It seems to me that the current implementation of the timer is too short to actually accommodate legitimate and unavoidable reasons for inactivity. For me, it's usually due to spotty internet connection or plugin/client crashing. When this happens, there is almost always not time to actually reload the game and get back in, especially since sometimes it's hard to tell whether it's a connection problem on your end or the opponent's end. I'm not sure how long the current timer is, but it'd be nice to tack on another few minutes.
It's already 2.5 minutes which is more than enough time for any reasonable disconnect. If you're having disconnects of this length with any sort of frequency you have an internet connectivity problem that you need to address.
For a disconnect, I agree. For a computer freeze that requires a full restart, etc. I can see 2.5 maybe not being enough for slower computers.
If you've got serious connectivity issues, you solve them. For instance, prefer plugging into your router directly rather over wi-fi if that's possible. If you own a crappy computer, you buy a decent one if you can afford it. A rig capable of running a flash game in a browser is not that expensive really. If an emergency pops up and you can't avoid staying away for more than a couple minutes, you make your opponent know and resign. Also maybe avoid playing MP if you happen to know chances of external interruption are high. You need to take into account, your opponent's time is as valuable as yours. So if you can in any way avoid frequent periods of inactivity, definitely do so. I'm sorry I don't want to sound bleak or anything, but I think it would be unreasonable to wish the game got into a worse experience for 99% of the playerbase, just because the 1% remainder might have some legitimate reason to go inactive every so often.
I was gonna reply "Said no one ever" but realized you are serious. In MP expecting another player to wait over 2 minutes on any regular basis is selfish. Personally I would have the time lowered to 90 seconds, but I know that it would penalize newer players, especially when the MP maps rotate. I remember having to check and check and check LoS when 3DC ruled and needed to make sure I didn't misstep.
Frankly, I see other people DC more than I DC myself and whenever it happens, it pretty much always results in a win (when I say DC, I mean actual DC when the game isn't going one way or the other, e.g. not ragequit). Now if the DC time was sufficient, then shouldn't most of these DCs result in them reconnecting? If 99% of the people aren't having these problems, then you won't have to deal with the longer wait time 99% of the time, so I don't see why it's going to be a problem if only 1 game out of 100 results in a 4 minute wait.
Sometimes people disconnect instead of resigning; either out of malice, or ignorance, or carelessness.
Yes, but does it happen often enough that adding a minute or two is going to make a big difference? At least in my experience, I can't recall a single game in which I was winning where they DC'd instead of resigning. I'm not saying it doesn't happen (of course it does), but from what I can tell, it isn't a rampant problem. Who knows, maybe sometimes when it did happen, it was due to a DC and they couldn't get back in the game in time. I know I had a QD game a few weeks ago where it was a close game and I DC'd near the end and couldn't make it back in time.
For what it's worth, I played you earlier today and you DCed and returned twice in the same game. That's the first time I've seen that in my 1000+ games. I'd guess that you are using a spotty wireless connection and would enjoy a smoother experience if you connected with an ethernet cable.
To be fair, that was the only time this entire day where the connection bugged out. I wish I could connect via ethernet, but I'm living in a shared house (university and all that fun stuff) and the router is in the hallway downstairs. There's also no central AC, so it gets pretty hot in the afternoon even if I could camp out there... At least my internet isn't as bad as my friend's. There was at least two occasions while playing coop that we ended up waiting as much as playing. Oh, the woes of living in a school dorm. In these extreme cases though, I doubt they would want to play competitively anyways.
99% might not have this kind of severe connectivity issues, but the inactivity timeout does come into play whenever someone goes inactive. The game's client can't possibly discern a connectivity issue from a player deliberately closing his browser. In fact, the true problem really boils down to the fact that a longer timer would give more power to stallers. Don't get us wrong, we are talking out of experience. We used to not have an inactivity timeout, and that was awful. The 2.5 min timer is long enough that you can still return from random disconnects, at least most of the times. If it often takes you much longer than that, then you have a very serious problem, and as already said we can't really ruin everybody else's experience for the needs of a tiny minority. Shared internet sucks, and we can't really do much about it. If I can give you a piece of advice, I would suggest you get in the habit of restricting your MP activity to hours when your local network is not too heavily congested. It might not be optimal, but at the very least you should be able to reduce the % of games you lose b/c of your colleagues using torrent and the like. You can use the ping command to get a rough estimate of how bad your internet connection is currently performing by using the ping utility. Open a terminal (command prompt if you're running windows) and type Code: ping -t www.google.com [take note you can't ping www.cardhunter.com as Amazon servers refuse to reply to ping by default] The program will start churning info about how much time does it take for a packet of data to reach the server (in this example, google's servers) and then get back to your computer. the important thing here is the "time=XXXms" part. If you see relatively low trip-back times (~200ms or less), you're free to go. Much higher times (~1000ms, i.e. a second), you might still be able to play w/o experiencing too many disconnects, although the experience probably won't be the smoothest. Even higher times, or worse significant packet-loss rates (the "connection timed out" lines), then your internet connection is extremely spotty and you'll likely get disconnected often.
Yes, I have heard about the dark age of no turn timer. But honestly, if they want to just stall, no matter how short you make inactivity timer, barring 10 second turns or something, they can still stall for the full 20 minutes. For actual DC/closing browser, given the infrequency of it actually happening, adding a minute or two to the inactivity timer will likely add less than 5 minutes per day.
You know, I was considering a triple wiz team with only wall builder staves and rings appropriation. But first I need to get enough rings.
Guys I totally agree and support this. I am using University internet and have no other option, but I am not sure whether it's the connectivity issue. My game sometimes just freezes on completing an action (or my enemy completing action). Chat remains active though! The problem is that I sometimes assume my opponent is thinking only to notice in a minutes time that I froze, and then I don't have enough time to reconnect. I lost around 5 battles already due to this, so an improvement of turn timer to 4 minutes could really help players like me. Also I totally agree that stollers can still stoll for all 20 minutes if they want, with current 2.5 min limit.
