Timeouts in Finals: Do they happen too often?

Ohlmann wrote:

Well, if you want to nitpick, extremely few action can't be negociated.

True.

Ohlmann wrote:

If my prey hesitate between defense (redirection, rush, combat), or offense (stealth, bleed), there is something that can be negociated.

True. You can tell him "go on, do your job, no agression from me for the next two turns", for exemple. It works great.

Ohlmann wrote:

If my prey want to villein for a lot, I can try to convince him that keeping blood on vampire for ousting my grandprey is better than turtling.

Mmm, this is another situation than the one described with the KRC. The actual terms of the villein are chosen when the card is played, you can't really negociate and change this(but you can comment).
Contrary to a KRC where there's some delay between "action is not blocked, we reach the referendum" and " let's set the terms". And even before, you can ask for hint to decide not to block if no damage is done to your pool. It's really, really different.

Ohlmann wrote:

The only thing I will say on the topic is, the less serious and concentrated people will be, the more likely they are to take forever to divide KRC or use Ashur. And there is people that use tournament as social gathering and consequently are less than perfectly concentrated, leading to slow play. Aggressively handing out warning for that mean tournament will be less friendly for them and more for competitive player.

... ok but the risk is the "relax" players won't come anymore and we'll lose half the tournament population. It happened before, it can happen again. Let's make a move to not divide the tournament scene again...

nc-italy wrote:

Izaak wrote:

I don't see the evidence still, really. What I see is your opinion, stated as fact and conclusions that have no basis.

By your logic KRC also slows down the game to a snail's pace because there needs a vote to be done and sometimes splits needs to be negotiated.

Political is negotation, so table interaction, sure it can pose another kind
of slowness problem but on another different level (negotiation slowness)
But cards such AT (or, say, the imbued mechanics with high amount of permanent in the game and long phases to be done without interactions) are no interaction at all, they're sort of autistical mechanics which, as said, just lead toward utter slowness of play

I know half a dozen serious Imbued players and none of them play slowly. In fact, they play faster than when they are playing with vampires.

This is sounding more and more like a local issue for you and nothing that the game or the community needs to address.

my opinion is that the final round should be given an extra 30 minutes on the timer. this should prevent those close-call timeout wins that are anticlimactic and unsatisfying. and if the game still isn't resolved after 2:30 then everybody loses! er I mean you count up half VPs so the judge can get on with his life.

it makes sense that the preliminary rounds must be capped at 2 hours, since there's many players who are waiting for their next game to begin. but nobody else is required to wait on the final round, so why does it need the same time limit?

I've read some people say this would create an unequal play environment, where some deck could do better in a 2 hr round compared to a 2.5 hr round, but.... ehhh. the finals are already different from preliminaries to begin with. you have the 5 best decks/players, who are most likely to talk diplomacy, and most likely to survive oust attempts. with chosen seating in seed-order rather than randomly assigned. someone may be grudgingly willing to accept 2VPs and no GW in a preliminary round, but nobody settles for that in the finals. if the finals are a whole different ballpark, so it seems fair to me that it gets compensated with the extra time it needs.

KevinM wrote:

I know half a dozen serious Imbued players and none of them play slowly. In fact, they play faster than when they are playing with vampires.

This is sounding more and more like a local issue for you and nothing that the game or the community needs to address.

Eh, I think that it is pretty obvious that some deck types and some cards are slower than others. If an Imbued player has 40 cards on the table with some moving around, some getting tapped, some hopping to and fro from the ash heap it will certainly take me more time to assess the situation and decide on an optimal course of play.

Similarly, Ashur Tablets in a tight spot might take some thinking. Not five minutes worth, but even 90 seconds is rather a long time to spend on a Master phase. And sometimes you need to consider the Master card you play and it can easily end up taking three minutes without any mental deficiency or foul play or anything like that.

The way I see it, nc-italy is saying that slower deck types have become more powerful and therefore more likely to reach the finals and result in timeouts. Which might be true or false but the underlying idea that some things take more time than others is pretty obvious and it seems like you and Izaak are arguing against that, which seems strange.

What we disagree with is that it's the fault of the game and/or certain cards that games tend to time out more and more. Slow players make tables time, not slow cards.

The whole idea that the existence of Ashur Tablets makes tables more likely to time out is so ridiculous that it's not even possible to start arguing there.

Yes, some cards, actions or situations take more time than others. But "more time" doesn't equal "so long that everything times". See, here in Holland tournament tables hardly ever time. And yet we're playing our Ashur Tablets and Parity Shifts just fine. We have our MMPA 300-pool decks just as much as everywhere else, and yet... timeouts are fairly rare. From what I gather, Kevin has the same experience.

Therefore, tables timing is the fault of slow players and judges not correcting them and not the fault of the cards. Play faster.

Haze wrote:

my opinion is that the final round should be given an extra 30 minutes on the timer. this should prevent those close-call timeout wins that are anticlimactic and unsatisfying. and if the game still isn't resolved after 2:30 then everybody loses! er I mean you count up half VPs so the judge can get on with his life.

it makes sense that the preliminary rounds must be capped at 2 hours, since there's many players who are waiting for their next game to begin. but nobody else is required to wait on the final round, so why does it need the same time limit?

I've read some people say this would create an unequal play environment, where some deck could do better in a 2 hr round compared to a 2.5 hr round, but.... ehhh. the finals are already different from preliminaries to begin with. you have the 5 best decks/players, who are most likely to talk diplomacy, and most likely to survive oust attempts. with chosen seating in seed-order rather than randomly assigned. someone may be grudgingly willing to accept 2VPs and no GW in a preliminary round, but nobody settles for that in the finals. if the finals are a whole different ballpark, so it seems fair to me that it gets compensated with the extra time it needs.

I played in the NAC finals when they decided to extend the final limit to 3 hours. And you know what? The eventual winner had to rush through his turn -- not even necessarily legally ousting his preys -- and the game ended with literally seconds left on the clock.

Additional time limits will do nothing to keep finals from timing out.