Speed games often are expected to be 2 minutes or less, the speed game community at least in my experience, dislike games that even have five minute turns. As a result, many speed games are completed extremely quickly, within a few minutes the outcome is determined. However, because of the lull in activity on the site, we have to wait very long for a speed game to start. Sometimes I wait for an hour with no one joining. Even if I have many games available with varied settings.
Because of this, I often discover that a game started and I've already missed all of my turns.
There should be something to safeguard from this happening, such as a delayed start to the first turn. Maybe 10 minutes for both players to click, "Ready," before the actual game starts. If someone no-shows to the game, they can still lose points for no-showing, but they will have the opportunity to play the game at least if they get busy for a minute or two and then miss the crucial first turn, which is especially damaging on maps with autodeploy, missing turns is a game-ender. This discourages people from playing when they encounter this problem and have this experience.
Also, this will prevent people from joining multiple games at once to bog down players with multiple speed games at a time. When I set up ten games or fifteen games, people often wait until someone else joins one of my games to join into a game. This bogs me down with two games or three games (especially if someone joins multiple of my games at once), meaning I can't play both games at once. A ready up timer for the first turn would totally fix this issue. Also, most games will still start right away, all the two players would need to do is click, "Ready." Ready up is a big thing in many turn based games.
Also, if someone clicks, "Ready," and then they get busy and have to answer the door, or go to the bathroom, and the other player hasn't readied up yet, they should be able to simply checkbox or uncheck the ready up feature, so they can handle their other business quickly and then ready up again when they are ready (within the ten minutes or x amount of minutes timer). This will allow you to ensure both players are ready before the game starts...
This will not only promote more people to buy and retain premium, for the benefit of speed games, but will also encourage more current players to play speed games, without risk of this common issue occurring that cost them score, waste time waiting for games/playing games that they miss turns on, and worry people will join their games in swaths... Being able to finish the other game I'm in that only takes a few minutes to finish will allow me to keep other games available for others to join, without worrying that I'll get "buried."
This will also save me time setting up and closing games. For example I set up fifteen speed games and then someone joins, now I need to close all the other fourteen games because I'm worried I'll get, "buried," by keeping the other games open and then someone joins, while I'm playing another game. I can't manage two or three at once if the turn timers are so short, as the community expects. The ready up feature will solve this problem, instead of wasting all that time closing and especially having to remake all the games again when I'm ready to play, I can simply keep the games open! Allowing more activity and people to play and games available on the site...
