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First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
 -  
Community Contributor
#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":
Below you will find a few advanced rule modifications. Of
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!
...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.

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.)
[EDIT 19 Apr 2017: A quick clarification, since this has come up several times in the replies: K-values are per match, not per tournament. If you play a full local tournament (3 matches at K=16), your rating will be affected more than it will be by an Exhibition event (1 match at K=22). The elevated K for Exhibition is necessary simply to keep it from becoming totally ratings-irrelevant, because it's a single-match format and will always have lower ratings impact than any multi-match event.]

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
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By nobthehobbit (Daniel Pareja)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
 -  
Moderator
#359209
Just one question, and I'm not trying to denigrate your proposal or suggest that it's in any way a bad idea (though I'm not implying it's a good idea, either; I'm honestly neutral to it except that I think anything that incentivizes people playing more games is good).

What CCGs/TCGs/LCGs have a time limit baked into their core rules, and not just the rules that govern tournaments? Or, put another way, what games don't have their tournaments warped by this same effect?
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By commdecker (Matthew Zinno)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
Arbiter
Community Contributor
#359237
First, good on you for thinking of new things.

My own early thoughts on the particular proposal:

This feels to me like a smaller thing -- deserving a lower K-value -- than a (current) regular tournament. Yes, a single game might run 6 hours, but it might also run only 45 minutes. Suppose both people brought a deck that would be at home in a timed tournament? What, then, is the justification for having made this a 1-on-1 tournament?

And achievements for playing a particular kind of deck currently involve some commitment. My particular perspective involves a lot of online tournaments, where after I've decided on a particular deck, I need to play it without modification for a month. Even without online, it's still 3 or 4 games with this deck in order to earn the achievement. Why should someone be able to get the same result from just a single game?
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First Edition Rules Master
By BCSWowbagger (James Heaney)
 - First Edition Rules Master
 -  
Community Contributor
#359267
Thanks for your thoughts, gentlemen.
nobthehobbit wrote:what games don't have their tournaments warped by this same effect?
I'm not familiar with a lot of other games, to be honest. Netrunner, Pokemon, Magic, and of course 2E all set time limits in their tournament rules, rather than their core rules. Yet I think that all of those games are less warped by their time limits than ours is.

Magic tournament "matches" have a recommended 50-minute time limit (adjustable by the tournament director). A match is a best-of-three set of games. A typical game of casual Magic takes about 15 minutes, as I understand it. So Magic allows enough time for three typical games (the maximum length of a match), then adds 5 minutes. I'm sure people hit the time limit, but I at least suspect the time limit is not the omnipresent concern it is for 1E.

Netrunner, I am told, takes about 30 minutes for an experienced player. A tournament match consists of two games -- so about 60 minutes total. The Netrunner time limit? 65 minutes: enough for one typical match, plus five minutes, same as Magic. (TD's can increase or lower the limit by ten minutes.) My very light familiarity with the community indicates that players start to fuss when more than a handful of matches go to time, encouraging TD's to use their discretion to go up to 75 minutes rather than down to 55 minutes.

I don't have the slightest clue about Pokemon.

2E is the game I know best of those four, and I know that it was a game designed to fit in a 60-minute box. Its playing time has crept up over the years as it grew in complexity (and cards), but my sense is that, even today (I personally don't play 2E anymore), 2E is still pretty much a 60-minute game, so a 60-minute tournament time limit doesn't distort it very much. A naive comparison seems to bear that out: at our regional this year, 10% of 2E games were modified wins or losses, compared to a full 33% of 1E games. That's just one data point, of course, and each event only saw about 25 games played during the day, which is not a huge sample.

So I think an untimed format for 1E is more valuable than it is for the other formats. (That said, if it did well, and 2E wanted to adopt it, more power to 'em!)
This feels to me like a smaller thing -- deserving a lower K-value -- than a (current) regular tournament. Yes, a single game might run 6 hours, but it might also run only 45 minutes.
It might make my answer clearer if I quickly recap how ratings and K-values work -- not for you, since I know you know this, Matt, but for everyone reading along.

