The idea being that you set up the boards that you are open to playing lightning games on . Then at any point you can click ON the "I'm Avalible" button and if any one has or starts a lightning game on a board that you are open to, then you automaticly join that game.

when you click OFF the "I'm Available" button it automaticly declines you from any unstarted lightning games.

You could set in your preferences:

-the # of lightning game you want to join at one time

-you can have it to turn off at a specific time

-the # of players you want to play with within a game

-player color preference

i think this would give players the confidence to join lightning games with more then 3 players on a board.

Sounds tricky and easy to forget about.
Player colors are different from board to board as well.

I agree in spirit. There needs to be a systemic adjustment to make lightning games with more than 2 players practicable. I think integrated (usable) multiplayer chat is on Tom's docket at some point and that will help. I suggest we see if that solves the problem before coming up with more involved approaches.

Each board you select that you are open to playing games on you would select your color preferences for that board. every time you log on there could be a flashing message asking if you want to become Available to join lightning games.

the reason i suggest this, is that the majority of people dont use the forums and they most likely wont use the chat either

That's probably true, actually.

asm wrote: I agree in spirit. There needs to be a systemic adjustment to make lightning games with more than 2 players practicable. I think integrated (usable) multiplayer chat is on Tom's docket at some point and that will help. I suggest we see if that solves the problem before coming up with more involved approaches.

This would help, but I think it will be marginal. Now I can see players in a 2-player lightning game pulling off a move every 2-3 minutes, but that's just not going to be the the norm.  I think 5+ minutes is probably more like it when you factor in the time it takes to notice that it's your turn, switch from whatever you are multi-tasking on, think about things, make your move, and maybe alert your opponent that it's their turn.  That's been my experience. In fact, it's been worse for me, closer to 10 than 5.  With 3+ players I can only imagine that the average turn time has got to be 6+ minutes.

I just did an informal survey of about 10 4-player WarGear Warfare games.  I estimate that with the cards sitting at 22 at the end of these games (a very conservative average) that each player is taking 9 turns, which easily comes out to 3+ hours at 5 minutes a turn (another conservative estimate).  I don't know about most people, but I know I'm not interested in playing in a game that I think will take more than 2 hours let alone 3.  We'll see, but I doubt that a multi-chat-room will improve things by 30+%.  I think it's unlikely that all four players will be chatting the whole time unless it's a private game and everyone agrees that they will be diligent about taking their turns in as timely a manner as possible.

I think the solution is simulplay.  BAO could work but it's not hard to imagine the hard-core players using every second of their ten minutes to out-order-stack each other.  All it takes is one.  Admittedly, even this would be a substantial improvement over traditional turned-based lightning game times; A 9 move 4-player game would last about an hour and a half. Not bad. The problem is.. it's not Risk.

I think the M-Engine could be real solution.  It looks and smells like Risk, and at 6 minutes a turn, a 10 move 4-player game could be played in under and hour.  Ask any of the players in Game 2 how long they think it takes to take a turn using a well designed UI, and I'll bet they'll say that it's only marginally more than a normal move if at all.  2-3 minutes is not at all out of the question (which becomes 5 when you factor in multi-tasking, etc.).  I might even suggest that it could be faster than a normal move because with M-E you don't have to make decisions based on what just happened on your last roll.  You simply think about your entire set of orders and place them.  I think Oatworm, Yertle, Ciscokid, and Exploding Rodent all have a solid handle on how things work because they're placing some pretty sophisticated orders at this point in the game, many of which are Scenario-Dependent orders, which are placed no differently than normal moves.

Right now Game 2 is at move 15, but the cards are only at 11 because we're using a scale of +1.  I think it's fair to say that if we were using a scale of 2 the game would probably be over by now.

Maybe one of you guys in Game 2 can chime in on this thread and comment on the whole thing?

Real time updates would be the helper for lightning games for me. That way you can watch the game, instead of refreshing the page constantly. Also, if the boot timer switched to make a MOVE every so many seconds, instead of giving a certain amount of time to take a whole turn, things would move along much faster. Most of that 10 minute boot timer is used up because people do other things waiting for their turn. Lightning games would fit their name much better if everyone was watching the whole time.

bengaltiger wrote:  if the boot timer switched to make a MOVE every so many seconds, instead of giving a certain amount of time to take a whole turn, things would move along much faster.

