The
news released today confirmed a lot of details about VGC 2017. The most interesting part of this to me is the existence of a "10-minute player time system". While vague, a
separate article goes into a bit more detail, though it still leaves some questions unanswered. The relevant bit about the timer is:
“Your Time” System for Rating Battles
A new system being introduced to the battle time settings is “Your Time.” When using this method of time accounting, players will have a maximum of 60 seconds each turn to select a move or Pokémon, and they will also each be awarded 10 minutes of “Your Time.” Under these rules, if a player runs out of their 10 minutes before the battle ends, that player loses the match. This will mean matches can be decided more quickly than in the past, allowing players to enjoy thrilling battles.
The time rules are (probably intentionally) left vague to the exact mechanics of the battle timer. There are a number of interpretations, which are the following:
A: The clock runs during move animations
B: The clock does not run during move animations with a separate time cap for games
C: The clock does not run during move animations with a separate time cap for rounds
D: The clock does not run during move animations without a separate time cap for rounds
Each of these scenarios has some unpleasant side effects for live VGC events.
The clock runs during move animations
In this interpretation of the timer rules, a player who gains a lead on time but would lose if the game were extended to have no time control would win. An example of why this is problematic can be seen in this game featuring Simple Beam, Minimize, Stockpile, and Psych Up.
http://replay.pokemonshowdown.com/battlespotdoubles-450323120
In past vgc rulesets, strategies like this are unviable because a player taking 45 seconds per turn can stall out 15 minutes of clock before the Minimize user can set up their sweep. A better example is a combination of Markus' tweet and the Muk team, where a Simple Chansey sets up Minimizes and spams Softboiled until the game ends; I don't have any replays available of that team in action but it exists. Anyway, if the player can ensure that the game reaches timer, the fact that an equal amount of time is burned from each player during moves would award the win to whichever player moved more quickly. This means that if a maxed out evasion Chansey can make it to the end of a game against 4 Pokemon, it wins the battle 1-4 assuming that the Chansey user played to their win condition of "make moves as quickly as possible".
This interpretation is the most likely in my opinion (others strongly disagree on it), and isn't inherently damaging to the circuit. However, it gives stalling tactics a large boost to viability, which both makes the game boring to watch and competitively less interesting. Players would adapt to evasion being commonplace, the game would become less fun in my opinion, but tournaments would run smoothly, albeit with the addition of a lot of extra salt directed at missed moves. Playing quickly/rushing moves to prevent falling behind on time may become a common strategy, and may cause more misplays/sloppy game management than we've seen in the past even if evasion is not played much.
- Interpretation B: Useless Clock is Useless
The clock does not run during move animations with a separate time cap for games
In this scenario, the game clock would still end the game after a set period of time, the individual time cap for players would act as an extra lose condition. This is the interpretation which would be closest to the old set of rules. It depends completly on numbers for the game clock to decide if this system has problems but it's hard to imagine the game clock being less than 20 minutes. With a 15 minute game clock, a player would only be required to experience 5 minutes of animations per battle, which could see games end on timer in as few as 10 turns (especially if animations are as lengthy... Z-Moves have indicated that long animations will continue to be a recurring theme). A clock of 20 minutes with a 10 minute turn timer is a pretty good compromise competitively, but that gives up 5 extra minutes per battle over the gen 6 timer, and Regionals already have a tendency to run long with 15 minute games. An extra potential 15 minutes per round over 8 rounds of swiss is an extra 2 hours to play out a tournament. To take the most recent regional in Phoenix for an example, Swiss on Saturday started at 11:30am and ended at 7:50pm. Adding an extra couple hours onto the event doesn't make it unplayable but it's definitely more of a grinding, stamina-based tournament. A clock over 20 minutes makes regionals more of a slog than they would be otherwise, as maintaining razor-sharp focus over 12 hours is a difficult feat.
It's hard to say how this interpretation of the clock mechanics would end up, because of the unknown length of time games will last. However, the change seems pretty unnecessary in most interpretations, and the move timer would simply exist as a loss condition people rarely hit. 10 minutes over the course of an individual 4v4 doubles game is a lot of time. I would prefer this interpretation of the 10 minute move clock to any of the others, probably with a 16-18 minute game clock (because a 15 minute clock is too easily stalled I think). I don't think it's likely that GameFreak would put 3 different timers on the screen to keep track of (your time, your opponent's time, and the game time) though.
- Interpretation C: We TCG Boys
The clock does not run during move animations with a separate time cap for rounds
This interpretation would probably require Judges to call games when the round hit time. We might see an introduction of the "3 turn rule",
which for those not familiar with TCG means that the game will end after 3 turns have passed (whoever has the lead on prizes is declared the victor) [edit: apparently the 3 turn rule states that if no one has taken all of the prizes the game is a draw, so the comparison isn't as strong.] The consequences from this would probably mean both players click run to activate tiebreakers or judges walk around to unfinished battles to manually apply tiebreakers. If there were too many matches for all of the judges to get to in the 60 seconds before everyone's games auto-selected a move for them that could lead to some comical scenarios over judges running around the room to quickly determine game states... but mostly I'm not a fan of the fact that a third game in a bo3 could be determined with a different ruleset from the first two (because of the potential for the game to be decided on tiebreakers rather than play ingame). There's also the potential for a set to be dragged out long enough that tiebreakers are applied in the second game of a bo3, resulting in a draw. Draws exist in TCG and aren't inherently bad, but, I'd prefer to have them be nearly impossible in scenarios that don't include mirror matches.
I don't think this scenario is very likely, it would create awkward logistics for live tournaments and only seems likely as an ad hoc solution to interpretation D. Given the choice between interpretation C and D I would prefer C, but I still don't like it.
- Interpretatation D: Stall is Life
The clock does not run during move animations without a separate time cap for rounds
This is the conclusion I jumped to upon seeing the rules. The only end to the game is through mons fainting or either player spending 10 minutes to make their moves over the course of a game. An autopilot stall team with this interpretation of the timer mechanics is free to spend 50+ turns setting up its win condition as long as it selects moves quickly. This isn't bad competitively; I like stall as a playstyle, but issues arise when a game takes a half hour to complete. It's not unreasonable to spend twice as long watching move animations, and in best of 3 swiss, if one person takes an hour and a half to complete their matches, 8 rounds of Swiss could extend from a long but reasonable 8.5 hours to an unreasonable 14+ hours of swiss. Perhaps some of their sets might be quick wins, or they might win or lose 2-0, but it's not unlikely that individual bo3s could extend for more than an hour. The fact that everyone in the tournament has to wait for every match in the last round to finish before the next round can commence is what makes this interpretation undesirable. To summarize,
https://twitter.com/NailsOU/status/783353800988000260
I hope it's clear that I
really hope that this option does not come to reality.
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Please let me know if I forgot something about the timer. I definitely could be missing an important detail but I haven't come up with what I'm missing. Also, I feel like I should state that outside of edge cases, I generally don't mind/like the addition of the Chess Timer. In standard games where players are racing to knock out the opponent's pokemon, the timer rewards playing quickly and not using your full time, which is a nice touch. However, I also liked the timer in VGC 16, as it allowed for very interesting endgames where you had to carefully manage where your damage went to secure kills and win on tiebreakers. I feel like the change is unnecessary and causes more issues than it fixes. I hope I'm forgetting something, but every interpretation of the timer I could come up with seems like it has a lot of problems.