This is more than likely just me being frustrated, but does anyone else get extremely annoyed when somebody leaves the game and wastes everyone's time? I've had this happen to me countless times... get a strategic advantage... opponent notices and leaves without finishing the game. 

This more than likely has been brought up / thought about before but what if there was some sort of penalty for this like a loss in rank or an exclusion from certain game types?

Something like 0-30 boots - No Penalty

                      31-50 - Loss in rank (Demoted)

                      51-100 - Suspension from fast game type.

I realize that things do come up and you are forced to leave from time to time, but one could say you shouldn't join lightning games if this is the case.

This has come up before.  I'd like to see restrictions on joining new games based on recent boots.  Seems like a fair way to deal with it.

+1000

This is a bit silly, but wouldn't it be nice if we could detract 1 boot every six months or every year.

I would really like to get back to 0 boots.

I completely agree with boots disappearing after a certain amount of time. This only makes sense.

Something like 'Boots in last 30 days' would be totally acceptable.

And if that number is greater than the specified amount... no quick time games.

There is a thread with a number of similar solutions somewhere in the archives..

Warfish handles boots similar to what is being discussed here.    It's weaknesses like this here that have me thinking about switching back to warfish....

ba-dum-dum- tish!  

But, seriously folks, I'm here all week, tip your waitresses.

OK, boots now expire after 30 days.

I'm certainly up for putting a limit on joining or starting games when certain thresholds have been reached. Should this be all games / just realtime?

What are everyone's views on this?

Opening thought -

All games but tournament games.

5 boots in 30 days no joining or starting games.

i'd up it to be more like 10. you can rack up a few real quick with RT games. hell, have 2 or 3 RT games going and the boss stops in to talk and you're halfway there. 

I'd say 10 means no more RT games for the month. not sure if i'd put more restrictions on it than that. 

I don't play RT games, but I've seen where boots can be a problem with non-RT games too.  I'd like to limit the damage someone can cause who is joining dozens of games, and getting booted from most.

I don't know how complicated this would be, but it seems like real time boots should be counted differently than normal boots.

Here's my suggested rules:

More than 10 RT boots in last 30 days -> no more joining/starting RT games.

More than 5 non-RT boots in last 30 days -> no more joining/starting non-RT games.

i'd be in favor of that if there's a way to keep track of them separately.

weathertop wrote:

i'd be in favor of that if there's a way to keep track of them separately.

They're not tracked separately at present but they could be easily.

I wouldn't handle realtime boots differently.  Yea, there is the increased possibility of someone getting accidentally booted in a realtime game, but that's not likely to happen too often for the conscientious player.  And I'd argue that those who drop in realtime games have a more negative effect on those games than in regular games (because of the "waste of time" factor and because there tends to be fewer players, so losing one really skews the game)... so those boots shouldn't be discounted, but , if anything, increased in penalty.

I must say, the administration on this site is top notch. Just pulled up my profile to check my global ranking and noticed that boots have been changed to what has been discussed here. I would like to give a wholehearted THANKS to Tom / All involved. 

Tom, I would error on the side of caution starting out with this and perhaps doing a limit on something equal to or greater than 10 boots. Just my opinion of course.

+1. 10 boots looks like an acceptable number. I would 2nd Amidon's point regarding treating tourney boots seperately.

Ozyman wrote:

...

Here's my suggested rules:

More than 10 RT boots in last 30 days -> no more joining/starting RT games.

More than 5 non-RT boots in last 30 days -> no more joining/starting non-RT games.

 

 

+1, sounds good to me (it's implicit, but for a 30 day period).

I would add that 2 boots in a tournament will make you booted of all remaining games in this tournament. 

Also, I wish to say I am not happy with the disappearance of the all time boot count. When you see a player with a 500 GR, it's very useful to know if this player is 5 year's old, or if he got booted 200 times. I would even be very interested to see the number of turns skipped as some players lose games because they get skipped a lot despite they never get booted. 

I'm dubious about 10 being the magical number. I had 7 there for a long time (mind you they were over like three years), and I think you might have problems with newbs cancelling their vacation without taking all their turns first and getting some skips and boots. 

Generally:

I have like 25-50 games on the go at any given time. It's my turn in 10-12 games everyday(in a 24 hour period) probably about half of them are one day turns.  So If I miss 2 days, I'm skipped in 5 or 6 games.  That means i can miss about three days of turns, before I reach my boot limit.

 (I say this because everybody is thinking about the bad player, who will quickly accumulate lots of boots, but what about the responsible player who's missing a beat?)  How many boots could you accumulate if you had to go for an emergency funeral, or your power went out for several days, or your kids just overwhelmed you...  these are all like 3-5 day events. 

Maybe 15 or 20 is a better idea, and maybe an escalating scale is better? Miss 10, no creating... miss 15 no joining... or something like that. 

And for how long? Do i have to wait another month before I can join games again? ...imagine... no wargear for a month... ;)

+1 to 2 boots in a tourney gets you axed from the tourney.