I'm not sure what you mean by this?

Real-time updates would be huge, there's no question.

Everyone here seems to balk and anything that is "complicated", but we could have a 5 minute timer with "credit" earned for quick moves so that after 2 or 3 turns you've got 8 or 9 minutes to use for a bathroom run should you need it.  Cap it out at 10.

More players, esp. more players who who have an interest in playing lightning games. They would organize on their own (see: Angusjustice).

By a move timer, I meant that when it was your turn you would have to be active (if you don't do anything for 30 seconds, for example, you're skipped). If the game was real time, this would insure that everyone was always watching the game. It would be very fast, but if real time updates were going on I could consider playing a game like that.

Mongrel wrote: More players, esp. more players who who have an interest in playing lightning games. They would organize on their own (see: Angusjustice).

I wouldn't. I'd be more interested in a pick-up game with 4+ people that could move fast, and preferably in under 1.5 hours. Playing the standard turn-based way with 2 or 3 players just isn't fair enough on most boards for my tastes. And with 4 players, they'd have to pull off a turn every 3 minutes to have a chance at a 2 hour game.  Organized games may work for the established crowd, but I'll bet there are a probably lot of newbies out there who just want to play a game of Risk in real-time. I'm not saying it can't be done, but the M-Engine or a stripped down BaO seems like a much more feasible solution to me. The M-Engine will render most boards fair even with 2 players - and there are a number of people here who think BaO accomplishes the same thing with 2 players as well.

Bengaltiger wrote: By a move timer, I meant that when it was your turn you would have to be active (if you don't do anything for 30 seconds, for example, you're skipped). If the game was real time, this would insure that everyone was always watching the game. It would be very fast, but if real time updates were going on I could consider playing a game like that.

I think I would prefer a credit..  I would hate to run to the fridge for a cold frosty and get skipped while I was trying to open the chips. Make it a a couple minutes and maybe..

another feature that the Automatic Lightning Game Registration (ALGR) could have is when you want to create a lightning game it could indicate, in some way, the boards that have people waiting to join.

There is almost always 15-30 people online. chances are there is 2 or 3 people that are wanting to play lightning games online most of the time and 2 or 3 other people that would join a lightning game if they saw that all it needed is one or two players to start. If the 2 or 3 player that wanted to play lightning games had the ALGR turned on it could indicate to you from the "create a game page" that if you started a game there would automatically have a few players join, or you could create a game with the # of player with the ALGR on and instantly start a real time game.

This does sound useful and there would need to be an automatic/default shut-off and ..., but I do like the idea as many players have voiced a desire for Real-Time/Lightning to take off.

I just had a inspirational thought. Instead of creating a new button and worrying about all that entails, how about this?

Have a setting that can be turned on(default off) so that interested players are automatically invited to lighting games so it appears as a turn and you don't need to watch the join page. Further, add a setting/implementation that once you log-off you are automatically un-joined/declined from any lightning game you joined that has not started (default on) (this, I imagine would be hard to implement with the auto-login features and such, but we can dream). I believe this would capture most of the desired effect that KrocK has proposed without the all of the baggage; is that correct or did I miss something?

haven't read anything in this thread yet, but what about making lightning games similar to DEV games? what i mean is that when someone starts a lightning game it automatically invites all those that say they're available. then first ones to click join get in...

EDIT: after reading thru you've got something somewhat close to this posted by Alpha just previous to this and then these options:

- call for better chat
- call for real time updates
- the M-Engine thing
- highly complicated thing by Krock to start the thread

none of which are very simple to implement. what i've proposed has all the basic coding already done for the DEV invites. it'd be a matter of changing some of that logic and adding the lightning availability setting and that's about it.

Some kind of push-based notification system sounds like it would help. It would poll the server for new games that had recently been created matching your criteria and would then notify you with a notification popover (something subtle in the top right hand corner that would automatically close itself)

You would be able to enable / disable this setting for specific game speeds or boards.

not just those that have already been created, but those that are created while you are online also.