Again sorry, and you are totally within your right to be upset. Although, truth be told, as a guy who follows the rules and wants other people to follow the rules too, I cannot properly express to you how upset I was when presented with this situation. When I realized I had lost the file I was like “Oh crap! How am I going to fix this without doing an Edit!?!?!” Embarrassment City.
This was not something I wanted to present to you but I could think of no way of getting you a completed Turn without doing the edit.
As for the edit itself, hopefully, and I do think you feel this way too, you realize it was just an accident and not done purposefully. Unfortunately, I have trained myself to save the game after I post it and when I couldn’t post due to the site not working, I just didn’t override my habit and save the game. I was like, I will come back and try to post again later, and then I ended up being busy and never came back. In addition, I am bad at closing my computer down every night. I leave it up for days at a time and since all my other programs, Word, Excel, Chrome, come right back up if the system reboots, I am never punished for this poor behavior. Of course, in this case TripleA does not have that feature.
Hopefully, since this was a very easy Russian Turn and since the site was having issues, you do see it was accidental. It would be awfully coincidental that the one night the site wasn’t allowing posting that was also the same night I made some error I wanted to fix that required the edit. Having said that, it does not remove the possibility, and that is what we are talking about. Transparency. After all, maybe I decided to change my build? Maybe I placed my units and realized I forgot to move somebody? No matter how easy a Turn looks there is always a possibility for an error.
Which brings me to your comment about my edit policy stinking. You are right, to a degree. (More on this below) This was something I didn’t consider when I started to implement the more stringent Playoff Edit policy. What happens if the computer freezes during a Turn? What happens if the program tanks? I had not considered that. And at first, I was thinking, after this debacle, that “Hey Andrew, you need to save every time combat is over to make sure if the file gets lost or corrupted you can restore the game without an edit.” But upon thinking about this more and more I realize the entire way virtually everyone on this site posts is incorrect.
What do we all do? We take the end Turn file and use it for our Turn. Unless there are combat questions, like OOL or scrambling, we conduct the entire Turn and then send the end Turn file. But what if there is a computer freeze? We all trust our opponent to reconstruct the Turn with edits, if combat occurred, and move on. But, do we really know it is the same Turn? After all, we did not see anything that occurred except for combat rolls. The more I considered this it occurred to me it is not enough to save the game after combat so if the game freezes I can reconstruct it without edits because what if it freezes DURING combat rolls. I don’t know about you but I remember at least twice this happening to me. This does open up an interesting path I had not previously thought of.
Consider this. I have X number of battles. Two of them are dependent on each other, as in I expect to win battle A, but if for some reason I lose battle A then I really don’t want to conduct battle B. So, I roll battle A, then if something goes horribly wrong, I turn off the game and reload the Turn but with a different Combat Move and only reconstruct the actual battle that I rolled. I am not saying people are doing this, but the way we post does allow for this contingency. What we should be doing, I now realize, is post at the end of the Combat Move, and then save and/or post after Combat and then post the end of the Turn. This way, as far as I can see, there is no way to lose the game and not have full transparency to your opponent if any edits are required to reconstruct the game.
Therefore, I am going to start posting end of Combat Moves and I would ask you, and my other opponents, to do the same. In addition, I am going to save the game after every combat phase so I would only have to edit combat if the game froze during combat rolls and only then.
Please realize I am not accusing you or any other opponent of doing this. But as Ronald Reagan said “Trust, but verify.”
