Increasing turn speed

[Ruatha]

In NGC2 turn times where generally fast. In NGC3 they where fast in the beginning. (Both games 20 players).

Now at turn 35+ the speed is far from impressing, not that the empires are big and hard to handle. I guess RL issues play a part.

The turn deadlines are 72 hours, this is to allow for shorter leaves without missing a turn.
The problem is that once the turntimes started to increase more and more players have started to delay sending in turns, it's a downwinding spiral....

I wish to retain 72 hours turntime but to increase motivation to speed up the turntimes, but how?

I'm starting a "Turn submission league" in the game where the first three players to send in the turns get +1 points, the Last but one gets -1 and the Last player gets -2 points (Not submitted turn = -2 pts).

I'm not sure this will have any effect but it's worth trying.

Does anyone have any other suggestions to motivate people, preferabbly "nice" motivators and not threats or punishments?

[Fyron]

There really is no nice motivator that will actually work.

[dogscoff]

Every turn, send large sums of money via paypal to all players that upload on time. I reckon this would work very well, although this idea does suffer from one obvious drawback.

Maybe PBW could track how good ppl are/ aren't at uploading and compile some sort of rating which would be publicly viewable. Everyone would want to maintain a "good" rating and (theoretically) everyone would get more punctual because ppl with bad Ratings would have a hard time being accepted into games. But then again, maybe this idea sucks as well.

[Ruatha]

Originally posted by dogscoff:
Every turn, send large sums of money via paypal to all players that upload on time. I reckon this would work very well, although this idea does suffer from one obvious drawback.

Maybe PBW could track how good ppl are/ aren't at uploading and compile some sort of rating which would be publicly viewable. Everyone would want to maintain a "good" rating and (theoretically) everyone would get more punctual because ppl with bad Ratings would have a hard time being accepted into games. But then again, maybe this idea sucks as well.

Best idea so far (Altough the only one if you don't count "poo on a stick" that was proposed on the PBW NGC3 game forum page )

[General Woundwort]

Originally posted by dogscoff:
Maybe PBW could track how good ppl are/ aren't at uploading and compile some sort of rating which would be publicly viewable. Everyone would want to maintain a "good" rating and (theoretically) everyone would get more punctual because ppl with bad Ratings would have a hard time being accepted into games. But then again, maybe this idea sucks as well.

There is an "in-game" function that tracks this for each of the players. I don't know how this sort of data could be made "public", but that might be a start. But there is at least one serious drawback - going on vacation where you can't access a computer for turns could ashcan your rating. That's what would have happened to me Last week...

[geoschmo]

I thought about having a cutthroat game where I would tell the players upfront that occasionally I would be looking at the site and if there was only one player left to upload I would force the turn even if the time limit had not been reached.

Geoschmo