[geoschmo]

Spacefan,

I see exactly what happend to you. I will explain it here, not as a way to ridicule you, but in the hopes that other new players can learn from your mistake. You should not feel bad, it is a very common mistake on PBW. Probably the #1 cause of messed up turns. Unfortunately there really isn't much we can do to prevent it except inform people to watch out for it.

On the 28th, you were the Last player to upload your turn. You uploaded your .plr file at 6:45:38, the turn completed processing at 6:45:54. You then uploaded again at 6:46:28, and the .plr file was exactly the same file size as the one uploaded at 6:45:38. Obviously this wasn't you playing the next turn very fast, this was the same .plr file. The only thing PBW does is check the file name to make sure you are uploading the correct player for the correct game. It cannot tell if you are uploading an incorrect turn for that player in that game.

But when Se4 goes to process the next turn, it does recognize that the .plr file is the incorrect turn, and so ignores it and the AI controls your empire for you. If a human game owner were running this as a PBEM game, they would get an error message at this point saying "The turn for player 6 is for the date 2415.3, and the current game date is 2415.4. Do you wish to continue and let the AI run this players turn?" PBW however runs turns at the command line and does not stop when it receives these errors. It makes the AI run these turns by default.

This same thing happened to you again on the next day. You controlled your empire for turns 153 and 155, and the AI controlled it for turns 154 and 156.

What could have caused this? Well most likely your web browser did not refresh right away, and you thought maybe PBW did not register your file upload and you hit the send file button again. The server process turns very quickly in most cases. A matter of seconds unless there are a LOT of combat rounds going on within the game. Quite often the server processes the next turn way faster than the page refreshes on your screen, due to communication lags over the internet.

The best way to prevent it is check the game info and the game log whenever you upload a turn. If you are the Last player uploading be careful. If you see in the log that it registered you as uploading twice with a new turn inbetween when you only uploaded once, then you can undo the second upload from the game info screen and play the correct turn and upload it.

You can also download and use the Play By Web Real Time Client. This automates all this stuff, and will delete the exsisting .plr file from your pc before letting you play the turn, and will not upload until after you play your turn, so you avoid all this mess to begin with.

We can't have PBW abort the game everytime se4 receives an incorrect turn or we would have to have someone sitting at the PBW server 24 hours a day clicking on the error Messages that pop up and sending emails to the game owners. It wouldn't be an automatic game server then.

Geoschmo
PBW Admin Team