Meeplelowda wrote: ↑15 March 2025, 00:01
All this above, plus I don't get why people don't understand that playing in turn-based mode when you plan on playing a game that you will finish in a few hours max is effectively playing with no time limit, even at the fastest turn-based setting. In fact, you could set up a fast turn-based game with the sleeping hours set for the current time so that the clock won't run at all. The bonus is you can also play for ELO (unlike friendly mode), if you care about that kind of thing. People behave as if turn-based games set a maximum number moves you may make per day, instead of a minimum.
While I agree that some people don't seem to realise that if you're playing faster than the timer, then the timer really doesn't matter, the main reason I wanted (and still want) no-timer friends-only games back is because I have a bunch of RL friends who aren't as committed to BGA as me, and sometimes life gets in the way. When they disappear for a few days, suddenly all their games have a time penalty. We don't boot each other as we're all friends, but accruing those penalties is irritating when it's in the context of a game where no one cared about the time. And while time penalties don't affect karma, there are those who will judge someone based on the time penalties shown in their profile. Admittedly, my more absent friends don't tend to play outside our friend group most of the time, but sometimes they do, and they shouldn't be judged in the same way on those games.
The other point is that the stated reason why the ability was removed was because people kept getting "stuck" in real-time untimed games where their "friends" just disappeared on them. So many of us said, make untimed games between friends turn-based only (so it doesn't impact your ability to play more RT games) - and even if someone was stuck, those games would time out after 4 hours of inactivity so I can't imagine people were stuck for very long (possibly less time than their report/request to be freed was seen by a mod, if moderator responses are anything like I see now).
Many posters said there was also an unstated reason that people could use the mechanism to boost their rating by playing with friends and then allowing a game to time out when a game looked like it would negatively affect their ELO (as I believe timing out meant ELO changes were nulled). However, this seemed so odd to me - either they're using a shill friend who they control, in which case, why wouldn't they just have the shill lose, or their friends are letting them play legitimate games but then accepting when their friend repeatedly just stops playing when they start losing. I cannot see many people agreeing to let their friend just stop playing and let the game time out whenever they are losing - I certainly wouldn't. And additionally, a player can still do this, even with kindly strangers who don't immediately boot them and/or forget to do so before the game naturally times out, but just accept multiple time penalties on their profile, which everyone points out "don't mean anything anyway", so what is the detriment of enforcing time limits? None of that decision made sense (but not the only decision I've seen by BGA admin to do so).
