[Cainehill]

Originally posted by Chazar:
Well, in fact I wanted to start a game at mosehansen since a couple of days and was checking regularly, but I couldnt. Obviously people that were previously playing are the first to notice that a new slot is free again...

Yeh - yesterday morning there wasn't a slot free (I checked), sometime before evening Cohen grabbed the slot as it came available. Never mind that he's had horrible luck finding players for his settings lately, going so far as starting a Faerun map game with 8 players because he got tired of waiting. 424 provinces, eight players. And another Faerun he started with only 12, on a map with fixed positions meant for 17 races.

...but then again, I'm not sure if anyone wants to play with me such a slow paced game, since nobody responded to my previous thread asking for a slow paced game.

Well - looking back (I was offline for 2 weeks until yesterday), you wanted a 99 hour game - not sure how many people really want something much slower than 48, maybe 72. You forget what was happening in the game, you might even forget you have a turn coming up with anything over that.

Worse - when you posted, there wasn't any slots on mosehansen, so you needed a volunteer host. Not that many people have the computer / internet connection resources to do that. ( I might now, but don't yet know how bad the electric power situation is here yet, so I power down at night, when going out, etc. Plus, dynamic IP address would be a pain. )

So anyways - no open slot on mosehansen and no host machine... There isn't a game until you have one of those, so people probably didn't want to rush in to say they'd play a game with no idea of a start date. (The 99 hour hosting might've dismayed people as well.)

But I dont want to stop someone else from playing. I'm just wondering why there is only one (private) server available and none from illwinter or shrapnel...

Not sure Illwinter has the resources, and Shrapnel probably doesn't want the headaches of setting up a server, supporting it, and listening to the political BS and complaints because things didn't please everyone. ("Hey, I want to start a game and I can't because there's 512 going already!", or "So-and-so joined my game and I didn't want to play with her!")

Then too - Illwinter has provided the tools whereby anyone who wants to can host, either via TCP/IP or email, so they (IW and Shrapnel) may not feel it's a high priority issue.

Maybe mosehansen's server should have a queue for new games, but I'm too shy to ask. I mean, his server seems pretty well done so far, and asking for more seems a bit ungrateful...

Well, I think I remember Esben commenting that it was almost more fun to do work on the game server than it was playing the games.

A queue of some sorts, or a weighted lottery for starting games (so that someone having 5 games already going had much less chance of 'winning' the lottery than someone with none going) might just be a great thing.