I mean this issue actually combines from a whole bunch of other issues. They are mostly framework related, but there are some things creators should be doing too.
#1 Players should stop creating tournaments with silly clocks. I understand the want to finish things as fast as possible, everyone would love that, but you've also got to be realistic, and it's near guaranteed the vast majority of players would vastly prefer tournament games actually finish than the game times out because the clock is silly. There's two elements to this, #1 if your tournament involves more than 2 player games you have to recognise the possibility of bad time zone mixes which necessitates the need for longer clocks, each player is actually exponentially adding to the time a game takes, it won't be linear. #2 Creators need to at least have some idea about what they're creating,like actually knowing the game would be a start. For example a few months ago there was a real-time Heat tournament set to Championship mode with 12 minute clocks. Now I realise you could also say there's some onus on players to recognise this could never work, and players mostly stayed away for that reason, but still creating a tournament that can never possibly play to the settings listed is just silly, you can't possibly play 5 player 4 race Championships in less than an hour, it's physically impossible. All these types of tournaments do is drive players away and give tournaments a bad reputation.
#2 The option for longer clocks than 30 days. There's plenty of games here that I'm sure struggle to complete if you set 5-6 player turn based inside 30 days, I mean isn't Twilight Imperium meant to be coming at some point for example. Again to use a Heat example, a Championship tournament basically doesn't work under the current settings, you can just about complete tournaments in 30 days if every player is very fast, and there's no bad time zone clashes, but realistically you can't expect your 200 player tournament to have all players who are very fast. 45 and 60 day round clocks would be appreciated and used, most people setting their clock to 30 days right now really just means they would like the tournament games to finish if possible.
#3 There has to be some kind of option to skip a player, you can't just have no such option as look I don't mind if someone goes a little over their clock, as long as they're actually playing the game. The problem arises what about the player who signs up, plays for a few days, then doesn't log in for weeks, there has to be some mechanism to kick that player. It's how the system then handles this, in 2 player games it's of course very easy, that player is out, the other player goes through, but the current situation for multi-player games where it's just random again is silly and giving tournaments a bad reputation and making players stay away. You can argue that a player being kicked mid-game changes the dynamics of a game if you allowed them to play to the finish anyway, but is that solution more unfair than the current solution? I would argue no, at least if I knew that was the rules going in, I would know where I stand and could adapt, rather than who qualifies just being down to the flip of a coin which ruins the tournament.
#4 More admin controls for tournaments. Right now tournament admins can't kick/stop players signing up who they know are going to cause problems. So the same players can keep causing tournaments problems over and over, rather than just saying this player quit my last tournament I don't want them to enter this one. The ability to remove players and an option to say something like any player I have red thumbed cannot enter would significantly reduce the occurrences of this in itself.
Some of these wouldn't even require huge coding changes, like sure stuff like how a game handles a player quitting would, but the option for 45 day, 60 day rounds you'd think could easily be implemented, and in itself would lower the opportunities for a player to get skipped.