When Player A plays against Player B at a sanctioned event, each player starts off with a certain rating. If you win, your rating goes up; if you lose, it goes down. The size of the ratings change is determined by a formula, which takes into account your rating at the start of the match, your opponent's rating at the start of the match, and the difference between the two. (So, for example, if you beat someone with a much higher rating than yours, the difference between your expected result and your actual result is huge, and your rating will go way up.) The expected result and the actual result are then compared, and finally multiplied by a standardized "k-value" to yield a properly-scaled result: the size of the ratings change from the game you just played.

The CC recalculates player rating changes after each game during a tournament. So, when we say that "local tournaments have a K-value of 16", what we actually mean is, "each single game played at a local tournament has a K-value of 16."

A single game played at an Exhibition event does not strike me as being a "smaller thing" than a single game played at a traditional timed tournament. So I think an Exhibition game should not have a lower K-value than a timed tournament game. A K of 16 seems like a minimum to me.

If anything, it seems like a somewhat bigger thing, since, as you say, it could end in 45 minutes, but could also end in 6 hours (and, in all likelihood, is probably going to settle out at about 90 minutes). Also, since all the marbles for the event are decided in that single game, it feels to me like a somewhat bigger deal than any single game at a tournament. Boosting the K by a measly 6 points, to 22, seemed like a good balance to me -- but that was an arbitrary choice, and anything from 16 to 27 would still strike me as reasonable.
And achievements for playing a particular kind of deck currently involve some commitment. My particular perspective involves a lot of online tournaments, where after I've decided on a particular deck, I need to play it without modification for a month. Even without online, it's still 3 or 4 games with this deck in order to earn the achievement. Why should someone be able to get the same result from just a single game?
This is a good point, and I hadn't thought of it in those terms. I need to consider further.

However, my first reaction is that this isn't the right way to look at it. As you say, you have to commit to a given deck for a month in order to get an achievement for it. Most local groups also run events on a roughly-monthly schedule, so, if you want an achievement, you have to commit to a particular deck for that month. Since Exhibitions are restricted, so you can only play one per month, the same length of commitment is involved. That strikes me, at least, as fair -- although I can see where you're coming from.

A couple of loose alternative thoughts: Perhaps Exhibitions would have Exhibition-specific achievements. Or, perhaps Exhibition players could have access to the various "played with..." achievements but not the corresponding "won with..." achievements (since you're bound to win more Exhibitions than traditional timed tournaments).

Thanks again for your thoughts. Please keep them coming!
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By nobthehobbit (Daniel Pareja)
 - The Center of the Galaxy
 -  
Moderator
#359282
BCSWowbagger wrote:Magic tournament "matches" have a recommended 50-minute time limit (adjustable by the tournament director). A match is a best-of-three set of games. A typical game of casual Magic takes about 15 minutes, as I understand it. So Magic allows enough time for three typical games (the maximum length of a match), then adds 5 minutes. I'm sure people hit the time limit, but I at least suspect the time limit is not the omnipresent concern it is for 1E.
There is actually a warping effect in Magic: play too slowly too often and you'll start accruing game losses (or even match losses). The definition of "slow play" further makes some decks effectively unplayable. For instance, look up the "Four Horsemen" deck; if there were no time limit, you'd see a lot more people playing that deck. (The issue with that deck is that it sets up a loop that is guaranteed to achieve a winning game state at some point, but not in finite time.)
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By commdecker (Matthew Zinno)
 - Gamma Quadrant
 -  
Arbiter
Community Contributor
#359286
not for you, since I know you know this, Matt
Ah, you overestimate me. :) I certainly didn't remember/appreciate that the number you say in that sentence applies to each game rather than each tournament. Withdrawn.
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Shipping Manager
By SirDan (Dan Hamman)
 - Shipping Manager
 -  
ibbles  Trek Masters Tribbles Champion 2023
#359291
I think this is fascinating. As someone who now has difficulty devoting a full day to a local event, a single game would incentivise me into making new decks to play, certainly more frequently than I do now.

