Live play can be awful due to perverse time control design

[Hefesto1337]

I have faced players that use all their time in the clock at every action, so every action they take is almost 1 minute. After that the clock recharges quite fully.

In those scenarios sometimes I have 30 minutes for the whole game (and I'm a bit of a slow player myself) and they have spent 60 minutes which is really tilting to be honest, in my opinion it just ruins the game experience and feels UNFAIR.

In chess for example that time control design would be just atrocious. Why 1 player has double the time to think during the game than the other player? It's just ridiculous.

I really like playing real time because turn-based TfM can be a bit tricky because you lose track of the game but I think I'm gonna switch to only turn play.

[Nekojin]

The amount of time given for turns depends on the time limits set up by the host. If you don't like the average turn time (which is what most games play on), you can pick the Fast turn time option if you're the host... which would require you to get a membership.

Without the membership, though, you can still influence or even choose the turn speed by setting game preferences (the gear mark beside the game icon)... at the cost of taking longer, sometimes much longer, to get a game.

[ErikLevin]

OP is premium and is playing on fast speed.

However, see:
- https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=36608
- https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=35735

[Yahyra]

I like to think and play optimally, but if BGA were to implement an even faster version (with less clock time) I would be fine with that. Honestly finding people you like playing with is best (although hard). I do try to chat and be friendly; some folks do respond and we play repeat games. Dare we dream of people being civil and getting along.

[BringerOfRedDawn]

Your analogy is flawed.

What you are implying - we're playing chess and my starting timer is 30 minutes but my opponent got 60 minutes - unfair!

What it actually is - we're playing chess and both got 60 minutes, the opponent wins but I have 30 minutes left, whereas opponent used 59.5 minutes of their time. OK, no extra points for left-over time, no unfairness here.

AFAIK the TFM devs don't control the timers so if anything this is feedback to top-level BGA to add ever faster game modes.

[Hefesto1337]

Your analogy is flawed.

What you are implying - we're playing chess and my starting timer is 30 minutes but my opponent got 60 minutes - unfair!

What it actually is - we're playing chess and both got 60 minutes, the opponent wins but I have 30 minutes left, whereas opponent used 59.5 minutes of their time. OK, no extra points for left-over time, no unfairness here.

AFAIK the TFM devs don't control the timers so if anything this is feedback to top-level BGA to add ever faster game modes.

in chess if you spend 2 minutes in the first 20 moves you still have 58 minutes on your clock, if you spend 30 minutes then you have 30 minutes on your clock, so the first player has 28 minutes more on his clock.

in TfM if you spend 2 minutes in the first 20 moves you have 1:45 minutes on your clock, and if you spend 30 minutes on the first 20 moves you have 1:45 on your clock, the same amount of time.

i hope you can see the difference.

i have asked players why they take and insanely high amount of time to play and they openly say that they do other stuff while playing the game, which i find incredibly disrespectful.

of course we can take the stance that you can do as you please with your given time, in which case real live games could go 3 hours which is obnoxious.

so we get the last option which is avoiding real time altogether which is a bit sad because it's the best format, but 2 hour games are tedious.