And I would like to make a suggestion for the GMR desktop client as well:
It would be good to have a way to sort the games. Right now I think the games that your turn is up is sorted by the time last turn is played. However, in some cases, it would be beneficial to sort by the time it is left to the turn expiration time.

When the host of a game leaves, I think GMR automatically assigns the next player (who plays right after the host) as the new host.
I suggest
a) a way to put it to vote on who should be the host
b) a notification to be sent to the new host. I have seen several cases that someone became a host and didn't know about it.

I am getting the exact same error when trying to download the save file through the GMR desktop client. The debug log also looks the same.

However, I can still download the save file from the GMR website, play my turn and then UPLOAD through the GMR desktop client (or the GMR website) without any problems. At least we have a workaround for the time being.

Well, about an hour ago, the admins posted the below messages on facebook and twitter, so I thought I should pass them on to here for the benefit of people who does not follow those:

https://www.facebook.com/MultiplayerRobot
"Our server has been having issues today. We're working on getting them resolved!"

https://twitter.com/GMRobot
"This comes at a really inopportune time for us, but we'll try to get it fixed as soon as possible! Thank you for your patience!"
"So sorry! We're currently experiencing a complete failure of our web server. We can revert any skipped turns due to this."

It would be nice if there is some sort of a notification somewhere regarding the GMR server being under maintenance or not. I suggest using this discussion board, I am not sure which is most used by GMR users, but I would prefer here over facebook or twitter as every GMR user has to have steam anyway.

Every game having a bloated file issue is out of my league, so admins will hopefully help you with that. However, I can share my general experience w/ bloated save files.

If the file is already bloated when you download the save game, you can use Andruh's fix for the bloated save file bug and that will reduced the save file size.

For more info, this is what Andruh posted in one of my games:

"I created a method of treating bloating file. See my last comments here: http://multiplayerrobot.com/Game#362.

Now everyone can treat bloating file using my mod: https://steamhost.cn/steamcommunity_com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=267554865."


To prevent bloating the save file yourself, you should do one of the following:
1) restart Civ V game between every turn
2) uncheck the DLCs, hit ok, let the game configure, check the DLCs hit OK, let the game reconfigure, before you load any save.
3) when you start the Civ V game, uncheck all the DLCs; then every time you load a game, it will automatically go to configuration mode to adjust for the save file. This is pretty much same as option #2 but requires you do the unchecking of DLCs only once, therefore I always use option #3. I am told that only unchecking the expansions (GnK and BNW) is enough, no need to uncheck all the DLCs, but I uncheck them all anyway to be on the safe side.

I just experienced a similar thing. I got an e-mail for one of my games, saying that I have been skipped. It is obviously a mistake as I just played recently (11:15PM GMT+1). Exaclty 45 min later, the next player is shown as skipped (th turn timer was at least 24 hrs), then the next player is skipped in 0 min, then the next player played his turn in 11 min, next player isskipped immediately (0 min).

Now it is my turn and now I got the same e-mail as the OP above, saying that the turn timer is disabled. It looks like I got the turn timer disabled message for 3 games so far.

I am waiting and not playing my turn as apparently there is some issue w/ timer and the other players should not have been skipped.

EDIT: Interesting, now the turn timer is off and I did not play my turn but still I got skipped... Something strange going on w/ turn timers.

EDIT2: The game link is http://multiplayerrobot.com/Game#8371

Thanks for your fast response Nullmaster. I can confirm that accepting an invite to a game and also turn notifications on the GMR site are working for me now.

Accepting an invite to a game, that appears in the notifications, also gives an error that starts with "Unable to serialize the session state." I have screenshot if you want.

EDIT: I restarted my browser, not sure it had anything to do w/ the error, but now the error I receive when I try to accept an invite to join a game changed to "The model item passed into the dictionary is of type 'GmrLib.Models.Civilization', but this dictionary requires a model item of type 'GmrLib.Models.Game'."

Great job guys, website performance is now very good.

One thing I noticed though is the notifications seems not getting updated. GMR client tells me in the last few hours several of my games reached my turn, however the web site notifications show the last time a game came to my turn is 17 hrs ago.

EDIT: Looks like if a comment is posted in one of my games, notifications show that, however if my turn comes in one of my games, notifications do not show that.