Suggestion: bid for max. turn limit

[Feedback101]

Here's my idea. In the setup for a new game, have a selectable range for the max. amount of time you want to wait between turns before timing out and loss. Sometimes I have time to sit down and feel like starting and finishing a game in one sitting. I end up waiting for multiple opponents, sometimes for days at a time. 5-6 choices from a range of 2 minutes - 4 days would be great. Speed Outwitters would be fun.

[Kamikaze28]

Let's do a little napkin math, shall we?

You come home from work, let's say you're free to play Outwitters at 19:00 after eating and such things. Now you start a "Blitz Outwitters" match with a 2 minute timeout for turns, let's assume for the sake of argument that an average turn will take you 1 minute to plan, execute and submit. Estimating an average length of games in terms of turns is difficult, but we can look at different scenarios at once:

• The short game (20 turns): 20 minutes, that's doable.
• The medium game (60 turns): 1 hour. You need to go to the toilet after drinking your well-deserved soda? Well better take your iDevice with you or else you lose the game.
• The long game (100 turns): 1:40 hours. You wanted to watch that movie you just streamed from Netflix while playing Outwitters? Well too bad you missed half of it because every minute your iDevice required your attention.
  

Looking at the potential problems above, you think to yourself: okay, maybe 2 minutes is a bit harsh, but I'd still like to finish the game before going to bed. Let's say 5 minutes, that should be enough to do stuff between turns, right? For the sake of argument we again estimate the length of an average turn to be 2.5 minutes. Let's look at our scenarios again:

• The short game (20 turns): 50 minutes, okay.
• The medium game (60 turns): 2:30 hours. Phew, that was beginning to feel like a chore.
• The long game (100 turns): 4:10 hours. I started this game at 19:00 and it's now 23:00 and we're close to the end. Since my iDevice bugged me every 2-4 minutes I haven't been able to do much of anything else and the evening is almost over.
  

After estimating this, I think it should be obvious that any longer timeout would result in the loss of the first player who needs to go to bed. The alternative being you explaining to your boss that you had to stay up until 3:00 in the morning to finish that Outwitters game and that you are not really fit for work today.

My main point: you cannot know how long a game will last beforehand and seeing that we all need to sleep for roughly 6-8 hours every 16-18 hours this is bound to be problematic. Patience is a virtue.

[awpertunity]

(09-19-2012 04:59 AM)TheQwertiest Wrote:  i have a suggestion. instead of losing when the timer runs out. it should give your opponent an extra wit if he/she doesnt finish their turn on the set turn timer?

So abandoned games would never end? You'd just end up with 100 unusable wits...

[Feedback101]

I love napkin math Kamikaze, bravo.

You're right, I have thought about the problem of people in different timezones going to bed etc. If both players agree to the the time limit, than that is the deal and you would lose even if you lost web connection etc. To use a sporting analogy, you could minimise these problems by giving each player a couple of timeouts in case of lost connection, phone call or whatever. Otherwise, youre both stuck with your agreed limit.

Personally, I would usually be bidding for something like a max 12hr limit which would cover any sleep period, but the game would still tick along with at least 1-2 moves each per day. If I had at least 10 games going with a 12hr limit, I would always have a handful of moves to make when I opened the app a few times each day during coffee breaks etc. This is my real objective, a consistent 5-10 minute playing experience when I have the time to kill, instead of staring at a scrolling list of 'Their Turn' before I go back to reading Reddit.

Occasionally, when I had a long time to play, I would play 'blitz' but most of the time it would be 12h I reckon.