I'm on board for what you've described as far as ratings, limits per month and per player. Achievements I can go either way on - you are correct that the "win with" achievements would be a lot easier with a 1-match event, but play with should be fair game.

:thumbsup:
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By Shepard (Matt Carroll)
 - Beta Quadrant
 -  
#359325
Speaking as someone who lives in a pretty isolated part of the Romulus region with (so far) only 1 other person fully sold on the game that I can play with regularly (and a few other potential converts), I think this is a great idea in principle. The idea presented here seems to strike a pretty good balance between keeping it fun while incentivising deck experimentation and also rewarding people for casual, but still somewhat serious, play.
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By PantsOfTheTalShiar (Jason Tang)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#359637
I like it. Once per month is perfect, but only twice per year per opponent seems a bit low. I would double that so you only have to wait 3 months between matches with a particular opponent. That would match the player diversity of a 4-player playgroup.

For ratings, it's probably safest to keep the K what it is for locals. If someone's interested in Exhibition, I imagine they probably just care that the games count, and don't need them to count MORE than a tournament game.

For achievements, an Exhibition game or win could just count as 1/3 of a tournament play or tournament win. Or maybe 1/4 is better, since playing the same opponent multiple times should probably count because it's better for isolated groups and easier to implement on the back end. Maybe they shouldn't be eligible for previously unearned achievements, then, though, since that would have higher incentive for abuse.

I'm sure there are ways to abuse it, but I'm pretty sure there are ways to abuse the current tournament system.

I especially like the idea of Online Exhibition, because then players could allow spectators. If there's enough demand for it, it could be its own separate league system.

Playing games of Trek = fun. Finishing games of Trek = more fun.
 
By razzy (Sidney Thomerson)
 - Alpha Quadrant
 -  
#359720
I really like this idea. It would be a great tool for teaching and recruiting new players. I can even see myself getting our local playgroup together and organizing two or three parallel exhibition matches at the local game store in lieu of a regular tournament. Running with no time limit would definitely encourage me to build and use some of the more ponderous but fun decks that are simply not fast enough to be competitive in the current format.

I would definitely rename the format Grudge Match though. "Oh, you may have beat me at the tournament, but I'm calling you out! I demand a rematch! Grudge Match in two weeks! Be there or suffer my eternal derision! "That sort of thing.
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By kingmj4891 (Matthew King)
 - Delta Quadrant
 -  
#380017
I love this idea, I used to love playing causal games but the my location does not help. Also the site could do better in helping set up casual online games.

I have probably at least 10-20 decks or deck ideas that just would never work in tournament environment due to time or other weirdness, but this would allow them to get played. If I do see this becoming a thing, it would be great.



I do see a few issues.

-I like the limit once per month rule but the same player only once every six month could possibly be reduced to 3 months or 4 times a year.

-The K Value should be lower than a regular event, possibly as low as half, in order to keep regular events meaningful and to protect against people from padding their ratings.

- On padding stats we should at least monitor games against family members, I am all for getting family involved but it could easily abused.

-All games should be registered on the CC either before hand or require results to be reported in a reasonable amount of time (say 24-72 hours afterwards). I think it would be bad if players ended up entering results a month or two after it actually happened.

Other ideas to add to the format.

-Obviously giving raffle tickets out to winner of each game would cause issues, but what if there were tickets randomly distributed to those that participated in an exhibition format game once a month. It could be either a fixed amount or variable based on number of unique players playing the format.

-The CC could have special themed scenario events/achievements revolving around exhibition format. Classics like Fed vs Borg and Dominion War would be cool but think about what else could be done Kirk vs Khan, Voyager Vs Borg/Kazon/Hirogeon, Klingon Civil War, Insurrection and Nemesis themed all have appeal to me and there could be many many more.
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