Playing hours

[womanhavingfun]

Please explain playing hours and how they affect turn-based play.
Also, what time zone does it reference and is it locked to 12 hour intervals?
Lastly, please explain how much time you have when you are on say a 24 moves per day game.
Thank you

[ohtarelenion]

If a game is set up with playing hours, timers are only active (run down) during playing hours.
The playing hours are displayed for you in the time-zone you set in your profile, and they are always set to 12h intervals.
In a 24 moves per day game, you get a 3h time bank to start with, and every time you make a move, 1h will be added to your time up to the 3h maximum.

[womanhavingfun]

Thank you, so could I assume that I need to put in my city since there are 4 time zones in USA? I don't see a place to add in my time zone in profile.

[Shivaware]

BGA is extracting your timezone automatically from your browser, so it should already be correct, assuming your system is configured properly. You should be able to look at the log messages for a running game to see if the reported times look correct.

When you create a game using the "Play Now" link at the top of the page (using Simple Game, Turn-Based, and Manual for the dropdown menus), you can see how much time you will receive for each speed. For a 24 turns per day game, the correct value is "+30:00 per turn (maximum 12h00)" meaning you start with 12 hours and half an hour is added each turn.

[Mathew5000]

The playing hours are displayed for you in the time-zone you set in your profile

That's not correct. I think that internally, the BGA server stores the playing hours according to the current time in Paris, and there is some code that attempts to tell your browser how to convert that to your local time. For example, here is a tournament I created with playing hours: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=334556 If you look at the HTML, the relevant part seems to be this:

Code: Select all

<div class="row-data row-data-large clearfix tournaments-option tournaments-option--game">
    <div class="row-label">Horaires de jeu</div>
    <div class="row-value"><span id="gameoption_206">23:00 &rarr; 11:00</span> </div>
</div>

I created the tournament with playing hours from 14:00 to 02:00 PDT but the HTML encodes it as 23:00 to 11:00, presumably corresponding to CEST.

I suppose there's something in the CSS which tells your browser how to convert time ranges identified as gameoption_206 ?

It will be confusing for players if their device is set to a different time. Maybe they are in a different time zone from when they register for the tournament, than they will be in when the tournament begins. Or maybe they just set their laptop incorrectly. I think that what's displayed to you is derived from the current time as displayed by your device, and not the time zone your device is set to. You can verify this as follows:

1. look at a BGA page with information on a game or tournament that has playing hours set. Take a screenshot.

2. Log out of BGA and exit your browser.

3. Change the time on your device by a few hours, but not your time zone.

4. Relaunch your browser.

5. Clear your browser cache (and maybe also clear your BGA cookie? But I'm not sure whether that's necessary).

6. Re-log into BGA and look at the same page as before, and check whether the playing hours are showing something different than before.

What I don't understand is, what happens when you are in a time zone like India, Newfoundland, or Central Australia, where the number of hours offset from UTC is not an integer. The playing hours are still displayed to you as integer hours, but that won't be correct. I think this is a bug, but as far as I know it has not been reported?

(Also, I believe you get unexpected behaviour when Paris switches from daylight time to standard time on a day when your own time zone does not switch, and vice versa.)

Some relevant bug reports/suggestions:
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=27142
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=33960
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=29609
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=41618
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=57379
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=59394
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=130167

I've meant to experiment further about this but I always end up getting very confused!