#359205
The Star Trek Customizable Card Game (First Edition) has no time limit.
That's an odd way to start a post, so I'll say it again: the Star Trek Customizable Card Game (First Edition) has no time limit. The rulebook says nothing about time. Neither does the Glossary*, nor the CRD. In fact, the only mention of a 1E time limit in the history of STCCG rules documents was in the Premiere Rulebook, which offered this "advanced rules variant":
The next full-size rulebook to be released was for Deep Space Nine; it contained no mention of this or any other timing rule. And that has continued: flip open your OTF (Official Tournament Format) rules sheet and check for a timing rule. None exists. Even today, the Rules Committee has nothing to say about time limits, because 1E is not a timed game.
The 1E time limit is wholly an invention of Organized Play. 1E's 75-minute time limit is imposed in a footnote on page 25 of the Organized Play Guide. It is an artificial constraint on the game, no more "part" of the game than OP's requirement to print out a decklist before you start playing.
Now, of course, you all know that. I'm not telling you anything new here.
And you all know, as I do, that time limits were imposed on the game for a very good reason: so that we could hold multi-round Star Trek CCG tournaments that last four to five hours. (Without timing limits, it might take a full 26-hour Bajoran day to get through a three-round tournament!) Organized Play did what it had to do in order to make the traditional CCG tournament format work for Star Trek. They did the right thing when they created the tournament time limit, and good on them for doing it.
Distorting the Game
But let's acknowledge that what we play at timed tournaments is a distorted version of the game. On a good day, the distortion might not be severe: the constant looming threat of "time's up!" creates moderate stress throughout, maybe a sloppy decision or two, but you and your opponent are both playing speedy decks and get done without much fuss.
But on a bad day, the time limits transform the game: players decide to abandon effective deck types because they can't play them quickly enough; other players exploit the time limit to create "lockout" decks that don't actually need to win -- they just need to score a few points and delay the opponent until time runs out. Games are won because a player who went second decides to take just a little more care choosing his away team before beaming down (and if that means time is called and he walks away with at least a modified win, well, what a happy coincidence); games are lost because a player decides to avoid a winnable rules dispute that would consume too much time (which the T.D. may or may not award back). Experienced players try to avoid playing newbies (and are tempted to steamroll them if they do), not out of malice, but because they fear newbies will play slow and force them to time, leaving them with fewer VPs.
Beyond those immediate effects, it's clear that the ubiquitous time limits affect the whole community surrounding the game. While there are people out there who are mainly casual players, most of us who are active here on the boards play the vast majority of our Star Trek CCG in sanctioned formats. Even when we are not actually at a tournament, many of us play casually primarily to refine our deck designs for tournaments. There is a culture, which most of us participate in to some degree, that says that games which affect our player rating "count"... and other games do not. And all games that affect our player rating... are timed.
We may all know, intellectually, that the time limit isn't a "real" rule, but it is such a strong consideration in so many of our games (even our untimed games!) that we all actually treat the time limit as sacrosanct, as natural to the game as breathing. There are dozens of actual rules that the community takes less seriously than the time limit.
This, in turn, affects Design, which is so attuned to the time limit that it now quite deliberately avoids cards that would upset the apple cart too much -- either by accelerating the game or, worst of all, by slowing it down. The player community demands as much: it is generally understood that one of the nastiest comments you can give about a new card is, "this will lengthen the game."
You might argue that some of the distortions created by the time limit make for interesting variations on 1E. In some cases, I'd even agree with you. The time limit can force choices on players, both good choices and bad ones. Good choices are what fun games are made of. So if you like the "Timed Variant" of the Star Trek CCG (First Edition), that's great. I enjoy a good tournament myself.
But let me suggest two things:
(1) The "Timed Variant" of 1E is not pure 1E. It's not the game Decipher built. It's not even the game the CC maintains. It's that game squeezed into a box that it can't quite fit in, that it was never intended to fit in. The full game lasts anywhere from 1-3 hours, and allows players to do things that more truly reflect the world of Star Trek -- and which just aren't possible in the compressed world of timed play. That's not an attack on the Timed Variant; it's just an acknowledgement that what we play at tournaments is a variant, not the core game. Heck, it's not even OTF: OTF is untimed.
(2) Players who prefer the untimed, original format of the game are not currently well-served by a community, a culture, and a Design ethos which all make timed play the first priority.
What might we do about this?
