Here's an idea... just popped into my head.

Let's say, every other month or so, every [willing] player gets added to a raffle pool. The winner of the raffle gets to decide on custom (within a range of selections, of course) rules for a set in a new game format. The rules would be limited of course, by you devs, so it doesn't dramatically fluff up the bandwidth or whatnot.

They could decide things such as:

--$2b bug enabled/disabled
--No allies
--Tags/No Tags allowed(and members per tag if so)
--Minutes per turn
--Set length
--forced GDI
--other more wild changes, like
----No LGs allowed (or no exploring allowed?)
----protection lasts a different amount of turns
----Military costs no upkeep
----Different "humanitarian" limitations
----fluffed if I know the amount of things that could be decided upon



Seems like I haven't seen a suggestion quite like this one, so I figured I'd share it.

What y'all think?

gah

lol... most people would end up choosing something weird that wouldn't work methinks...

plus changing things on a server-by-server basis is very very inconvenient...

Well, you'd be the limiters in what's available to them. Say, some form of points system? Each feature has a set point value, and you may only spend X points in creating the set. Or, possibly something along the line of "if you choose X, then you cannot choose Y." Obviously you'd have direction in the process.

As far as changing the ruleset server-by-server, yeah, that'd be a pain, but I've a feeling (yes, given time that's not very abundant) if the idea was a hit, you could have some type of selection form written up to automatically generate the game, eliminating a bunch of the busywork from the process. I'm actually kinda suprised something like this isn't already in place on your back-end of things.

Like I said, though, just another random thought trying to help the game boost itself. Hell, once we're live on Facebook and we've got more than ~1000 active members again, you could probably sell off these raffle tickets for donation bucks :P

(if that's the case, though, i want a free set sometime... rofl)