Clearing lines needs to send garbage like in Tetrinet. The games go on because gravity isn't particularly fast, and the only way to lose is to get battered by items, or to screw up big time, which many of the good players aren't likely to do.
It's a lovely game you've developed, however, the animations makes the game too slow. I know I'm not the only one who can't perform at maximum speed because of the animations. Some of the best blockwar players I know quit when this new version was released (at blip.se), they couldn't stand the slow animations. My suggestion is that all animations are removed in fast blocky. It's kind of hard to rotate the pieces when you're building high, if you get the red piece building high you're basically dead, in the old blockwar version you could rotate them when playing high without dying like a noob. I'd like to see a similar solution, I can't really describe how it worked, I hope you understand or look into it anyway. The pattern special at certusgames is ugly and weak, make it cooler! Btw, the table creation dialog could be prettier.
Translation into MVC-ese: Have the game model run without "animation", and changes to the state take effect immediately. Then have the view add animations.
Thanks for all of you comments! They are appreciated. We will take them into consideration as we evolve blockwar further. We are able to do a lot of the things that you request, however we need to strike a balance between the casual users and the "pro" users. I am not sure how that will work out exactly, but the option for creating configurable tables - even though the dialog isn't the most beautiful - should allow us to create a configuration that really good players will like.
By no means have any of the requests here geared towards "pro" tetris players. They have all been balanced requests. Also i think the games are too long. It took me almost 10 minutes to get into a game. If i had not wanted to see for myself what we were talking about here i would have left because of the long wait. I fear you will lose alot of people because they do not share my love of the game and it is not worth a 10 minute wait to play.
Or do what TetriNET did, which was to make a second mode for people who wanted faster gameplay and less dependence on items.
