well if everyone were to agree to shorter phases, then why not have everyone pretend there are short phases and make sure they get on and ready orders?

Lol mongoose, you're quite right. :)

But perhaps they're asking because current Build phase started 4 days ago and Cuba has not disbanded his last unit yet although he logged in recently: 6 hours ago in the site, 20 hours ago in another 2days/phase game he's normally playing.
Looks like he's a classical sore loser pretending he can't find 10 seconds to finalize 1 order. I don't know if he really is.

Not finalizing is not against the rules and I believe this rule is right.

But once I found a player who never finalized his orders all game long in a 5 days/phase anonymous gunboat game. Really a sporadic user, I thought.
I started thinking he was an asshole as he got dislodged from his last SC in fall and saved his retreat tough there were no SCs avaliable to retreat to, while a normal brain would have finalized a disband.
Next build-phase came and after a few hours he SAVED his last disband.
As the game ended and I could read his name, I opened his profile and I found he was playing some 24h/ph or 48h game and he was playing only gunboats, saving without finalizing in all of them.
MUTED. Now he can't join my gunboats anymore. He keeps his right to save without finalize, I keep my right to not play with him.

I like to save over finalizing because I like to know basically when each game is going to advance, but if I make exceptions when it's obvious I'm on my way out.

"Classical sore loser" - only in Anc Med.
The rest of us are post post-modernist sore losers.
Except for the Viking berserkers high on wins

I can change the phase-length if everybody agrees.
PS: If you block/mute a player (not the country in the game) he is no longer able to join your games.

@mongoose:
You’re right, I didn’t mean that the phase length can’t be changed (if everyone in the game agrees of course).
I was meaning that every user should be aware beforehand of what kind of game is going to join, we should avoid to ask Oli to do this manual job for us.
I am guessing that amisond won’t join a 7 days/phase game anymore. This one is going to last for months, about 6-10 months. I meant: if he were told, if he were warned, probably he (and other players in the current game) should have done another choice and now they shouldn’t play a worthless game where the discussion is focused on whether canceling or not.

I am happy to play carry on playing the game just feeling a little pressured into voting draw by some of the other players.

So my guess on you is wrong, amisond.
But my guess is right for at least one of the current players.
This is the point: 1 single "wrong" player is enough to get a game screwed.
If those players were not comfortable with those game settings,
or were not aware of the drawbacks of those game settings (first of all the time duration of the game)...
well, they were not supposed to join that game.

@deci my post was not intended to rebut your post, but the original one