Non-playing Player who has signed up for A LOT of tournaments

[DrRockenheimer]

For 3+ player tournament games, I believe the ideal would be to have highly active volunteer players available to step in to play through remaining moves for players who run out of time. Getting kicked out of a game should be automatic for running out of time in a tournament. (There also should be *slower* tournaments available if the usual time controls are too restrictive for a large enough group of players.) A tournament ban of X number of days for each such failure, escalating rapidly, would cover the big problem people.

[nik592]

There's a big difference between a non-playing player and one who has run out of time simply due to timezone differences among players (as someone who lives in Australia, and enjoys playing tournaments, but often runs low on time towards the end of games). I'm not clear why tournaments all run on a fixed time system, rather than having the option to run with a per turn time limit like standard/Arena games. So I would strongly disagree that running out of time should be an auto-boot.

[DebbieMJ]

There's a big difference between a non-playing player and one who has run out of time simply due to timezone differences among players (as someone who lives in Australia, and enjoys playing tournaments, but often runs low on time towards the end of games). I'm not clear why tournaments all run on a fixed time system, rather than having the option to run with a per turn time limit like standard/Arena games. So I would strongly disagree that running out of time should be an auto-boot.

100% agree…I’m in the UK and recently played some tournament games against people in Australia…in that instance it was me who ran out of time not them…not through anyone’s fault, purely due to the time zone difference. Running out of time should definitely not lead to auto-boot.

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I also had a game today where approx 10 mins after I played my turn, and only being about minus 30 mins on the clock the other player decided to boot me out…imo that is poor gamesmanship. The whole business of booting people out of tournaments is a gnarly subject that I doubt we’ll all ever agree on…but people ‘gaming’ the system to their own advantage is definitely my pet peeve.

[DrRockenheimer]

I believe that tournament games have a set time limit so that one can know for certain the calendar time commitment for potentially playing through many rounds.

Looking up nik592's tournament game involving an unfortunate booting, it appears to be a 4 player Ticket to Ride tournament billed as a relaxed(!) time control of 3 days per player, 15 days max. If I understand correctly, that means there is an extra 3 days of slack time and players presumably would typically be accommodating if players go over. But if the time zones and player order are not favorable, as in this case, then one player can get stuck on the clock every day while sleeping. 9 days of 8 hours sleep will burn up the entire 3 days (72 hours) of time, so that's not a realistic way to play these tournaments. (But because that's relatively rare, this is tolerated?) In this case, because there's the slack time, it would make sense that the ability to boot (or auto-boot) at least be restricted until closer to 4 days of time is taken. I don't think it should be possible for the absolute time limit to be reached and the game still be in progress. That's where you get arguments about players deliberately stalling out games when they are losing.

There might be a more flexible option of having 18 hour time windows, which could accommodate more global play in turn-based tournaments. Or maybe there's some formula allowing players to have their own inactive time, yet still guarantee a result in X days. But the bottom line is that typical tournaments in games with more than 2 players would need to be substantially longer to be playable globally without this sort of issue being a problem.

[Shivaware]

Looking up nik592's tournament game involving an unfortunate booting, it appears to be a 4 player Ticket to Ride tournament billed as a relaxed(!) time control of 3 days per player, 15 days max. If I understand correctly, that means there is an extra 3 days of slack time and players presumably would typically be accommodating if players go over.

There is never any extra slack time in a tournament, the time per person is just getting rounded down to 3.

[nik592]

Exactly, max time is just split across the players and rounded down (so 15 days divided by 4 players = 3.75, rounds down to 3 days). And yes, if someone takes a turn at 1am my time, I can easily lose 6+ hours between moves. What peeves me is where people are obviously playing turns regularly, and if I recall correctly, the game where I was booted was close to finishing, and I'd only gone over by about an hour or two by that point (and nowhere near the game time limit). That to me is poor etiquette - I realise it's totally within the rules to do so, but it's a jerk move to do, and very often seems to be done by players who are obviously losing, clearly with a hope that the random selection into the next round might choose them.

I'm still in favour of games having a maximum time for the game, but just give players time per move instead of fixed time for the game. Having a maximum time for the game would still meet the calendar commitment DrRockenheimer mentioned. I almost exclusively exhaust time on tournament games (from memory, I can't remember a non-tournament turn-based game where I've run out of time, but I admit I could be wrong), and where that happens, the game is rarely at maximum time. I think the intent is to not having a game where remaining time for players can exceed the max game time, but this can still happen easily. So why punish those who happen to get a poorly aligned timezone difference with the player ahead of them?

Besides which, the current tournament timings don't allow for games that have a lot of moves. For example, I'm playing through a Race for the Galaxy with drafting variant tournament. Two of our six players in our current game had exhausted their time before we even finished the draft, and I don't fault them, as they've been making moves regularly. The previous game I was in, we JUST completed the draft and someone chose to boot someone who had gone negative. That's super frustrating - we'd spent several days constructing our decks and then didn't get the play the game at all. If that's what someone wants to do in a tournament, why are they playing at all?? Surely the fun of actually playing games outweighs glory from a website? It's not like winning a tournament on BGA (especially one where you boot a majority of your opponents, and are just lucky to get through) means anything in the real world. But I know, there are some people like that.