In economics, they say that if you want more of something, give people incentives for it. In 1E, we have two powerful incentives at our fingertips: player ratings and achievements. The CC routinely uses both tools to try to encourage players to play the game differently -- or at least to try out something new.
I'd like the CC to consider using these tools to give players more opportunities (and more reasons) to play in untimed games. More than that, I'd like players to have more reason to take those untimed games seriously (not simply as warmups or tests for timed, sanctioned tournaments). But -- for obvious reasons -- the CC is only able to offer achievements and player ratings for events that are officially sanctioned by Organized Play. So, for this to happen, we would need to have a new, sanctioned format that is untimed.
As you can probably tell from the above, I've been thinking about this for a while now (over a year), and I've decided I've gone as far as I can on my own. I need to share my ideas, gather some feedback from the community, gauge OP's current interest in accommodating more untimed play, and then start to refine my proposal into something more formal. So, here goes.
A New Format: "Exhibition"
I propose a new sanctioned format called "Exhibition." In Exhibition, two players would agree to play against one another in an Exhibition. This would be registered on TrekCC a week in advance, like any tournament. On Game Day, the two players would meet to play a single untimed game. After the game, they would enter the results, just like any tournament, and Elo scores and achievements would be awarded and adjusted accordingly.
And that's it. In brief, Exhibition is an untimed, 1-on-1 tournament format.
With this new format, players gain an incentive to play pure 1E, with no time limit, and to take those games seriously, because there are Important Things At Stake. (Sure, some of us don't care about player rating, some of us don't care about achievements, but most of us care about at least one of them, and both would be relevant in Exhibition.)
Bonus: isolated players, who often struggle to organize or participate in centralized tournaments, gain more avenues to play and more flexibility for participating in the wider community! Fantastic!
But there are some problems with this proposal.
First, allowing anyone to turn any casual game into a rated event threatens to put a lot of pressure on the whole ecosystem of casual play. If they can make any game a sanctioned game, some players might never want to play unsanctioned games at all -- to the detriment of casual play as a whole. Yes, I want players to play serious-business untimed-format 1E more frequently, but I don't want that to destroy the wonderful world of lazy, casual 1E where nothing at all is at stake.
Second, allowing anyone to turn any casual game into a rated event could damage tournament attendance -- why show up for a tournament 10 miles away if you can just call your pal Kevin and play a rated event in your basement? And we can't afford to suffer further loss in tournament attendance. I don't want to hurt tournaments, either.
Third, allowing anyone to turn any casual game into a rated event could really compromise the Elo scoring system, which depends on players playing rated events at about the same rate and with a diverse pool of opponents. We already have problems with isolated playgroups causing Elo rating distortions, but allowing me and Kevin to play three games per day against each other, over and over and over again, could really throw our ratings askew.
So Exhibition format comes with some restrictions, which aim to address these problems:
With these restrictions in place, I think an untimed format like Exhibition could flourish, encouraging more people to play more 1E in more ways with more people. And, even if you think the time limit in 1E is the greatest thing since sliced bread, that's a good thing, right?
Meanwhile, for those of us who really find the time limit frustrating, Exhibition would offer an alternative channel, where we could occasionally enjoy a game of 1E with a variety of players without the omnipresent pressure of The Clock... and without that niggling but widespread stigma of "Oh, it's not a tournament, so it doesn't really matter."
I think that's a win-win.
But of course I think that; it's my idea. I've been thinking about this for a year now. The reason I've finally posted it is because I want to know what you think. Your comments, pointed questions, friendly questions, concerns, and edge cases are all welcome, on any aspect of this post. I yield the floor.
*Warp Speed doesn't count
That's an odd way to start a post, so I'll say it again: the Star Trek Customizable Card Game (First Edition) has no time limit. The rulebook says nothing about time. Neither does the Glossary*, nor the CRD. In fact, the only mention of a 1E time limit in the history of STCCG rules documents was in the Premiere Rulebook, which offered this "advanced rules variant":
Below you will find a few advanced rule modifications. Of...a variant format which, you'll notice, the folks at Decipher explicitly considered "hectic" and implicitly believed would end before either player actually reached 100 points.
course, both players must agree on these rules or any house
rules before playing:
Alternative Endings… Increase the number of points
required to win to 150 or 200 points. For a hectic game, try
a time limit of exactly one hour (the air time for a Star
Trek: The Next Generation® episode). When the hour is up,
the player with the highest number of points is the winner!
