longer max tournament time

[snakeixirr]

(NOTE) i posted this before, but i dont think it posted properly. sorry if i am posting this twice.

so. recently i have been enjoying the game terra mystica and thought to create a tournament, and join some other tournaments. however, 6 days is simply not enough time for a tournament of terra, players make so many moves and i found that i timed out in all 3 of my tournaments. i am not a slow player, i can comofrtably make 4 moves a day, but with NZ time zones i was often having people move while i was sleeping. the main idea, is that we have a tournament time option of 12 days per player, that way longer games ca have tournaments for them without players staying up all night. for context, i have never timed out on another turn based game (includint fast timer settings), and my time is almost always under 10 days. this would be a huge improovement, as currently tournaments are unplayable for me, and a lot of other players avoid the longer games tournaments. this has been discussed in the terra mystica discord, and a lot of other players feel the same as me.

[FSKFSK]

This is a frequent request and I'm surprised it hasn't been implemented yet: Give an options for tournaments to use a Fisher Clock system instead of a fixed clock system.

In the Fisher Clock system, it would be something like +8 hours per move taken with a maximum time bank of 1-2 days. That would keep the tournament moving but allow for people to sleep without timing out.

It's normal for tournaments to drag on forever anyway, because there's always one slow table or someone who times out and then the game hangs. I don't see it as ruining the tournament system if variable-length games are allowed.

The fixed clock system doesn't work for games where people take lots of small moves, like worker placement games. The fixed clock system only really works for games that have a fixed duration and/or where everyone moves simultaneously, like 7 Wonders.

[Chuck Henebry]

I'm in a tournament right now, Golden Trophy Age Of Stone Age, where at the end of the first round only 1 out of 24 games ended with an actual score. Three of the games were abandoned due to a player dropping out, but the remaining 20 ended simply because the maximum time was reached.

I've never set up a tournament, but it's really clear from this result that BGA needs to supply tools to tournament administrators enabling them to create the tournament with a realistic time limit. The most important would be a statistic tracking the number of times a given game hands control to a new player. This isn't just player turns: games like Stone Age hand off control to other players to make decisions when a player buys certain cards. So, for example, a stat that says 50% of completed Stone Age games hand off control 100 times or fewer, while 70% hand off control 120 times or fewer, and 95% hand off control 137 times or fewer. These figures could then be combined with a statistic that gives the average response time for players during asynchronous tournament games to give a crucial estimate: 50% of players will finish all their moves in 3 days; 70% in 5 days; 95% in 5 days. Armed with this information, tournament administrators could make smarter choices about how to balance the fun of a quicker tournament with the fun of actually finishing games during that tournament.

Statistics like these might also help people make smarter choices about which tournaments to sign up for. When people complain here on the forum about tournament games that ran out of time, others advise them to be more careful to check the maximum time when they sign up. But how are players supposed to know what's a reasonable time? After getting burned by a Viticulture tournament with maximum 2-day thinking time, I figured the Stone Age tournament with three days thinking time would be a cinch. Turns out there's a LOT more player handoffs in Stone Age than Viticulture. Knowing that 50% of Stone Age players are expected to finish in under 4 days, while only 30% finish in under 3 days, I'd know to stay away from a 3-day max, since what are the chances that all four of the players at the table will be in that 30%?

[FSKFSK]

Stone Age probably is one of the worst games for the current tournament system. A game of Stone Age lasts maybe 10 rounds, but each player gets around 4-5 turns per round. That's 40-50 moves per player for the entire game. If each of you lives in a different timezone, that's probably max 1 or 2 moves per player per day. There's no way the game could be finished in 30 days. (I see that tournament was configured for 15 days.)

They really need to add a Fischer clock system for tournaments. I.e., you get +8/12/24 hours per move taken with a maximum bank of 1-2 days. End the idea of fixed rounds for tournaments, and the game ends when it ends. (And automatically end the game when someone runs out of time.)

In the meantime, you need to make sure that the time allowance for a tournament is enough before joining. I've decided that single-elimination and multiplayer elimination tournaments are best, because the slow/absent players get knocked out in the first round or two.

I'm playing in a Swiss tournament where half the games are timeouts. It's just silly.

[dgjxqz]

I have a more radical suggestion to fix this. https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=59570