Timeouting as increasing trend

For my personal experience it seems like that games nowadays tend to timeout more than before. There could be few reasons for that:

1) The level and skills of the average player have risen and due that the vigilance for recognizing an oust have increased. The level of gaming has grown better and more complicated.

2) Game development by cards like Villein and Ashur Tablets have lenghtened gaming time by providing more careful allocation of pool and more options to bloat.

3) Increased variety of cards have created more complex game as a whole.

Do you agree?

No, it does not seem like this to me. Judging from my own experience it seems to have been around the same amount of games going to timeout since I started playing a few years ago. There are of course some variation like the tournament where everyone randomly happens to bring walls decks, but overall no.

There was also a study made some time ago, based mainly on the data from the 2010 EC I think, that showed no indication of more timeouts. But it was of course far from complete.

1) No, in general I have the feeling games take more time with inexperienced players. If an experienced player is holding the game up he is more likely doing it intentionally.

2) Yes, I agree, better bloat and more card shuffling probably has some effect.

3) Yes, but this does not necessarily make the games last longer.. however it does make deckbuilding last longer


Overall I think local meta has had more impact on game time the last few years.

Oskar wrote:

1) No, in general I have the feeling games take more time with inexperienced players.

Yes. Imbued played by or against multiple semi-experienced or inexperienced player(s) deserve special mention in this category imho. totally horrible experience last tournament. everyone: break the code!

of course, inexperience can also cause tables to be swept in no time in some cases as a single mistake against an Una or weenie-dementation deck can prove fatal for all.

You should think also what kind of your metagame is. I guess Finland can be a violent place for vampires and that kind of play makes games go longer. Combat just controls the minions and doesn't necessary make game go forward. Table with lot of combat decks will resolve very rarely.

Oskar:

The analysis of 2009 - 2011 ECs indicate that there were indeed more timeouts in Poland in 2011.

Whether it's significant difference is a separate matter.

Extrala has the numbers somewhere on hisw ebsite.

Whether it's significant difference is a separate matter.

Extrala has the numbers somewhere on hisw ebsite.

They're here: extrala.blogspot.com/2011/11/ec-gamewin-timeout-statistics.html

Some ballpark and fairly simply math (that I did in the comments) shows that there is no significant increase in time-outs since 2009, and not even a upwards trend. I ran the numbers in SPSS for a more thorough analysis, but unsurprisingly the results weren't different.

Unlike Juggernaut claims in one of his comments to that Blog, 2-3% differences are not significant in any accepted statistical model, even if the sample size is only 200-300. On the side, 200-300 is by quite a large margin a large enough sample size for this specific analysis, because the chance of a table actually timing is fairly high (it's over 30%).

That said, I think (but that's just a hunch) high-stakes games (such as finals or some third-round games) have a tendancy of timing more often, because some people at the table benefit from it timing. My gut feeling says that finals time more often than they used to do (but I'm just guessing), but I wouldn't attribute this to anything but the rule changes that disallowed table splits.

Would be interesting to collect data on that, actually.