The next full-size rulebook to be released was for Deep Space Nine; it contained no mention of this or any other timing rule. And that has continued: flip open your OTF (Official Tournament Format) rules sheet and check for a timing rule. None exists. Even today, the Rules Committee has nothing to say about time limits, because 1E is not a timed game.
The 1E time limit is wholly an invention of Organized Play. 1E's 75-minute time limit is imposed in a footnote on page 25 of the Organized Play Guide. It is an artificial constraint on the game, no more "part" of the game than OP's requirement to print out a decklist before you start playing.
Now, of course, you all know that. I'm not telling you anything new here.
And you all know, as I do, that time limits were imposed on the game for a very good reason: so that we could hold multi-round Star Trek CCG tournaments that last four to five hours. (Without timing limits, it might take a full 26-hour Bajoran day to get through a three-round tournament!) Organized Play did what it had to do in order to make the traditional CCG tournament format work for Star Trek. They did the right thing when they created the tournament time limit, and good on them for doing it.
Distorting the Game
But let's acknowledge that what we play at timed tournaments is a distorted version of the game. On a good day, the distortion might not be severe: the constant looming threat of "time's up!" creates moderate stress throughout, maybe a sloppy decision or two, but you and your opponent are both playing speedy decks and get done without much fuss.
But on a bad day, the time limits transform the game: players decide to abandon effective deck types because they can't play them quickly enough; other players exploit the time limit to create "lockout" decks that don't actually need to win -- they just need to score a few points and delay the opponent until time runs out. Games are won because a player who went second decides to take just a little more care choosing his away team before beaming down (and if that means time is called and he walks away with at least a modified win, well, what a happy coincidence); games are lost because a player decides to avoid a winnable rules dispute that would consume too much time (which the T.D. may or may not award back). Experienced players try to avoid playing newbies (and are tempted to steamroll them if they do), not out of malice, but because they fear newbies will play slow and force them to time, leaving them with fewer VPs.
Beyond those immediate effects, it's clear that the ubiquitous time limits affect the whole community surrounding the game. While there are people out there who are mainly casual players, most of us who are active here on the boards play the vast majority of our Star Trek CCG in sanctioned formats. Even when we are not actually at a tournament, many of us play casually primarily to refine our deck designs for tournaments. There is a culture, which most of us participate in to some degree, that says that games which affect our player rating "count"... and other games do not. And all games that affect our player rating... are timed.
We may all know, intellectually, that the time limit isn't a "real" rule, but it is such a strong consideration in so many of our games (even our untimed games!) that we all actually treat the time limit as sacrosanct, as natural to the game as breathing. There are dozens of actual rules that the community takes less seriously than the time limit.
This, in turn, affects Design, which is so attuned to the time limit that it now quite deliberately avoids cards that would upset the apple cart too much -- either by accelerating the game or, worst of all, by slowing it down. The player community demands as much: it is generally understood that one of the nastiest comments you can give about a new card is, "this will lengthen the game."
You might argue that some of the distortions created by the time limit make for interesting variations on 1E. In some cases, I'd even agree with you. The time limit can force choices on players, both good choices and bad ones. Good choices are what fun games are made of. So if you like the "Timed Variant" of the Star Trek CCG (First Edition), that's great. I enjoy a good tournament myself.
But let me suggest two things:
(1) The "Timed Variant" of 1E is not pure 1E. It's not the game Decipher built. It's not even the game the CC maintains. It's that game squeezed into a box that it can't quite fit in, that it was never intended to fit in. The full game lasts anywhere from 1-3 hours, and allows players to do things that more truly reflect the world of Star Trek -- and which just aren't possible in the compressed world of timed play. That's not an attack on the Timed Variant; it's just an acknowledgement that what we play at tournaments is a variant, not the core game. Heck, it's not even OTF: OTF is untimed.
(2) Players who prefer the untimed, original format of the game are not currently well-served by a community, a culture, and a Design ethos which all make timed play the first priority.
What might we do about this?
In economics, they say that if you want more of something, give people incentives for it. In 1E, we have two powerful incentives at our fingertips: player ratings and achievements. The CC routinely uses both tools to try to encourage players to play the game differently -- or at least to try out something new.
I'd like the CC to consider using these tools to give players more opportunities (and more reasons) to play in untimed games. More than that, I'd like players to have more reason to take those untimed games seriously (not simply as warmups or tests for timed, sanctioned tournaments). But -- for obvious reasons -- the CC is only able to offer achievements and player ratings for events that are officially sanctioned by Organized Play. So, for this to happen, we would need to have a new, sanctioned format that is untimed.
