Board Game Arena

I've seen the option to kick people due to clock expire abused way to often.
When someone is losing they will kick as soon as they can even when a player has been generally not wasting time.

I would love to see the option for all the other players to vote on when to kick due to time expiring.
That way if most people want to give that player and extra minute to come back they can.

Or only allowing the host to kick people due to expire.

This easily has the potential for abuse.

Players A, B, and C (friends) join a table with player D. Player A runs out of time, and D wants to kick them. They can't, because B and C don't allow it. Player D is now stuck in a game that may or may not progress any further, and their only way out is to take a karma penalty by quitting themselves.


Additionally, this is "fixing" a problem that shouldn't exist. "Even when a player has been generally not wasting time" still means that that player is playing slower than what they committed to at the beginning of the game. It is a site-wide rule to play games in the allotted time. Anyone can enforce that rule once a player runs out of time.

This should be the case for tournaments where there is a game expiration, then nobody gets stuck. This is where the abuse is the worst, I am in a 6 player Welcome To tournament and a player just did this despite in the chat being asked not to as we had 6 days left and only about 4 rounds left.

A group vote in tournaments would be a great addition.

Oh I agree in tournaments for sure!
I was in a Ticket to Ride tournament recently and one player who was losing kicked another as soon as they ran out of time.
What really pissed me off though was that the losing player who kicked the other one was then randomly put through to the final (2 players move on) and not me even though I was also considered a winner of the game and had highest points at the time. That player also quit the game right after kicking them out while the other three of us continued playing to game end. Super unfair!

I agree there are problems with the kick out method of enforcing the clock, but I can see that there are problems with this proposed solution too.

Can't we create other incentives for people to play within the agreed times?
At the moment there is no penalty for letting your clock run out unless someone kicks you out.

What about if your clock goes negative at anytime during the game you lose karma points? perhaps lose something like 2-5 karma points?
I think you should lose more points for a negative clock than you gain for a game without a negative clock (currently 1), so that there is a clear incentive for playing within the time consistently, while allowing for exceptional circumstances.

Additionally we could increase the karma requirement for participating in tournaments (currently 65) to 75 (which you get when signing up to BGA).

I think we're better to use automatic punishments more because they're less open to strategic abuse. Kicking a player out is also a pretty heavy penalty for a slightly negative clock, so it would be good to have a lighter penalty, (while retaining kickouts for more exceptional circumstances).

I recognise that this doesn't entirely solve the problem being raised, but it should reduce the instances where players have the option to abuse this penalty.

if you want you can vote for my suggestion here https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=81001
thanks