Mickey wrote:
Forcing players to play at an unconfortable speed is just going to create bad feelings.
I think this may be where the majority of the people who are apprehensive about Bill's suggestions are getting hung up.
Nothing that has been done so far would
force people to play at a faster speed. But I can tell you for sure, if you were to get matched up against someone like Bill or Dean or myself at GenCon, and played the normal way you do at home, shooting for 4 or 5 rounds in that hour....a judge would likely get called over. At your LGS, everyone may play a similar speed, thus there is no imbalance in how much time a player gets in a game. If everyone is playing a similar speed, then even if you only play 4 rounds, each person is likely getting roughly 30 minutes of the game. Now, if you play that same speed, but your opponent plays much faster, it quickly shifts that to more like 45 minutes for you, and 15 minutes for your opponent.
In addition....and going back to the Universal Tournament Rules here....you are supposed to "Play at a speed that allows the game to reach it's completion WITHIN the time limit." Based on section 616 of the SWM Floor Rules then, the only way to complete the game within the time limit is to reach the victory condition. Yes, rules are in place to handle the occurrences where the victory conditions are not met by the end of the time period. But in order to truly follow the 'slow play' rule from the UTR, you should always be trying to reach the Victory Conditions before time runs out.
I don't think we're trying to force anyone to play faster than they are capable of. However, I do believe that EVERYONE is capable of playing a complete SWM game at 100, 150, or 200 points within an hour. They just have to learn how to do it. Practice. However, the current system in place doesn't encourage people to learn that. That's all we're saying. Let's encourage people to develop better playing skills, so that they can finish their games in that hour.
Yes, playing cautious is a good thing; protecting your pieces is the smart way to do things. But it is possible to do that, as well as play quicker, and in my experience, if it's a difference of skill level between you and your opponent, no amount of playing slow will make up that difference.
Omnus wrote:
Dodonna is much more a problem than actual activation limits. I believe if we put every faction on the same page (no tempo control) we would help the game alot. I find that most of the games I see that go to time are with squads that include atleast one player running tempo control.
I am so sick and tired of hearing that argument. If you stuck a rule on the game that every activation should take 30 seconds, would Dodonna or San or Ozzel change things at all?? No. If you had 14 activations, it would take you 7 minutes to do your squad, with or without Dodonna. Players should be approaching that the same way. If you have Dodonna on your squad, you should be playing in such way that you take the same amount of time to move/activate your pieces as if you didn't have him. The only time there should be any additional time allowed is if it's a really tight situation, and you're trying to decide if you need to activate 1 or 2 pieces.
Otherwise, San/Dodonna/Ozzel should have absolutely NO impact on how fast you play. I've played San at two Championships now ('07 and '08), and Dodonna in '09, and 75% of those games were completely finished within the time limit, even when my opponent also had tempo control in many situations. Of that remaining 25%, the large majority of those games were well decided anyways (i.e. there was a large point margin between myself and my opponent).
People need to stop using tempo control as a crutch. It is not an excuse to play slower, and it should NOT be slowing down your games. If you believe your game is running behind because of tempo control figures, then you need to be calling yourself on slow play.