Lobotnik wrote: ↑03 February 2024, 07:52
Then 1 turn before I was about to win, someone quit because I took too long the day before.
What are people's thoughts on this?
I has come up repeatedly. You were over your time when they expelled you (the terminology is important). They cannot expel you if you are in your time, regardless of how much or how long you were over time earlier in the game - so at the moment they expelled you this was a completely legal move.
This differs between two player games and multi-player games (by your description yours was a multiplayer game):
In a two player game 'clocking' the opponent is a perfectly valid way to win - it is fine to play for it, it is as valid as any other victory, it doesn't matter if you are a million points ahead if you go over you time your presented your opponent a valid move to win - you have no cause for complaint.
Its still a legal move in multi-player games and the person who does it has not done anything wrong but no-one likes the way the system works. If a player is expelled the other players draw for first place and the expelled player comes last. This is of modest importance for the game itself, but in terms of tournament standings, Elo ratings, Arena scores, etc. it is always in the interest of the person in last place to expel somebody who is over their time - because it improves their standing. That is not an issue for the expelled player (you lost, you should come last, works fine). The problem is for all of the people who neither expel (so are not in last place) nor are expelled (so have not played badly). And it is the impact it has on those players which cause the problem - unfortunately no-one has been able to come up with a system that would work better.
So, in the case you describe you don't have any reason to complain. You screwed up and were punished for it (ie you made a bad move and came last). You would have had a cause for complaint if you were in first place and somebody expelled the player in second and thus moved themselves from last to drawing with you in first. That happens a lot, and its problem, and if there was an easy way to fix it that would be worth pressing BGA.
P.S. One partial fix that has been suggested but would not be straighforward to implement would be for people to be auto-expelled if they go over time, which would remove any ambiguity. Unfortunately it would almost certainly require an option to be added to disable it for non-Arena, non-tournament games, for players playing more casual turn based games.
