Timeouting as increasing trend

A lot of good points in this thread.

For five players, 2 hour time limit gives only 24 minutes of time per player (if divided equally). In tournaments, a lot of players seem to be content with timeouting instead of taking a risk with getting ousted.

I suggest that if the game time-outs, the participants won't get half the victory point anymore. That could encourage more dynamic and faster gameplay since stalling and timeouting wouldn't advantageous.

The game is called Eternal Sturggle but i wouldn't want to sit in table for two hours with no ousts...

Tournaments are slow already so adding time to especially preliminary rounds is a no-go. Besides a longer game changes the meta.

In past we've sometimes used, IIRC, 2,5 hour time limit (or was it unlimited?) for the finals.


Not being what you'd call a good player I unfortunately often tend to take too long to play my turn. I'm trying to improve but often there's too many choices...

It's fairly trivial to speed up your own game - start planning you turn the moment you end your own discard phase instead of when your predator ends his discard phase.

Izaak wrote:

It's fairly trivial to speed up your own game - start planning you turn the moment you end your own discard phase instead of when your predator ends his discard phase.

Yes exactly. Your hand will not change much most of the time. You should have at least some idea what you want to accomplish on your next turn. Since most decks fit into archetypes, you can even plan your turn well before the tournament. This requires some flexible thinking, but you simply cannot count on having even 24 minutes to play.

I would be happy enough with no VPs on timeouts, but I don't think that would fix the problem because then some players would play to deny VPs to others. I've seen that in tournaments. We get close to time and I go to oust my prey and somebody, who has no hope of gaining VPs and isn't going to be ousted, stops me because the oust will cost him 12 TPs (or whatever it is - I could care less).

This is valid in a way, but that kind of thinking is very self-defeating. If you are playing for TPs, you have the wrong priority on multiple levels.

Lönkka wrote:

Tournaments are slow already so adding time to especially preliminary rounds is a no-go. Besides a longer game changes the meta.

In past we've sometimes used, IIRC, 2,5 hour time limit (or was it unlimited?) for the finals.

Last couple of tournaments we've played 2:15 for preliminaries and 2:30 for final. It somehow goes better than just 2 hours.

Squidalot wrote:

or a card limit but both the first tournament WOTC rules had both time and card limits in place and it seems like a reasonable assumption that those guys were close enough to Ricky G to make some none arbitrary rules.

Except that Richard Garfield has explicitly said that, after him, the WotC product guys made changes that:

a) he didn't want, and
b) he fought (in some cases - specifically, the free-for-all bleeding introduced by the weird-ass changes on the meaning of actions).

www.vtesinla.org/articleGarfieldInterview.asp

That wrote:

Goudie: Speaking of "only attacking your neighbor", I imagine you were still close enough to the game to see changes made via rulings or errata that went against your original vision. I mean, its understandable that few people will actually truly recognize all of the subtleties of your design choices but how do you, on a personal level, deal with negative changes to your games that occur after you have moved on to other projects?

Garfield: I remember that in particular and I was in there fighting the changes! Typically though I let the people responsible for the product make the changes they think they need to make with my advice remaining advice, and not becoming commandments. This way they learn firsthand, and those lessons are always more powerful, and seldom is a mistake so bad it can't be undone later. Also, their attention is fully on the product and the players, so there is every chance they are making a sensible decision even though I don't appreciate it at first!

So it's not a reasonable assumption that the guys at WotC were close to him.