Matrix Games Forums

Seems several recent games have opted to run turns thru servers recently rather than emailing turns directly between participants ..... What is the advantage and for whom ?

Sorry if this is a silly question, just don't understand the recent trend .....

I have no basis for this, but i'll give you two reasons;

1. some security function that lowers the ability of either of the players to alter/replay outcomes
2. traffic or some profit motive on the web site

In addition to stronger anti-cheating, this approach also makes it much easier to find an opponent when all people are playing via a common connection point. Also, this makes the games much easier to manage. If you are playing just one PBEM game, it might be fine to use conventional email, but if you have several games running in parallel, it becomes quite messy to send around the right files to right people. The whole experience becomes much more streamlined using the server. This also gives us a lot of options for future development, like easily adding rankings, ladders, tournaments and the like.