Board Game Arena

I'm trying to understand what the timeframe is BGA uses to determine when to consider a game "abandoned". I see tournaments where some timer must have been set too low because every single game of the tournament was an abandoned game; so I want to know what I need to be looking for before I sign up for a tournament, to know if the creator set something wrong and the tournament isn't worth my time.

Playing hours that match your time zone help although this doesn’t lock out players from other time zones, just helps prevent the time penalties for people not playing during off hours.

Another thing I would look for is if the overall tournament duration is short with many games needing to be played and short estimated durations of games - while this can still work, it’s tougher with games with turn sequences (as opposed to simultaneously playing turns) when the game has players from very different time zones following one another…. You can see how quickly in this situation even despite every player’s best intention to play if it always pops up that their turn is the middle of the night then there will be another long hour delay for them to complete their turn as they need to wake up so this then impacts the next player and the next. Related note I wish tournament player grouping was smarter to put a heavy preference on similar time zones.

Hmm... I don't understand why the actual time isn't just made clear and transparent...

I think you are asking about this (attached). When you go to register for a tournament you can see the time set for the completion of the match. In this case it is 7 days. The way BGA allocates time per player is

max time for game / max number players in a match.

So in this case it is 7 days/ 4 players, which comes to 42 hours each with no sleeping hours.

A few days ago I put a BGA suggestion in asking to change this formula for tournaments of simultaneously played games, as clocks run at the same time and it makes it really easy for someone to run out of their individually allocated time, but there still be plenty of time to complete the game. If interested you can find my suggestion here: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=41933