Bring back Turn Based "No Time Limit + Friends Only"

[jreakins]

Not giving ELO in all competive games means the system will be off
There is no trick that I am awear of
By not giving a long enouph slow time turn based game so that people don't get time penalties you are forcing us to choose between giving our friends time penalties or disguising our ELO

There is a reason Training Mode doesn't give ELO because people are learning the game

There are people that wont want to play in training games and there are people that wont want to play with people that have time penalties

[Windrisen]

10-12 players trapped each day is an issue that is not super important but that definitely matters and should be solved.

Thanks for responding, although this seems like a cut and paste from the now locked 18 pages of comments.

I pretty much always play Friends Only, Turn Based, No Time Limit games. Every time I've started up one of these games, I see the warning that emphasizes that you can not escape from a game set up like this, which is what I thought it meant to be "Trapped".

But it turns out for FO, NTL, TB games, you aren't actually trapped. At 40 days, the game stops automatically. So there is not such thing as being trapped.

Is it an inconvenience to be in a game for 40 days that, for what ever reason, a player has stopped playing, it requires no intervention from the site admins. If I sign up for a game like this, I had no idea that the game would end in 40 days, but it does happen that way. And I wouldn't ask for help if I did choose to do this - I knew the risks when I signed up, and now I understand that I won't actually be "trapped".

18 pages of users who are saying they want NTL FO TB games back, ought to override "10-12 players" who aren't actually "trapped", especially since it
"is not super important", and almost everybody speaking up thus far do not see it as a problem "that should be solved".

We are a smart community. If someone is dumb enough to complain about being "trapped", I'd make them wait the 40 days. I wouldn't request relief.

If the majority of your vocal user community wants this back, why not give your users what they are asking for? Can it really be about 10-12 people a day who simply made a mistake?

Do we have a voice? Do our preferences matter? Does our support matter? Does our encouraging others to join this platform matter?

Please reconsider your decision, and let us have what we are asking for.

Thanks!

[LoudLibrarian]

Agreed! We all see the warning, we know we could be in it for the long haul...but enough people want this feature back! I cannot commit to playing every day or even every two days and my friends as well as the people who attend our weekly library programs cannot commit to this either.

We need Normal (not training) mode to be offered with no time limit.

[_sidh_]

I support this request as well, that's the way I played almost all my games as I like to play with my friends and we sometimes have conflicting schedules.

[Nullzone]

Training mode is not a good solution as it regards the game as "real time" which means the table will be destroyed after only 4 hours of inactivity. Furthermore, the notion of being "trapped" is absurd and only agitates someone who demands their games in progress page be pristine; I can have multiple tables of the same game queued at once and the "next table" feature will skip over games that would be regarded as "trapped". If players truly aren't playing at them, then the table will self destruct at 40 days per usual. It is the most invisible of inconveniences.

At a minimum, this feature should be turned back on for "friends only" mode, because at that point people know what they're signing up for and presumably can poke their friends to play if it's really important to keep dead tables to a minimum.

[Silene]

The possibility to be trapped however only existed in a real-time-setup of the game

Sorry, not true, there are both realtime and turn based tables concerned by the problem.

It's not visible at the table whether they were set up as TB or RT. But what is certainly true is that they were all very short. Most of them just a few minutes. I think the longest from your examples was still less than a day.

I do understand that people would quit such game if it was set up as RT and they were blocked from starting another RT game and that could be considered as being "trapped" and should be addressed. But if the table was TB, there was no being "trapped" - it was just people voluntarily leaving a game in progress after a few minutes. It's their own fault when they absolutely didn't need to quit those games that weren't blocking them from anything. It wouldn't be any different if those games were set up WITH a time limit of 1move/2days, because the timer was far from over at that point and they would get a leave penalty in the same manner. Not every case where people voluntarily leave a game and take the penalty needs to be addressed. Not when there was no good reason for them to leave.

[grid]

I host a weekly game night. At least one of our regular players doesn't usually play outside of the game night. So as a matter of course we had previously started all games without a time limit. We like playing with ELO, and it's a frequent point of discussion when a game finishes.

I think if someone is highly competitive, they should be playing Arena mode, and it would make sense to have this type of restriction there.

[grid]

Another option, as a compromise, you could create a new asynchronous game option with a time limit of 1 move per week, or even 1 move per month. In theory, that should give even the slowest players the chance to play their turns in time. Make it a premium feature!

[nik592]

Now, we can read that some of you would like to play without time limit, in a game where they are able not to play during weeks, and still want to get an ELO for that kind of game. Well, as BGA, we are saying that ELO, which is a competitive measurement, does not apply to this category of games. For you, I am sorry that we did a mistake by letting this possibility in the past, but this trick is not possible anymore.

Why is a game that is played slowly less deserving of ELO than one played within the available time limits? Why does a game need to be completed in a certain timeframe to be competitive? I am genuinely asking this question as I don't understand the rationale behind this statement. If you believe it somehow allows users to game the system to increase their ELO unfairly, I'm curious how the time limit affects that as well.

[Tanjanica]

This is terrible news and has really hurt my BGA gaming group as we're based in different time zones around the world and have jobs where it's not always possible to take one turn a day. We're all find with a slow game lasting a month or so, but don't see why we shouldn't get ELO for taking out time.

No one is complaining about it in our group and this has only caused a negative impact on our ability (and reason) to play on BGA.

I really hope you'll change it back ASAP.