Yes, the game needs to be unpaused for any draw to take effect.

Hmm, i don't really want to pause the game because your new player was quite within his rights to join. If a game is paused everything is paused, and the game won't even be considered for processing - this includes draws.

But Fig, the players had all voted for the draw. Through an unkown result to them, someone snuck in. Is that fair to them? Give the new person back his points (he didn't know they had voted for the draw), unpause the game, and let the draw commence without the new guy. It's the only fair thing to do.

One of the things I'm going to look at this summer is having draws be independent of the pause and have both be immediate, independent of the 5 minute timer. That time should never have been put in place when orders are all finalized or pauses/draws are unanimous.

Fair enough, although I have to say I'm not sure on that issue which is why i haven't dealt with it. Also, I guess I'll be racing you for the next set of updates then - I'd be very interesting to talk to you about what sort of things you're thinking of doing, email me?
-- On the issue in question:
True, but i can't refund points so i can't do anything about it if that's the view people come to.

Thanks figle, for looking into it. I guess we're still waiting to unpause the game anyway. We'll just play it out - it just sucks because the person that went CD had 12 SC's and was playing really well until he left for unknown reasons. The rest of us agreed to draw when he went CD, but we didn't know about the pause rule.

Fig, drop me a note if you like. What I do will actually be directed by Kestas when time is freed up to do it, but I'm going to push to get away from timers and move to triggers to prevent some of these last minute sneaks which really aren't part of the game. Could someone change their vote at the last second and hold up a F2F game? No. They would just be told they agreed to it and everyone go on with the original plan. So there is no reason someone should be able to vote for a draw or a pause then at the last minute unvote when everyone has gone about their business.

http://forum.phpdiplomacy.net/viewtopic.php?f=9&p=1081#p1081
Have a look Draug...

The issue there is in the fundamental design. Kestas talks about startup and all that. what should be done is a independent thread that sits and monitors a message queue. when it sees a message it processes it, so no startup times.

But I'll take this to the dev forum as I'm sure the non-techies here aren't interested in it.