Sorry, I don't speak spanish. I hope that you can understand english, or an online translator does a good job of translating this to spanish (I tried with german, and it was, well, meh).
The game timer is always an annoyance. But there is no way to make it flawless!
Assume that there were a swiss system tournament, but no timer. You MUST give a timeframe for swiss system, otherwise, the tournament lasts forever (been there as organizer, done that, tore my t-shirt in frustration). And how to decide a game result when the time runs out? Disqualify both? Throw a dice? No. You can only look at the points. Consequence: if a cheater leads, he simply delays the game until time runs out, and has won. That's a no go.
Most turn-based swiss tournaments on BGA use the 5 day timeframe, which gives 60 hours to both players. And then there's the night, and then there are different biorhythms. And players, that seem to be online around the clock. I played against Neverhoodoff 12 days ago, twice. In one game, he always played early in the morning (around 5), and had the nights on his clock. I won, we were both in time. In the other game, he always played shortly after midnight, when I slept. And I had holiday and didn't rise early. When the round ended, I lost because I was over time, but he was also leading. Sh*t happens, I thought.
It might be his strategy to force opponents into timeout. Maybe he needs that, his ELO is not so stellar. Or not. You can't rule out the possibility that these were just the moments where he found time to play.
In any case, it's not sportsmanlike in these circumstances to cancel a game because of timeout. I think that cancelling should be disabled in tournaments. But that won't help. As soon as you are out of time, your opponent can let you starve. He just needs to wait. A 5 day timeframe has 120 hours. Both players get 60. If you have exhausted your time, you used up more than half of that time. There is no way that your opponent can go out of time, too. After 120 hours, the game ends and you lose because you were over time, no matter how many points you had.
Of course, starving the opponent is bad sport, too. But how to decide if a wait is intentional starving, or just Real Life that demanded all attention? It's impossible. BGA is a platform for having fun. So, if you feel cheated, you might be right. Play rhythm and cancelling the game is definitely a hint to that. But do you want to install a tracking system? Give somebody a "cheater" tag because they forced you to go overtime and then let you starve? This CAN be intentional. But how to prove it? Wrongly accusing someone creates even more anger. And of course, the best cheaters are also best in pretending that they are the innocent victim. And how to act on players that get too many of those tags? Block them from joining tournaments? Ban them from BGA? What about intentional wrong accusations to mob somebody out of BGA? I wouldn't want to open that Pandora's box.
I can understand your frustration. But - from one player to another - I don't see a good way to solve this. If you feel like it, you can give Neverhoodoff a red thumb on his profile page, but you shouldn't do this after one incident. This will prevent him from entering games that you created (not in tournaments). And if he collects enough of them, I think the platform will give him some sanctions.
Robo
