[Norfleet]

The length of a game is really dependent on many factors: The size of the map, aggressiveness of the players, frequency of play, and how long it takes people to get their turns done.

PBEM games crawl at a horrendously slow, snailish place. Network marathon games can go about as fast a single player session, until some whiny pansy decides to call it a night. Wimps.

The MP game is about as stable as the SP game, that is, fairly stable....but as of 2.06, the server seems rather intolerant of players lagging out or dropping, and will eventually require a reset if this happens more than once or twice, as the ghosts of the dead connections seem to exact their vengeance by clogging the server.

The MP community is definitely far more welcoming of new players than other, more mass-market games: Games like Dominions 2 are favored by the more erudite, and as such, the population isn't populated by the smacktards you'd find in a game like, say, Warcraft. If anything, that's the selling point of the game right there: !Warcraft.

Oh, and I fully agree about the forums. The person who decided to make it sort in this bizarre, mutated manner, and somehow managed to simultaneously delete the user preferences option to make it sort normally should be gutted with a rusty fork.