I've seen a lot of complaints on the forum about situations when one of the players always makes their move in a turn-based game an hour or two after the person just after them went to sleep. It makes it very hard to the player who looses 6-8 hours of their clock everyday due to sleep to stay on positive time in a game they would have easily completed with a positive time if just the turn order would be different and makes it easy for people who are loosing to claim more elo or tournament score than they deserve by skipping the overtime person in the last turn, even if they are just an hour or two overtime on a 99% completed game.
In most cases it affects negatively majority of players at a table where someone's turn has been skipped and it's very hard to think of a better system to award elo or (especially!) tournament score. But I do believe the number of such unpleasant situations could be greatly reduced if the turn order would be only partially random and some of it would be determined by the time zone the players live in.
I've seen there was already a suggestion in bug report and a forum topic about it, but they didn't seem to get much attention and I kinda don't understand why.
https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... time+zones
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=67596
Now, I know it is possible and maybe even easy to make such a system unfair to some people. For example, if you randomly determine the first player, then go by the time zones east to west, in any game that's very popular in Europe and not very popular in the other parts of the world, a person from Greenland would be much more likely to be the last player than for example the 2nd player.
But there's a way to make it fair: first you determine a general "circle" of the players, that is: in each timezone, if there are multiple players from this timezone, randomly determine which of them is "first", then list the players according to the order of timezones east to west, in each timezone by that random order. And then randomly pick a player who will go first, then follow the circle.
So, for example, let's say we have 5-player game, 1 Japanese player, two players from Europe and two players from USA (let's assume for simplicity the USA players and the Europe players are from the same timezone). We randomly decide that player A from Europe is before player B from Europe and the same for USA. So the circle goes: Japanese player -> European player A -> European player B -> USA player A -> USA player B -> Japanese player -> European player A -> ... and so on. Then we randomly pick one of the players to go first.
Note two things:
1. Being "first" in your timezone may very well mean you will be last in the actual turn order. However, the person from the same timezone will still have their turn just after you.
2. No matter where you are from, your chances of being 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th.... player is always the same. In my example, the Japanese player has 1/5 chance to go first (because there's 1/5th chance they will be randomly picked as the 1st player), 1/5 chance to go second (because the USA player B has 1/5 chance to be picked as 1st player), 1/5 chance to go third (because the USA player A has 1/5 chance to be picked as 1st player) and so on.
So, I think this way is quite fair for most of the games, as your chances of going 1st/2nd/3rd/4th... are exactly the same as if it was completely random and the non-random thing is who is just before and just after you. I guess in some games where you have high interaction but only or mostly with neighbors, like 7 Wonders Architects, it might be unfair if, for example, the majority of the strongest player in a tournament would be from the same timezone, which would put people from the timezones just before and just after that one at a disadvantage of being more likely to be a neighbor to a strong player, but this seems a very niche kind of situation.
I know it is very far from being perfect system and some unpleasant situation would still happen, for example in 3-player game with two people from central Europe and one from east Asia, the Asian person will still be very likely to loose a lot of clock time during their sleeping hours, but in many situations I believe it would be a huge improvement at a very low cost: BGA already uses players' timezones to display hours on site, so it seems it wouldn't require as much programming to implement it as other ideas I've seen in bug report center.
There is also the issue that a group of friends from different countries gathering to play the same game many times will always have the same neighbours, which matters for some games and may be bored by it, but perhaps it could be implemented as an option that could be turned off?
What do you think?
In most cases it affects negatively majority of players at a table where someone's turn has been skipped and it's very hard to think of a better system to award elo or (especially!) tournament score. But I do believe the number of such unpleasant situations could be greatly reduced if the turn order would be only partially random and some of it would be determined by the time zone the players live in.
I've seen there was already a suggestion in bug report and a forum topic about it, but they didn't seem to get much attention and I kinda don't understand why.
https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... time+zones
https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=67596
Now, I know it is possible and maybe even easy to make such a system unfair to some people. For example, if you randomly determine the first player, then go by the time zones east to west, in any game that's very popular in Europe and not very popular in the other parts of the world, a person from Greenland would be much more likely to be the last player than for example the 2nd player.
But there's a way to make it fair: first you determine a general "circle" of the players, that is: in each timezone, if there are multiple players from this timezone, randomly determine which of them is "first", then list the players according to the order of timezones east to west, in each timezone by that random order. And then randomly pick a player who will go first, then follow the circle.
So, for example, let's say we have 5-player game, 1 Japanese player, two players from Europe and two players from USA (let's assume for simplicity the USA players and the Europe players are from the same timezone). We randomly decide that player A from Europe is before player B from Europe and the same for USA. So the circle goes: Japanese player -> European player A -> European player B -> USA player A -> USA player B -> Japanese player -> European player A -> ... and so on. Then we randomly pick one of the players to go first.
Note two things:
1. Being "first" in your timezone may very well mean you will be last in the actual turn order. However, the person from the same timezone will still have their turn just after you.
2. No matter where you are from, your chances of being 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th.... player is always the same. In my example, the Japanese player has 1/5 chance to go first (because there's 1/5th chance they will be randomly picked as the 1st player), 1/5 chance to go second (because the USA player B has 1/5 chance to be picked as 1st player), 1/5 chance to go third (because the USA player A has 1/5 chance to be picked as 1st player) and so on.
So, I think this way is quite fair for most of the games, as your chances of going 1st/2nd/3rd/4th... are exactly the same as if it was completely random and the non-random thing is who is just before and just after you. I guess in some games where you have high interaction but only or mostly with neighbors, like 7 Wonders Architects, it might be unfair if, for example, the majority of the strongest player in a tournament would be from the same timezone, which would put people from the timezones just before and just after that one at a disadvantage of being more likely to be a neighbor to a strong player, but this seems a very niche kind of situation.
I know it is very far from being perfect system and some unpleasant situation would still happen, for example in 3-player game with two people from central Europe and one from east Asia, the Asian person will still be very likely to loose a lot of clock time during their sleeping hours, but in many situations I believe it would be a huge improvement at a very low cost: BGA already uses players' timezones to display hours on site, so it seems it wouldn't require as much programming to implement it as other ideas I've seen in bug report center.
There is also the issue that a group of friends from different countries gathering to play the same game many times will always have the same neighbours, which matters for some games and may be bored by it, but perhaps it could be implemented as an option that could be turned off?
What do you think?
