The cocked feature doesn't work over a long period of time. These games need to be played in one sitting. The best use for clocked is to enhance the real time side of things; allowing a chess style timing system (bullet, blitz, etc.).

(from Hennns)
My fear is that it will turn into a booting competition. for example Imagine if one player takes his turn once in an hour

That's why this is (in my opinion) predestinated for a real-time-game. As a host you know you have a specific time for a game you want... maybe 30, 60 or 120 minutes.
With that option you can make a match where the game lasts precise the time you have and want.
No unfair opponent could stretch the game with waiting each allowed time every turn or hide cowardly behind a big blockade.
So this would be a quite useful feature...

I get the idea, that, if you need to leave, you can, and then meet up again later. The problem is that, after a player has to leave, I don't think it's very possible for all of them to 'meet' up again later; likely, when that player has to leave, and he comes back, everyone's not just going to be waiting for him patiently.

Edited 2/19/2015 03:26:34

I just created a "clocked game", but there's a 4hr min per term because of multi-day limits...

https://www.warlight.net/MultiPlayer?GameID=8082186

Good idea, only if the game creator can change the initial bank boot time.

Let's imagine a game between two players who live on opposite sides of the earth, 12 hour time zones apart from each other, and assume this is their schedule:

- 8 hrs work, from 8am to 4pm, they will make 1 turn (2 commits) right before
- 8 hrs play, from 4pm to midnight
- 8 hrs sleep

On this scenario, the max number of turns that will be played within 48 hrs is 10, which is sufficient in some cases but it obviously isn't in most of them.

The idea surely is interesting, but it is flawed: a clocked game is either played in one sitting or it becomes a multi day, since it's usually very unlikely for the two players to "meet" again if one of them has to go for several hours.

There is no easy way to build a game mode which is somewhere in between Real-Time and Multi-Day: each of them is the best possible for its purpose, since a fixed time for the turns IMO is needed.

One idea that came to my mind and that maybe is a bit more logical is a "fast" multi-day game with 8 hrs boot time and 4~6 hrs banked, and it confirms that multi day mode is still the optimal one

I think this would actually work better as more of a "real time" style. For example, bank 20 minutes. If one player moves in 30 seconds they have 19:30 for the next turn. If someone else takes 2 minutes, they have 18 minutes left. Since fast moves are emphasized, this model feels like it would work better if yours playing in one sitting

Sephiroth,
Assuming your scenario there are 10 moves in 24 hours. Another scenario is someone has the whole day free and/or they can play at work. [You know who you are ;) ]

Back to your scenario with 10 moves in a day, That is still 9 moves in a day better then waiting for 1 move each day. So a Clocked game that had 3-5 bank days would be more then enough and your scenario person would want to play that range of game.

Right now a multiday game can last over a month.

QB,
We already have bank 20 minute bank option, that is the max available.

Mercer:

I know banking exists, but I thought this would be essentially a set bank time with a boot of zero? that's not possible now

I like it

My experiment seems to be working, but it would be nice if I had a little more flexibility in Banked times & boot times. I had to go with 5 days banked and 4hr boots because RT didn't allow me to bank enough, and MD didn't allow a boot shorter than 4hrs. We're both up to 7 days banked now...

All the above arguments for the number of turns required per game, and the amount of time each player needs per move, etc, are really pointless. There are a lot of different types of games. Some large LD maps can take an hour to play to single turn. Some of the smaller ones can take less than a minute. In order for the clocked games idea to work, we simply need an amount flexibility to match the diversity of games that can be played on this platform.

The current system is hung up on defining a game as RT or MD. The best clocked games would certainly fall somewhere in between, but in the meantime you can still design playable clocked games. You just need to pick a map that suits the RT or MD model.

If you did it, you could put a "pause button", and if both players click it it pauses the timer. Then when one person plays again, the timer would start.

I think the idea of clocked game is designated for coin tournaments (afair fizzer mentioned they need to make tourneys faster) and i would say it would be horrible experience. I can imagine playing one game, but possibility of playing a whole streak of such games, one after another, would discourage even me :P Clocked games are fine for RT, but if you try to make MD tourneys faster just:
- reduce boot time to 18h (effectively forcing people to make 2 moves per day), maybe with some banked time
- disable vacation (or allow to use 1 short vacaction per tourny)
- implement auto-surrender

It won't be as fast as forcing people to finish game in 2 days, but still should go much faster than 'normal' MD tournament

Im not entirely sure, but I guess there are still some ways to abuse this feature. For example: Players will delay defeats and avoid surrenders, which gives them the opportunity to win after the time ran out and the opponent got booted.

I really like the idea of always having 3 minutes set/left on the clock if you are at the end of your boot time. So you can continue playing.

this wont help, when your time runs out, while you are asleep or just unavailable to attend the game.