Essentially, if someone is a regular or semi-regular forum poster, they won't CD often, if at all.

I can honestly say that in my 40 games I have never CD'd. :) I'm sure there are others that can beat that...so there is hope tullman.

I've never CDed in 39. I have NMRed though.

Hell, I've CD'd in a few games, never on purpose, though. Took me a while to realise that I couldn't handle 24-or-less deadlines.

tullman, the key is working up your points to the point you can play in the more expensive games with quality players. I hope to get to such a position myself over the next month. It is definitely frustrating when your opponents benefit on someone not even turning in their first orders.

Anyone have the statistics on % of CDs based on a pot size range?

Ghost?
We all know you are the lord of all stats on here:]

I've only CD'ed once, and it was in when everyone just held to "pause" the game when there wasn't a pause feature. I forgot about it, but bought right back in haha.

The last time I checked the mass stats available for this site and a similar one (playDip) the results were something like 30% or so of the games have a No Moves Received in 1901 and a nearly 90% chance of a CD in a game. This is the sad reality that comes with open game creation where there are a lot of new players.

Alternatives such as having an AI back up with an active replacement player recruitment for new games is not available here, but on the site that has it, the player base is much more experienced/veteran oriented with none of the ranking./scoring system functions here that are a trade off it appears (but not for sure).

One way around the problem is to recruit players on the forum where the drop out rate is significantly lower since only 5 per cent of the player base seems to post here and probably only 10% read it, thus you have a pre-screened population of more intense dedicated folks.

Other options are the various tournaments.

One thing that is often over looked in trying to deal with the problem of drops is an aggressive communication within the game from the start with the idea of smoking out problems before they start. Write to each and every player in the game, introduce yourself, try to fire up some social contract sort of environment where people are reminded that we play these games to have fun and make it fun for others.
When people communicate in the game the chances of them dropping go down.

At some time this site code masters and monitors may be able to handle the issue of getting people into replacement positions and delaying games before people go NMR and into CD and screw up games.

In the meantime we can only drag out the horses from the morgue and continue to pound on their carcasses.

Ghost says:

"Best to embed yourself in the active forum community, and get games with players who have already played many games."

This may be the best place to ask why there doesn't seem to always be a correlation between games played, points earned and rankings.

How can someone who has played in only a handful of games rack up hundreds of points without even winning a single game? Or are the "games played" statistics not trustworthy?

Thanks!

It'd be nice to have an email reminder system (on by default but you can turn it off) that emails a reminder to the player when their turn is up in the game. So those that stop by, play a game, then forget get a reminder to stop by and play the next round. I'm willing to bet that'd help the community BOOM...

They get them by big survivals, draws, and the fact that if you have less than 100 points when you finish a game (including points invested in ongoing games), you get bumped back up to 100.

Also, if there are lots of CD takeovers, the pot can increase massively- I am currently in a game where the pot has increased over 50% through CD takeover.

The best explanation is that the point system is wonkier than the Alps.

That is in response to greendjinn

Thanks to all for your responses. I like the idea of the e-mail reminder and I bet that would help players get their turn. Along the same lines, but slightly different I'm amazed that so many people jump as soon as things don't go well, as early as FALL 01. To me there is no sense playing if you will only stay if you do well. Can't folks take a punch? It's only a game, if you lose it doesn't make you a loser. You lost a game. That's all. There's no crying in baseball.