I've read all the comments above, and I feel like I do agree with some of the proposals about the penalities for chronical CD/NMR players
...but I think we're on the wrong path for the solution, or at least it's just a partial solution.
My opinion is that once a player loses 1phase, or worse, goes in CD the damage is already done and the game
is going to be strongly affected, REGARDLESS of how soon we're able to recover/substitute the player, and REGARDLESS how much we're going to punish the "guilty player".
Oli said there're no stats available about Civil Disorders, so I'm going to report my experience here as an example:
I've played 35 games on this site (not a huge number actually, but big enough to have an idea about what's going on).
Among 35, 18 are 1vs1, so I'll exclude them cause it's reasonable to assume that a 1vs1 game won't have CD issues;not sure,though!
I'm going to exclude 2 live games too, cause the dynamics/thoughts about live games are rather different.
We're talking about 15 games then.
5/15 (33%) games have had no CD.
5/15 (33%) games have had 1 CD.
3/15 (20%) games have had 2 CD.
2/15 (13%) games have had 3 CD.
10/15 (67%) games have had CD issues.
The average of (CD occurrence)/(Number of players per game) is 13% ,minimum zero, maximum 3/7 on a classic board...
14/15 games (93%) have had NMR issues.
(the only flawless game was a 1066 variant, three players...)
my diagnosis: CD/NMR is a plague and we should prevent it. Mods, forgive me if I'm too rough, but it's my opinion,and numbers argue in favour of it.
SO, the point is: why are we wasting our time in trying to fix a problem which is impossible to be fixed? Why can't we put our efforts in preventing the problem to happen?
I mean, like I meant a couple of months ago
http://www.vdiplomacy.com/forum.php?viewthread=18519#18519 :
why aren't we "reliable" player allowed to join a game with a reasonable assumption that the game itself won't be influenced by CD/NMR?
My request was simple: RR thresholds and number of phases played thresholds option to join a game.
Oli himself said this kind of change is obvious and easy to implement.
Summarizing, my proposal is: give a benefit to the reliable players, continueing punishing the "unreliable" players won't solve the problem:
the website has 2000 users, there will always be a newcomer who will "ruin" a running game.
Chronical CD/NMR players and multiaccounters don't really bother about RR.
It is very likely that newcomers too dont'bother about RR.
I do love this game, as well as this website, but the percentage of games affected is too much for my taste and now that I've brought my active games to the end I'm going to stay out of ongoing games until the problem is not solved.