fortis magna: stop spamming other people's threads.

ginger: no, you can't. gunboat means no communication.

If you sign up to a 24 hour phase game then expect the phases to take 24 hours. There is no obligation to ready orders and in fact players often have good reasons not to.

Stop yer bitchin'. If ya' didn't want to play 24 hour phases you shouldn't have signed up for them.

I don't mind waiting 24 hours in games where it is necessary, I just find it a bit weird to leave your orders saved when everyone else is ready and there are no messages to send. anyways, thanks for answering the question folks.

someone might know he needs to be gone for a period and doesn't want to risk an NMR for the next turn, so he knows to let the whole phase go, nothing wrong with it

There are reasons for saving and not readying. They player may put in initial orders but then want to look them over in the evening before committing. They may also like the time of day that the phase is scheduled to end so want to keep that cycle going as is as long as possible.

I agree with ginger. This practice is obnoxious. It makes people not want to play gunboat.
You people may claim there's a legitimate reason, but 9 times out of 10 there isn't.

I'll admit I'm a chronic non-ready-er. I'll find myself in live games hitting Save out of habit, only to realise two minutes later that I was the only player with retreats. Oops.

"You people may claim there's a legitimate reason, but 9 times out of 10 there isn't."

How could you possibly know this? Do you do exit surveys after games?

Perhaps we just have different ideas about what a "legitimate" reason is. To me, I'd say almost anything besides "I want want to be a jerk" is legitimate.

Yes, there are people here who think anything goes and there is no such thing as etiquette.

And anyway, I know most of the time there isn't a real reason because I typically complain to the person about it after the game, and they "explain" their "reasoning".

Well, in our gunboat game it is more suspicious. We had an empty country because someone quit. A new person joined and promptly asked for a pause and stretched the phase out to 24 hours. He is now doing this every round, although he has saved his orders. So why would he join an active game where we were going two or three orders a day, and then immediately ask for a pause and slow the game down to the full length each time? I think it is rude and discourteous.

I will sometimes do this if I know that I will have trouble accessing a computer the next day. For instance if a turn has just progressed you have a turn that expires at 9:00 AM the next day, If you don't ready your orders you can be assured that if you come back before 9:00 AM the day after that you still would not NMR.

I sometimes ready too quickly, because I don't like the box on the top of my screen.

Every time?

And besides, what are you thinking about? It is gunboat. If you have thought through what you want to do and entered orders, what is the problem with clicking Ready?

Curious, how would that new person have known that you all had been getting threw 2 or 3 phases a day? Sure you can tell him now, but that doesn't mean he has the schedule to match that pace. And before joining he would have had no way of knowing.

As for your last question, did you read the previous responses. There are reasons to set orders but not ready them. Even in gunboat. To reiterate one reason, the initial orders may have been done after a quick glance at the board with the intention of a more thorough examination later that day or night and therefore those initial orders would not be made ready.

I think it's good to have these sorts of threads every once in a while, though. My first *live* gunboat, I was the one not readying orders, not because I was trying to be a jerk, but because a) I didn't know anyone found it so irritating and b) I was multitasking, using the extra three minutes to fill out paperwork. After seeing a few of these threads pop up, I stopped multitasking while I played live games. So it's possible they just don't know, and at least for the remainder of the game you just have to hope they see this thread because, hey, no talking. But as others have said, there are reasons to save without readying, especially in a non-live game.

Sorry Alderian, I am new here. I thought there would be a way for a player to view the game even if it is gunboat before joining it. It would then have been immediately obvious that we have played a lot more turns than would fit in the time since the game started. But if not, then I agree with you - I was wrong. I guess I am just upset - this was my first experience of the site, and first we had a no show on the very first turn, and now we have this person who is delaying things (although perhaps with good reason). I had hoped that joining a gunboat game would mean the game would just move along.. don't mind me - I am just being grumpy. I will shut up now :-)

Solution: join games with people you know are reliable (you can see this on their profile as percentage of games resigned), with a shorter phase length. Don't be put off, most of the active population on this site is great :)

Good suggestion gigantor - I didn't know about profiles. That should help. I guess it means you can't join anon games though , because then you cannot check the profile :)

@gigantor: Won't work for gunboats, considering they're virtually all anonymous (for obvious reasons).

You could, however, try a semianonymous game -- password-protected anonymous. Lots of the regulars do this.

No worries Curious, and welcome to the site. If you look at a game, you can't tell when the game started or what the time/date was for each phase change. So there really isn't a way to tell how quickly a particular game is moving.