What to do when a game runs out of time? Seems to me like there are two dominant camps, with several sub camps. Makes it hard to please everyone.
First major camp sees this issue as resulting in a draw. Technically speaking, they are correct. Neither mage has managed to win, under the normal definition of a victory in Mage Wars.
The other major camp wants to have a victor. Perhaps this is desired because time running out happens so often. Perhaps it's because the time limits are already so unfair to so many strategies. Whatever the reasoning, if a victor is desired it requires either a tie breaking method or an alternate victory condition (not really much difference between the two). This camp can also make the claim that although neither mage has won, they've also not drawn as far as the rules are concerned. A draw is when both mages die at the same time. Instead, this is an unfinished game.
It may not be possible to reconcile these camps. You're never going to please everyone. Other factors to consider though are how fair the system is, how easily it is understood and implemented, and how consistently it is enforced. Counting it as a draw is super easy. But may be considered unfair to those who aren't able to finish in time. It would skew the meta towards aggression and make people much more focused on fast play.
On the flip side, any tie breaker / alternate victory condition will skew the meta to take advantage of that condition. You're not going to be able to predict who WOULD have won with perfect accuracy, if that's your reason for wanting this method. But, I've seen a very large number of people who seem to want this type of approach and this is the way MW has always gone in the past. The method of comparing life remaining is also super simple and easy, and seems fair. If you consider mage death as a finish line, this is seeing who was closest to that finish line. Fair, simple, consistent, and makes sense.
They both have flaws. But they're also both workable systems. What we're seeing now though, is backlash over strategies arising to take advantage of the tie breaker. This was bound to happen though. If we're going to use a tie breaker, people will play with it in mind. However, it is compounded by the fact that the cards weren't designed with the tie breaker in mind. Restore was designed to be a temporary effect, delaying the game. It is now being used as a finisher to win the game. That's not its intended function, and so could be considered a bit of abuse or an exploit of the system rather than merely planning around the tie breaker. It is defintely overpowered when used in that function.
To address this, we could change tournament rules. We could errata the card. We could ban the card. There's lots of options. None of them joyous, because nerfs are pretty much never something to get excited over. Switching camps to that which considers time running out to be a draw has some appeal, as we no longer have to worry about competing victory conditions. It'd nip this problem square in the bud. If you don't want strategies taking advantage of alternate victories, then removing those alternate victories is the only sure solution. However that is a pretty drastic change and trying to keep things consistent with smaller adjustments also has a lot of appeal.
I made a suggestion to Grizz that if we keep the current tie breaker, we just add an extra rule stating that all disippate effects are destroyed at time. This would stop effects that are meant to be temporary from being used in other capacities. I think I kind of ended up rambling and I apologize for the long post. I'm not sure what my point was other than that this isn't a simple problem with simple solutions, and I think many of the different views and approaches have merit. There's no right way. Just being mindful of what the different ideas will affect and picking one.
I mostly agree with everything you just said zuberi. However remember that the game does not exist in a vacuum. There are multiple values being traded here, not just fairness vs desire for a victor.
In reality the values are as follows: monetary expense, event time, table space, player count, fairness, openness to newer players, ease of tracking/management, the quality of the player experience, and a catch all category for everything else that might become an issue depending on what sort of solution gets implemented.
I think we're all in agreement that for most large cons like gen con etc it's very unlikely that we'll be able to get more table space or time for tournaments in the near future. Not unless AW wants to spend more money, which I would assume for now that they don't. So increasing expense, tablespace or event time is off the table.
I honestly think it's a REALLY REALLY bad idea to trade away fairness under any circumstances for a game like this. Not unless you literally are pidgeon holed into it and have absolutely no remotely better options on net. So trading away fairness is off the table—I hope.
That leaves player count, ease of tracking and management, openness to newer players, and the quality of player experience.
One possible solution is to cap the number of participants at a lower number, like 8 or 10 or something. Increases fairness but decreases accessibility.
Another solution is to eliminate the elimination rounds, use "dance cards" with a list of opponents for each player where the matchups are randomly generated in advance, then when you finish a game you check off your opponent from your card and immediately move on to another available opponent on your list. Increases fairness while also making MUCH better use of the time we already have by not making people wait half an hour or so for the longer games to finish. If you use this solution you could get rid of the individual match time limits, and just say whoever has the best win:loss ratio at the end of the tournament time is the winner, with people who've won a greater total number of games preferred over those who've only won a few in the event of a tie. Unfortunately this would make it harder for judges to keep track of because games would not be starting all at the same time. The dance cards would have to be visible to judges at all times, so that judges can keep track of how many games a player has played so far and which opponent they are facing right now. It's not as intuitive to keep track of matchups as keeping track of rounds, but I think it should be doable. Not sure if you would need to hire more judges, or if people constantly changing seats would be a problem.
The third solution is to use timed phases rather than timed matches. It's possible that if you set the right time limit on individual phases, the shorter matches will naturally compensate for the amount of time taken by the longer matches, not to mention that people who take too long thinking during each phase might not be as familiar with the spellbook they're using, so so if they're taking too long to think during phases they probably wouldn't win anyways. This solution would have to be tested however.
My vote is to test solution #3, and then if it doesn't work well enough, try some combination of #2 and #3 and see if that works. Then if it's still not good enough to be tolerable, we can start thinking of some more ideas.
For testing solution #3 we would need at least one volunteer ambassador who can run a series of tournaments. Set a timer for 8 hours each time, and then keep track of how far past the 8 hour mark each tournament goes, and adjust the time limit for phases until it is somewhere under 8 hours. The lower you can get the tournament length to the better, because that way you can have even bigger tournaments take place within 8 hours, not just the average sized ones.
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