As you can probably tell from the above, I've been thinking about this for a while now (over a year), and I've decided I've gone as far as I can on my own. I need to share my ideas, gather some feedback from the community, gauge OP's current interest in accommodating more untimed play, and then start to refine my proposal into something more formal. So, here goes.
A New Format: "Exhibition"
I propose a new sanctioned format called "Exhibition." In Exhibition, two players would agree to play against one another in an Exhibition. This would be registered on TrekCC a week in advance, like any tournament. On Game Day, the two players would meet to play a single untimed game. After the game, they would enter the results, just like any tournament, and Elo scores and achievements would be awarded and adjusted accordingly.
And that's it. In brief, Exhibition is an untimed, 1-on-1 tournament format.
With this new format, players gain an incentive to play pure 1E, with no time limit, and to take those games seriously, because there are Important Things At Stake. (Sure, some of us don't care about player rating, some of us don't care about achievements, but most of us care about at least one of them, and both would be relevant in Exhibition.)
Bonus: isolated players, who often struggle to organize or participate in centralized tournaments, gain more avenues to play and more flexibility for participating in the wider community! Fantastic!
But there are some problems with this proposal.
First, allowing anyone to turn any casual game into a rated event threatens to put a lot of pressure on the whole ecosystem of casual play. If they can make any game a sanctioned game, some players might never want to play unsanctioned games at all -- to the detriment of casual play as a whole. Yes, I want players to play serious-business untimed-format 1E more frequently, but I don't want that to destroy the wonderful world of lazy, casual 1E where nothing at all is at stake.
Second, allowing anyone to turn any casual game into a rated event could damage tournament attendance -- why show up for a tournament 10 miles away if you can just call your pal Kevin and play a rated event in your basement? And we can't afford to suffer further loss in tournament attendance. I don't want to hurt tournaments, either.
Third, allowing anyone to turn any casual game into a rated event could really compromise the Elo scoring system, which depends on players playing rated events at about the same rate and with a diverse pool of opponents. We already have problems with isolated playgroups causing Elo rating distortions, but allowing me and Kevin to play three games per day against each other, over and over and over again, could really throw our ratings askew.
So Exhibition format comes with some restrictions, which aim to address these problems:
- You can only play one officially sanctioned Exhibition event per month. This prevents Exhibition from supplanting either tournaments or casual play, and it keeps it from distorting the player ratings by being played too often. Exhibition should be an addition to how we play, not a replacement.
- You can play an Exhibition event against any player who agrees to it. However, you cannot play an Exhibition against the same player again for six months. This forces the Exhibition environment to have the same level of player diversity as the local tournament scene -- you can't just play against the same friend over and over again. Instead, you have to seek out new players... or recruit them!... in order to play an Exhibition event every month. Played everyone in your local playgroup and don't have anybody left to play Exhibition with this month? Great! Try an Online Exhibition... or maybe on your next road trip for work you can make a short pit stop and play against somebody on the other side of the country!
- To incentivize players to play Exhibition despite these rather tricky limitations, the K-value of an Exhibition match would be set at 22: halfway between a Local (16) and a Regional (28). (For reference, Masters/Nationals have K-value of 40, Continentals 52, and Worlds 64.)
With these restrictions in place, I think an untimed format like Exhibition could flourish, encouraging more people to play more 1E in more ways with more people. And, even if you think the time limit in 1E is the greatest thing since sliced bread, that's a good thing, right?
Meanwhile, for those of us who really find the time limit frustrating, Exhibition would offer an alternative channel, where we could occasionally enjoy a game of 1E with a variety of players without the omnipresent pressure of The Clock... and without that niggling but widespread stigma of "Oh, it's not a tournament, so it doesn't really matter."
I think that's a win-win.
But of course I think that; it's my idea. I've been thinking about this for a year now. The reason I've finally posted it is because I want to know what you think. Your comments, pointed questions, friendly questions, concerns, and edge cases are all welcome, on any aspect of this post. I yield the floor.
*Warp Speed doesn't count
Rules Manager | Official Rulings in blue. All else opinion. | Rules Archive
"We pledge our loyalty to the Glossary from now until death."
"Then receive this reward from the Glossary. May it keep you strong."
~Iron Prime
"We pledge our loyalty to the Glossary from now until death."
"Then receive this reward from the Glossary. May it keep you strong."
~Iron Prime