Open seat prerequisite "takes no longer than an average of X minutes per turn" (in RT games)

I would really appreciate a setting like the above for RT games. I get very bored when my opponent constantly takes much longer than me, so I would like the option to exclude anyone who takes longer than 2 minutes for a RT turn (in average) from my games (especially 1v1).

+99, more prereqs is always good

The game collects the necessary data and displays it on the website profile pages anyways

I take 1:35 minutes in average, JK_3 takes 0:53

-1


I feel discriminated against.

It's not because of you, Lep xD

We alreayd have boot time for this sole purpose, no need for this

Boot time isn't an average, it naturally needs to be much longer (even for the picking stage alone, but also for complicated turns)

Edited 6/21/2022 08:57:23

In some games with a lot to do I easily take longer than that myself, but the average shows how fast someone is under normal circumstances

See, someone who in average takes 1 minute longer than me is likely to take around this much longer every turn, not when I need longer too. So almost all the time, I will be the one waiting a notable time for the game to advance.

The old banked boot time system solved this- you could have used it to limit the moving average of boot time (with 100% banking).

A prereq is pretty weak here since most slow players are still pretty fast on average and only tend to be slow for specific games or at specific times. You really need a way to cap average move speed for a specific game.

What is the old banked boot time, I am not familiar

Before the Flash>Unity transition, boot time banking worked with 4 parameters:
- boot time (this is just per-turn)
- initial banked time
- % banked each turn (% of leftover turn time that would carry on into the next turn)
- maximum banked time

If you wanted to cap the moving average of turn speed, all you needed to do was set banked time to 100%. For example, the following settings:
- 1 day boot
- 2 days initial banked time
- 100% banking
- 2 days max banked time

Would fit Strat 1v1 well. You'd get 3 days to make picks, after which you'd be capped at roughly 1 day/turn average speed and 3 days/turn min speed. If you played fast, you'd get some buffer room; if you played slow, you wouldn't be able to stretch the game out with 3 day turns- it would fulfill the intent of letting people occasionally take 3 day turns but not let them get away with doing it every turn. Stalling would become 3 times less viable.

That said, the players never figured this out. Imo, there were 3 barriers:
- poor communication around how this feature worked (most didn't piece together that you could use boot time to make your per-turn boot time stricter & base it on intended average, rather than maximum, turn speed)
- poor UX on boot times on the dashboard (this was years ago, so Muli's userscript and the default sort weren't that good and iirc you couldn't even sort games by time remaining)
- the norm of playing once every 3 days had already been established; it's how a large chunk of the Strat scene worked, and switching something like the ladder to 1 day/turn average move speed expectation would've encountered opposition. You'd essentially shut out players who aren't active enough to move every day- who, tbh, shouldn't be on the ladder in the first place, but sadly we've already let them on there and if they're gonna go they're going to do it kicking and screaming

So when the time came to rewrite the Warlight client in Unity, Fizzer just didn't implement banked boot time. A while later, he revamped and relaunched how banked boot time works- and we got our present system where you gain banked time not based on how much spare time you've got from the last turn but from how long the game has gone on. It's a weaker system, and I don't think Fizzer quite understands how people actually play his game, but you can still use it to set 1 day/turn average move speed expectations with some limits:

- set banked time to 2 days (this is both initial & max banked time)
- set boot time to 1 day
- accumulate banked time at the rate of 4 hours/day

This means that you'd expect players to take a turn every day, with 3 days to make picks at the start, and they'd accumulate enough time to take a day off every week. You wouldn't quite be able to limit the moving average of time per turn (since there's no mechanic to reward players with more banked time if they play fast; instead, the new banked time mechanic somewhat works the opposite way- if turns happen fast, they get little additional banked time). It's somewhat exploitable by stallers (due to a UX issue around what the actual per-turn boot time is)- use the full 3 days, then use the full 36 hours, then the full 30, then the full 29, and eventually it'll stabilize at 28.8 hours/turn (instead of the 24 you'd think if you set boot time to 1 day). Still, better than 72 hours/turn.

But the heart of your ask seems to be that you want to decouple max time/turn (most people need a 3-day turn on occasion) with average time/turn (if you take 3 days for each and every turn, then I hope the fire-and-brimstone version of Hell exists, just so you can spend eternity where you belong). Your proposal- of building a lever to sort-of shut out slowpokes & stallers from some games- wouldn't really accomplish that, and stalling would continue to be a viable (even rewarded) strategy on the ladders. Directly limiting average turn speed, while creating some allowance for occasional slow turns, would do a lot more. The old banked boot system would've done a better job, but with Fizzer's product vision you just need to take and be grateful for what you can get.

Edited 6/25/2022 09:24:41

Oh wow, that's great! Thanks for the detailed explanation!!!