The timer is annoying

[steventcramer]

So playing a game for 7 days and you miss a turn … you lose. You don’t come back from that.

If people have jobs they can’t always play and what if you go on vacation for a day?

If you just remove the timer how many people would care? It isn’t like it is a fast-paced game.

[ondrej]

Hi steventcramer, welcome to the forum!

It’s a fair complaint. Let’s first have a look at two pros of the current system:

• if you forget to click end turn, it happens for you,
• if somebody abandons a game, the opponent gets a win.

What can we do instead that’s less restrictive and how does it reflect on the pros?

1. Fully abandoning the timer would leave us with abandoned games.
2. One option would be to make the timer a week long. That seems like a long time to wait.
3. Another option would be to make it a week and then an immediate lose. That retains #2 in good quality (maybe improves!) and for #1 it’s worse in case you forget but forgetting is probably rare*, although if you play every 6 days it might get a bit annoying for the opponent (maybe?).
4. Maybe we could have a “vacation mode” that would change the behaviour under some conditions?

I’d like to have one behaviour that makes most people happy but if there isn’t one then the timer length could also be configurable for each game. I quite like number 3, let me know what you think.

Related, there was also a suggestion to allow the opponent to skip your turn instead of it happening automatically.

Manual "Skip turn" button

At the moment, after not playing your turn for 24 hours, it automatically ends and it’s the turn of your enemy. There are situations like I have experienced that I am unable to finish my turns in time, however if there is an understanding opponent, skipping the turn could be his decision and not an automatic one.

* This could be verified from the database but currently the sample is quite small.

[mahks]

What about 2 game options, set when you create a game offer.

Tournament Mode : 24 hour timer (or configurable)
Friendly Mode : No timer

• After 72 hours of no play the opponent may claim victory.
  … or
• Just award the game to the opponent after no play for a week.
  … or both

[mahks]

I think I have a stopgap solution for the timer issue. Change it to 30 hours.

I think many of the times turns are missed by a few hours.
Say someone normally plays once a day at a certain time, the opponent makes his turn right after. So even if the once a day player is only 10 minutes later the next day, they have missed their turn.

Not a real fix to the problem, but easy to implement and will prevent some percentage of misses.

[jan_roman]

This is actually a really good idea. I usually play every evening and I have lost plenty of games due to missing my turn by one or two hours.

[ondrej]

Great idea, changed to 32 hours.

I’ll want to revisit this in the future and implement finer controls like those described above but this should improve the experience for now. Will this help you @steventcramer?

[mahks]

Another pro for eliminating the timer:
You are in a game and your opponent goes AWOL. The game will continue until you manage to capture all his bases, this could take weeks on a large map. Really boring to have to fight a dormant foe.

So if there was no timer (no reason to have one unless a tournament) and there was a automatic win to opponent of dormant player after a week, you would not be forced to fight a dormant.

We lost Cramer due to that timer…

[ondrej]

I agree. Also I’d make this triggerable by the non-AWOL player rather than automatically as suggested by @jan_roman somewhere.