[geoschmo]

I wouldn't say it's a common occurance, but it's definetly not unheard of. There isn't a list of specifications, but anything that makes a game more complicated and take longer to process in the later turns can be a problem.

The issue is that PBW will timeout after 20 minutes of processing a turn. This is what the PBW code was specifically written to do, it's not a bug or anything. The assumption was that turns that take longer than that had frozen up and stopped processing. Early on there were some bugs that would cause that to happen. So the 20 minute timeout was written in to keep a game from tying up the server and making it unable to process any other games.

Most of the games now that hit that timeout aren't actually locked up, just so complicated they take more than that to run. You can download the turn files and .plr files and process those turns offline though. And then upload the resulting turn back to PBW and it will notify the players of the new turn. PBW still helps in these cases as a turn distribution and collection, it just doesn't actually process the turn so there is a little more work involved for the game owner.

Geoschmo