Has there been discussions previously about ladders turn times. Whether they should be extended up to 4-day or 5-day. Or some-kind of dynamic timing methods.

I assume the rage of 1d1h players, who do not understand why someone would need 4-day or 5-day to commit. As well the fear of stalling, delaying losses etc. But the questions is: what if this change could bring more players to ladders, if the constraining factor is time. This mainly should affect Seasonal ladder where you get rather many games at once and they accumulate quite quickly.

By dynamic timing I mean on seasonal for example one should commit on average per X amounts of games X turns per week. With some safe method, that opponents turns would not affect yours if you may come short of turns to commit. I for myself kinda feel that 3-day is not enough for me and half the week is usually busy, but other half quite free to play. Some-kind of dynamic measure would help me tremendously or 4-day seasonal. I wonder if there would be any support to extend seasonal turns somehow?

1 day turn time is the trend.

It takes at most 15 minutes of thought to make a turn, usually much less. How do you find yourself needing 5 days? We've all had our busy weeks or months, and when that happens you either find those 15 minutes somewhere every couple of days (riding the bus, in between classes, when you end your date early because you got catfished by a bear, etc.) or you don't make a commitment.

If you want 5-day boot games against competitive players, you can do that by creating a tournament. The ladder can't accommodate these edge cases (3-day players is already bad enough, with stalling and whatnot) since it's for the mainstream. Making fast players wait 5 days for you to take a turn is also ridiculous- it's not just about your preferences (or others' "anger") but also about others'. Taking more than 2 weeks to finish a game is seriously pushing it for most people, and you can't expect people to regularly tolerate that on the ladder.

So just find time in your life, find the right crowd, or hold off until you can make the right commitment. You can't expect others to adapt, or it'll be at the expense of ladder participation. No way to make everyone happy.

I sympathise. For those who get very busy, it's very common to go three days without being able to put the effort we would like into our turns, particularly at the picking stage. However games can drag on as it is, even without ill intent from either player, so any increase in turn-times just wouldn't work.

Something that reduces the average time-per-move but allows you to spread that out so that individual turns could be >3 days, would be a good thing. e.g.:

2 days per turn
3 days initially in bank
50% of unused time added to bank per turn
Time in bank expires after 5 turns

Unfortunately, as long as the dashboard tells you how long you've had for your current turn, rather than how long you've got left, this would lead to a lot more boots, so I guess it isn't viable either.

EDIT: I don't think there's anything "edge case" about this, by the way. If you look through ladder games, it's not uncommon to see instances of 2d 20+ hr turns which clearly have nothing to do with stalling. I'm guessing that in most of these cases, the player would have liked a bit more time for that turn, and would have happily sacrificed a lot more time elsewhere for it.

Edited 2/14/2018 17:52:56

+1 kicorse

Bank time would be the perfect solution for both fast and inconsistently-slow players.
I don't know if it's Muli's userscript or Fizzer's code, but my dashboard is sorted by time left. So there's at least some way to avoid the sorting issue.

2d20+ hour turns inconsistently make sense. But someone who consistently takes over 3 days per turn is just terrible for the ladder. I think the ladder's best bet is to accommodate all generally fast players who take <A hours on average and never more than M hours (and up to P hours for picks). Then you can have the following setup:

- A hour turns
- 100% banked
- P-A hour initial bank time
- (M-A)/A turn bank expiry

So if you wanted people to take 24 hours on average but never take more than 5 days for a single turn with up to 3 days for picking, the setup would be:

- 1 day turns
- 100% banked
- 2 day initial bank time
- 4 turns banked time (so max banked time after turn 4 is 4 days, making max total time 5 days; players can take up to 6 days for a single turn on turn 4, but that's a one-time deal)

A 15-turn game would finish in at most 17 days (2 + 15*1) with these settings, while still allowing players to take 5 days for tricky turns or turns when they're busy IRL. Right now a 15-turn game can take up to 45 days; typical games take less than a week on the 1v1 ladder (from a small sample of the most recently finished games).

Keep in mind that people usually take turns in pairs, too. So you can afford to ignore Warlight on average for 2 days at a time.

Edited 2/14/2018 18:46:15

Thanks for considered thoughts.

Something that reduces the average time-per-move but allows you to spread that out so that individual turns could be >3 days, would be a good thing. e.g.: - kicorce

@Knyte
I just want to hear what community has to say, or something have been discussed earlier. Well, it does not have to be 5-days. Just an idea. Lets not argue how we use our daily time, how busy or else. Not everyone plays everyday for various reasons and occasionally some of us need more than 3-day interval to commit. Not as vacation, but maybe few times a month. I plan my time quite well and I do not want to get into things knowing I wont be able to finish - same in Warlight.

I for example could play 3-day ladder quite safely and should have time to finish all games before time runs out - I estimate it to be 90%. But still I do not want to get booted 1-3 games. I rather invest my time elsewhere, when I know it is a possibility. What kicorse suggests is something I would like. Having 3 days and something ladder/tournament bank. The question is not how to make ladders as short as possible, but balance it between efficiency and participating player-base.

I wonder why there are so few players on seasonal ladder? ~200 vs 1v1 ladder´s 350? Is it just the preference, lack of time besides 1v1 and could more dynamic turn-time bring more activity there? Yes, my personal motive is to lengthen it, so I could play.

I am not mobile-player. I only play from PC. And my days are very different. Some days, up to 3-4 I do not have time for gaming activities almost at all, some days I can commit every few hours. Dynamic timing would solve my problems.

needs to be shorter, not longer.

Edited 2/14/2018 23:06:22

I wonder why there are so few players on seasonal ladder?

this season has around ~225 ranked maybe because of need of Unity.

36hr boot, 36hr initial bank, and 100% bank up to a max of 3 days 1 hour.

These are the perfect settings in my opinion. You get 3 days per turn assuming you make back to back moves. And if you want to play at the same time every day, you can due to the extra hour. You could increase the max bank to 4 or 5 days if you wanted to accommodate people who can't play on a long weekend or something.

Edited 2/15/2018 15:51:19

@Hashirama Look older Seasons, its not significantly different.