Time Out -A Little Warning Please!?

[Ja Karta]

I'll play other people and their games will be 5 or 6 days from last turn and they don't time out. Fine.
I'll have games that list 4 days and I have at least that day to put in a turn. Okay.
I just lost a game that was listed at three days (I assume it moved to 4 this morning).

This is riduculous.
Some of us (all of us) have other lives. We're travling (I am right now) or otherwise engaged with the world.
There HAS to be a better indicator of how much time is available to make a move.
A countdown timer (not time passed) and it needs more precision than just the day when there's one day left.

It's not the end if the world I know (though this is the first match I "lost" to a masters level opponent [i was not losing] and I'm annoyed I confess). BUT if you want competitive play with commensurately competitive players you can't have a game that hands out capricious time outs.

You can set the clock for whatever you want, but the time available needs to be clear.
Currently it is not.

[awpertunity]

It's four days but it seems the server does not check for these timeouts at a fixed rate. So after 96 hours your game can timeout at any second, sometimes it happens immediately and other times it might take an extra day or two.

[Gf!sh]

SUGGESTION:

Display time elapsed in hours, and make games time out client-side instead of server-side.

[GreatGonzales]

(03-15-2013 06:09 AM)awpertunity Wrote:  It's four days but it seems the server does not check for these timeouts at a fixed rate. So after 96 hours your game can timeout at any second, sometimes it happens immediately and other times it might take an extra day or two.

This sounds right. But that sucks, I know I've lost a game because I waited too long to make a move, and I was quite sure that it hadn't been listed as "4 days" for a 24 hour period. Now I'm super afraid when a game reaches 4 days, and I try to take my turn ASAP.

[TheGoldenGriffin]

Why a warning? We already know that the game can time out any time after the 4th day. But if players are too busy spend a few minutes to check your games then there should be a notification like, "Your opponent is waiting for you to play your turn! Tomorrow, your time is up so play now!"

[Lenticularis824]

This just happened to me today. 3 games... I honestly thought it was a 5 day timer... My poor rating.

[Norahsul]

valid suggestion!
it'd be nice to know how much time the opponent has before the game would auto win too lol

[Ryzuma]

Maybe it's cuz they are changing servers

[Ja Karta]

Bump.
(C'mon, y'all know you want to talk about something other than Bramble for a bit.)

[DanielT1263]

1) A countdown timer instead of a count up timer is a good idea.
2) Use capped fisher time. Your timer starts at 4 days, and counts down when it's your turn. When you make your move, don't reset the timer back to 4 days, instead increase the timer by 1 day, but cap it at 4.

What this would mean is that you have to move an *average* of one turn per day, but you would have up to 4 days vacation time.

They might have a cron job that runs once a day and marks games that have stalled for too long. If so then switching to anything that requires two timers (one for each player,) may be too painful.