limit concurrent number of games

[whelmking]

Why is there no limit on the concurrent number of turn based games? I'm currently playing a game in a tournament with someone playing 194 concurrent games, with almost 10% over time violations in their last 400ish games. I'm all for playing multiple games at once and don't want to cramp anyone's chose play style, but there has to be a reasonable absolute limit (max number of concurrent games) and some kind of mathematical restriction when someone has so many over time games. As it is, neither of these seem to be in place which is crazy. At the very least, this should be setting to restrict playing other people who are playing over X games, with X designated by each player.

[tbhp]

I don't think the number of games is the problem. If someone is the type of person who goes out of time, they will go out of time regardless of whether they are playing 100, 10, or 1 game.

What causes someone to go out of time frequently is not being overwhelmed, it's carelessness. Sure, if it happens once in a while, there may be other reasons, but if it's a pattern, it tells you the person just doesn't care much about the games they are playing.

The idea to limit the number of games would create a sort of stigma against people who play a lot of games, when unless proven otherwise, those people aren't doing anything wrong. They may or may not be more or less likely to run out of time than someone who only has a couple of games going.

[lefalaf]

Early on, I thought there was a correlation, but I've seen profiles with issues, and also non-issues, at multiple volumes, from a couple games up to maybe the 200's give or take. Highest I've seen was 300, but I forget if they were good or bad.

If most of the the games are slow speed with multiple players that could make the burden more manageable as turns don't come around as often. I still don't know how the (good) heavy volume players do it, but some do.

What they probably could use are some restrictions for the problem players, after a certain number of time issues in a period of time and/or a certain reputation level, until they clean up their reputation. Something like no new tables for regular or arena, no new tournaments (but exception for in progress to not spoil the tournament), unsure about non-started, but registered tournaments, maybe unregister them.

[tbhp]

Early on, I thought there was a correlation, but I've seen profiles with issues, and also non-issues, at multiple volumes, from a couple games up to maybe the 200's give or take. Highest I've seen was 300, but I forget if they were good or bad.

Pretty much. If anything, I've had more problems with people who only had like a couple of games going, so I should want to create a stigma against people who are only playing one or two games, haha. But I don't think it's right to judge people without knowing.

Also, think of it this way: if someone is invested in the competitive scene of a game and wants to play many tournaments for this game, and there are a lot of round robin tournaments happening at the same time, it's natural that the amount of games they are in is going to add up. Or, they are invested in many games at the same time, making the games add up even more.

So, there's many explanations for a person having lots of games that aren't just "this person is starting more games than they really need to and they don't realize the amount is crazy". I think people have a tendency to see so many games and assume it's crazy, without realizing that in fact, when a person has many interests, the numbers can creep up very naturally.

[SquireKeladry]

There are a few limits already but they're not significant for people who have built up a good record in the past. I guess BGA thinks that red thumbs are sufficient for everything else.

The limits are:
1) you can't start a new turn based game if you're overtime in one of your current turn based games, and
2) new BGA accounts are limited in how many turn-based games they can have running concurrently. The limit goes up each time you successfully complete a game.

I also know that Premium eliminates the limit in point 2. I don't think Premium affects point 1 but I couldn't confirm that. I'm also not sure if these limits are applied to tournaments too or just to regular/arena games.

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On an related note, tournament games tend to be worse for time violations than regular games. They use different system for the timer and the odd person out timezone wise can often end up getting shafted by this. Even if that person is playing their moves just as frequently as when they're playing a regular (ie. non tournament) games.

[tbhp]

Yeah, well, karma already does the job. If a person plays many games and ends up running out of time because of those, it will show in their karma (and if it doesn't, then the issue would be with how karma is designed).

So, we don't need to point fingers at people for their gaming habits and arbitrarily judge those when we already have karma that tells us the thing we want to know.