refuse to give them.

I for one tend to refuse to give a pause if it's in the first 2 years. But it also bothers me when a game has gone on for weeks and someone refuses to pause, so someone NMRs and the whole game dynamic changes.

I'm going to pass the auto-pause-on-nmr into a new thread to remove the slightly offtopic 'noise' from this one...

Having a No Draw Option is bad for a number of reasons:

1) It will cause significant confusion for newer players.

2) It will give the mods more work when people decide they do, in fact, want a draw and mods are asked to intervene.

3) It will artificially increase the ease of winning a game.

4) It will cause some games to last for decades for no reason.

I have actually played a couple of live games with friends on a real board were draws are not allowed to make it more interesting. And what I have seen is that it is actually harder to win and games do last longer (but if someone decides to play it's their problem). Regarding noobs, maybe we can have this option unavailable for new players and regarding bothering mods, I think it could be programmed to draw automatically after a stalemate of more than 3 years.

I'm having a hard time understanding how it could be harder to win with no draws.

Here's an easy solution: don't vote for a draw. Everyone else will be forced to play it out.