[DrRockenheimer]

Oh, that makes more sense. So 15 days for 4 players is 3.75 days per player, or 90 hours. (That rounding down thing can be odd in practice, but that's another story.) I counted roughly 25 turns made per player (ignoring consecutive logged turns by the same player) before the game was stopped. Maybe 30 moves could be played in a full game with 4 players, at most? (I haven't played Ticket to Ride in a long time.) I suppose the logic is that the slowest player should be able to make 2 moves a day, and finish in 15 days. But that still falls well short of the time needed to complete a game if the same player is consistently on the clock while sleeping. 3 moves a day would do it, and I'd guess is more typical, but that pace wouldn't be possible if the time zones and such don't cooperate. From the sounds of it, I'd guess that making such tournaments 18 days might be enough to get it done on a 24 hour clock. The bottom line is always going to be that the problem of diligent play penalized by a time zone crunch can be solved with longer tournament rounds.

I don't think changing to time per move would be any better for this situation, as long as there is always someone on the clock and the number of moves per game is reasonably well known. Though maybe a hybrid approach would help address deliberate slowdowns. The clearer advantage would be for addressing the problem of the true non-playing player, who at least could be detected and kicked out early, and (in my suggestion which I have little hope of seeing in practice) replaced by a non-competitor who can quickly help play out the game.

[nik592]

Maybe 30 moves could be played in a full game with 4 players, at most? (I haven't played Ticket to Ride in a long time.)

Looking at average stats for TTR players, people make probably about 25 moves on taking cards (42 cards average taken per game, mostly 2x but allowing for an occasional locomotive), 1-2 turns on drawing destinations, and 13 on taking routes. So that's about 40, for an average game, so some will be more (and obviously some will be less).

I don't think changing to time per move would be any better for this situation, as long as there is always someone on the clock and the number of moves per game is reasonably well known.

I'm not clear why you think it wouldn't. Let's say I start with a 2 day buffer (and max thinking time). If someone takes a move at 1am, I lose 6+ hours off my clock before I'm back taking moves the next day. Let's say I take a conservative 3 moves a day needed to finish the game in 15 days (but really it's more like 5-8), and it adds an hour back to my time every time I take a move. While I would lose some during the day, this is going to be consistent with the current clock method, so those 3 hours I gain back will offset the 6+ I was sleeping. If I gain back 8 hours over the course of my waking time, I'd possibly be back at max clock before I slept each day. In either case, I'd easily finish the game with a positive clock. I don't think it would cause players to take longer with their moves than they do now, as I don't think anyone looks at their clock and goes, wow, I can take 2 days before I take my next move, so I don't think you'd hit a lot of games running over max time because of this. Mostly I think people play tournament games as quickly as they are able to. Besides which, if you're only gaining 1 hour per move, that's not much if you really are only taking one move per day (and you'd be running your clock down a long way in between).

The other point I'd make is this situation is probably only limited to tournaments that run 24 hours a day. The idea of playing hours I believe was supposed to mitigate this, but only works when all players are in similar timezones. For this reason, I only play tournaments that run 24 hours a day, as tournaments with playing hours pretty much never work for me. I assume those tournaments don't have this problem, and probably don't need adjustment. So you could still have the option of a true fixed time tournament with designated "sleeping hours" for those who want it.

[DrRockenheimer]

If you start with 48 hours (2 days) and get 1 hour per move, expecting up to 40 moves, then that's effectively 88 hours per player, which is roughly 15 days for a 4 player game. It doesn't matter much if you start with 88 hours or accumulate that time along the way. The per turn clock might push things along slightly for players who begin at an impractically slow pace, and also limit slowdowns later in a game because players can't bank more than the initial 48 hours.

The problem still comes in if you are getting consistently hit for significantly more than 6 hours in all of the playing days, just for sleep time, because each player's portion of the daily 24 hours is exactly 6 hours. In practice, even with time zone issues, most games will progress fast enough that you can get a reasonable number of turns in per day. But if you are consistently disadvantaged during sleep time, and the other players play consistently slowly, if only because of their schedules, your clock is still going to be the first that might run out.

[nik592]

OK, yeah, that's fair enough, although that does support what you were saying about needing longer times. Perhaps it would just be a case of not rounding off hours (since 3.75 days is 90 hours). Although, that does depend on how many moves you're expecting in a game - that's just TTR. I would expect there are other games with more moves (not a lot, but certainly some heavier games). But again, maybe longer total game times is the answer there too.

In any case, my original point on this thread was that I don't think going into negative time should result in an auto-boot. In fact, given that booting results in basically a random result, I think you shouldn't be allowed to boot on tournament games at all, you should just have to wait for the max time to be reached (in which case, whoever has remaining time wins, which is still a bit random, but a better solution is probably pretty difficult). If all players are playing regularly, hopefully the game will be finished in time. If someone chooses to run their clock down late in the game to try and get to max time, they're likely to place poorly.