Timeouts in tournaments

You cannot stall legally. Besides, you can already do this regardless.

Sure I can. I ask my prey if he is okay if I hunt before declaring the action. Take meaningless actions that have no impact on the game.

Pause the game and bluff I have a DI in my hand to try and change your plans for the rest of the turn. Same with intercept.

All legal actions that can slow down a game since they are actions/strategy in the game.

That's not stalling, that's being a jerk.

Which is already being done a lot. As I quite elaborated on in my above post. Stalling is, by its very nature, illegal. The problem is that you can just be an ass and make everything take three times as long by initiating meaningless tabletalk. Which is legal.

t.p wrote:

What about changing .5 VP for surviving to time limit, to -.25 VP penalty? I’ve noticed that „Grab 2 VP, stall the game, get GW“ was quite often the strategy on last EC. This way one will have to act more instead of wait in order to win the game.

As has been pointed out several times, a player cannot legally stall.

If the players at those tables weren't calling a judge to point out slow play and they later complain, then they're just bad players.

If the judges in the EC were actively allowing this, then they're bad judges.

Solution: Trust judges until you have reason to distrust them, and call other players on obvious slow play of any kind.

Drain wrote:

KevinM wrote:

Instead of whining, these people, if they want anything to change, should be calling a judge and asking for a stalling penalty or a slow play penalty and then asking for more time to be added to the game clock. I've done all of these things to and for slow players, and they work quite well in order to facilitate change in player's attitudes when they constantly get called on slow play and want to avoid the embarrassment.

Of course, there are the stallers, as well. They just need to be educated, or ejected, as you find necessary.

I don't know how much of a diplomat you are, Kevin, but in a game with such a dwindling player base I find that such confrontational and heavy-handed measures could quite possibly end up having counterproductive effects (of course you can still defend that you'd rather not play than play with stallers or people who would react negatively to being called out on it).

When judging, I'm fairly diplomatic, sure. If another player complains about slow play -- because I never, ever confront a player on slow-play as a judge -- I measure up the player in-question. If it's a serious pro who should know better, I ask them what happened and if it's not a legitimate reason to have played slowly, I ask them to play faster. If it's not a serious pro then, off to the side if necessary, I gently ask them why they were playing slowly and educate them a bit about playing faster. I add a few minutes, as necessary, allow the table to continue as-normal, and watch the table for 10 minutes to determine what's happening.

Izaak wrote:

Well ya know, the game's 18 years old. After 18 years about 40% of the people playing this game are mindnumbingly slow in tournament games. Saying they "should play faster" will not happen unless you enforce it. Which cannot realistically be done.

Of course it can. I (and others) enforce "standard-speed" play all the time. I'm sorry that you have experience with spineless judges.

Izaak wrote:

Until judges actually get some tools to punish borderline stalling and slowplay, people will play slow.

The tools needed are already there: common sense, experience, the Judge's Guide, and courage.

Whether or not judges choose to make use of these tools is an exercise left to them.

Adding to the time limit changes the game and meta.
2,5 hour VTES is not same as 2 hour VTES.

Besides, the tournaments are long enogh as it is.