Board Game Arena

Meeplelowda wrote: ↑01 September 2025, 13:28 Some games don't even have scores. So how would you decide who is in the "lead"? For other games, a person could have the most points, but no way to score more and no way to stop the others from passing them were the game to play to completion. That person would have an incentive to stall the game until the round reaches the maximum time, the same as a person losing under the current system but with more time on their clock has an incentive to stall the game until the round reaches the maximum time.

So the current system is just as faulty but rewards players who are behind instead of ahead (as the alternative above would).

Meeplelowda wrote: ↑01 September 2025, 13:28 And if your answer is just to make the devs decide on a game-by-game basis how to assign a winner in an incomplete game that their code is not designed to resolve, well they may have something to say about that. The current system is flawed, but at least it is uniformly applied across all games.

As the settings are already customisable in games, it doesn't seem like a huge undertaking to have a setting for how games running out of time are decided (ie. Toggle 'when games run out of time, decide result by points / time remaining).

There is no merit to a rule being uniformly applied across so many games which have such diverse scoring systems.

Rosie Napper wrote: ↑01 September 2025, 12:50 Also, as tournaments have a 'maximum game length', thinking time resting would not make the game go on indefinitely as you suggest. The thinking time could be the same as a normal (non tournament) game but the game still ends if the total game length is reached. That's what happens now - the game ends due to the limit being reached rather than the individual players' remaining thinking time.

This is basically a no booting tournament. Games there go to the maximum, no one is allowed to boot their opponents. That's a relatively new setting though, and there may not be heaps of tournaments using it yet.

Rosie Napper wrote: ↑01 September 2025, 17:27 As the settings are already customisable in games, it doesn't seem like a huge undertaking to have a setting for how games running out of time are decided (ie. Toggle 'when games run out of time, decide result by points / time remaining).

It's still work that has to be done, for fairly minimal benefit. Depending on how the tournament framework is coded, it could be a non-trivial amount of work. Besides which, what happens in games where everyone is tied on low scores (or zero) because the game hasn't reached the part where "scoring" happens? Now we need a way to break those ties. And while you may say that games without points shouldn't be set to that setting, that depends on tournament creators (and not all of them make good choices for their tournament settings).

Tournaments are a complicated system that unfortunately doesn't work ideally in all places. With that knowledge, you can try to choose tournaments that are less likely to lead to you running out of time and opening yourself to being booted. And in the meantime, feel free to suggest/upvote/champion other ideas for changes that may improve things, but understand that limited time and dev resources mean that of the MANY suggestions and bugs reported, not all of them are going to get fixed, and/or it may take some time for that to happen.

Meeplelowda wrote: ↑01 September 2025, 12:31

Rosie Napper wrote: ↑01 September 2025, 12:05 The current system actually allows someone who's losing (but who has time remaining) to get the win by getting the game go over.

That is correct. If you can think of a better way to resolve this that works within the current structure of tournaments, feel free to propose it in the bugs/suggestions database.

If your proposal is simply to have open ended tournament timelines that go on indefinitely until a winner is determined for each game, you can propose that as well.

Already proposed: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=29010

I don't like that idea, for the reason mentioned by Meeplelowda. I especially don't like the idea of giving tournament creators the option of adding time each turn or not, because players will find that confusing.

A better idea is to allow for longer-duration matches; sometimes 30 days is just not enough. See https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=55235 and https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=153554

Mathew5000 wrote: ↑01 September 2025, 18:17 A better idea is to allow for longer-duration matches; sometimes 30 days is just not enough. See https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=55235 and https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=153554

Agreed -this is a better solution.

Just to be clear; I haven't suggested once removing time limits completely (that was Meeplelowda's statement of "if your proposal is...")

Rosie Napper wrote: ↑01 September 2025, 23:02 Just to be clear; I haven't suggested once removing time limits completely (that was Meeplelowda's statement of "if your proposal is...")

Adding more time back to the clock didn't seem to serve a purpose if the round length was going to remain fixed. I was allowing for the possibility that I didn't understand what you want.

But that is because I know there is an option now that prevents people from being expelled from the game for running out of time. If one doesn't know about that option, then I can see how it would make sense to add time to the clock to prevent someone from being expelled.

Adding my two cents to this discussion. I know this is a highly-requested feature and this has all been said before.

The problem is that for many games, particularly games with 4+players, it is very difficult to finish games even with the absolute slowest settings. 30 days, for a 4-player game, is generally not enough. Skull King and Terra Mystica are two games I love that are quite frustrating to run tournaments for, since they each have over 50 active turns per player. Feels like at least a third of the games I run in these tournaments fail to finish on time, despite being as slow as the website allows.

Right now, tournaments are tuned to work for short games. And on that front the system works well. Games like Can't Stop have thriving communities of hundreds of tournament players, sometimes multiple brackets firing every day. But for a game that has more than 40 turns/player (the majority of the Popular Top 100 list), good luck even trying! The only tournament players you'll typically get for longer games are people who are online 24/7, because having a life is not conducive to finishing a Terra Mystica game in under 7 days. The "Can't be skipped" option has done wonders for this though. Now I can safely budget 30 days of my time towards a long game, knowing that *if* all the timing works out and every person takes at least 2 turns per day, we can probably make it. Still, a solid portion of games will not end on time, and the more relaxed clock does not do any favors for that aspect.

The user experience problem with tournaments right now (for long games) is that it adds palpable stress to your life knowing that every second you spend not online, you are inching closer to nullifying the result. Indeed, the moment your clock falls below 00:00 the game is out of your hands, and a losing player with more time than you can choose simply not to play. (This is the same issue no matter the "skipped" setting). Why would you subject yourself to that anxiety compared to a casual turn-based game? It feels bad. Only a small portion of people can sign up for tournaments in good conscience because of this.

Could we please have a single time-control that is longer than 30 days? Maybe it could be restricted to just games in the "long duration" category, or for tournaments with 4+ players, or just high elo, or just multiplayer elimination mode, if there are concerns about tournaments lasting for too long. There's plenty of players on BGA that log in every day to make their turn-based moves, but aren't comfortable signing up for the stress of attempting to finish a heavy game with 7 days of turn clock. A longer time control could revitalize the tournament scene for all sorts of titles on BGA. I understand the hesitancy to have games drag on forever and lose players by the wayside, but 30 days as the longest option is simply too short for most players and most games.