MArcomage

I like to play quickly, otherwise I lose my train of thought, so I have my defaults set to 5 minutes. When people arrive on time, this works well for me and them.

Sometimes I put up 5 minutes games and then have to leave. I forget that I had these up (because visibility of challenges and own games isn't so good from the main screens of the game).

Would be great if the game could auto-kill any of my open games or challenges, provided no-one has joined yet, if I don't interact with the site for some set number of minutes. Sometimes, prospective opponents would still get into a game before the idle timeout, but this will at least greatly mitigate the problem.

Would this be useful to others as well? I just find that trying to set up 5 minutes games keeps coming back and biting me, even though it's very satisfying when I can have a quick 15-30 minute game with keen parties. A double-edged sword!

People would ditch the games they know they would loose

MeCho wrote:
People would ditch the games they know they would loose

No. The game COULD NOT be ditched once it was started. This is to prevent your open games from being joined AFTER you become inactive (idle for 10, 15 minutes). The moment you come back onto the site (backend receives any activity from the user), then games may be re-opened automatically, or if shut down for good, the player can manually create new ones.

Perhaps make it possible to set a timeout when creating an open challenge. That way you can have it remove itself in a set amount of time, like 20 minutes. This might be easier (and less costly) to implement than either having the challenge feature check for player activity or coding the site such that a player going inactive checks to see whether open challenges exist.

DPsycho wrote:
Perhaps make it possible to set a timeout when creating an open challenge. That way you can have it remove itself in a set amount of time, like 20 minutes. This might be easier (and less costly) to implement than either having the challenge feature check for player activity or coding the site such that a player going inactive checks to see whether open challenges exist.

Sure, that could also work.

EDIT: Would be glad to get some (any) feedback on this from Mojko / developers as it seems I must otherwise stop setting up 5 min games for now. It just leads to more lost games than anything. Making the 5 minute option a little pointless unless I am literally on the phone with whoever I'm playing against.

DPsycho wrote:
Perhaps make it possible to set a timeout when creating an open challenge. That way you can have it remove itself in a set amount of time, like 20 minutes. This might be easier (and less costly) to implement than either having the challenge feature check for player activity or coding the site such that a player going inactive checks to see whether open challenges exist.

I like this idea. It's certainly a better approach compared to the one mentioned in the opening post.

Mojko wrote:

DPsycho wrote:
Perhaps make it possible to set a timeout when creating an open challenge. That way you can have it remove itself in a set amount of time, like 20 minutes. This might be easier (and less costly) to implement than either having the challenge feature check for player activity or coding the site such that a player going inactive checks to see whether open challenges exist.

I like this idea. It's certainly a better approach compared to the one mentioned in the opening post.

Great. Will this be added to some development roadmap? (Just so it doesn't get lost in the noise.)

It's already on my TODO list ;-)