Hammering out a Fifty Turn Rule proposal

If you cared to read the OP, you would know that draw requests are irrelevant here no matter what you or other people may wish. There are other threads to discuss other topics. Welcome to Foruming 101.
Where in the OP does it say that only the 50 turn rule may be brought up? If anyone disagrees with the 50 turn rule, it only makes sense to suggest an alternative which may or may not involve a suggest draw feature. Again, if you would care to read, a suggest draw feature is being brought up not as a replacement for a force draw policy, but as a complement to make it more effective.

While an endless battle thread does also exist, it would be a pretty idiotic waste of time to only post a rebuttal here and post the part where an alternative is suggested in the other thread (is this what you are suggesting?). That would just unnecessarily lead to the overall discussion being harder to follow. People having to reply to one part of the argument on one thread and the second part on the other, or possibly even missing out on one part of it. The end goal of all of us here is to come up with a rule or combination of rules to deal with the issue of endless battles, and this sort of pedantry is simply distracting from the actual discussion. If someone who moderates this forum comes in and says to move this discussion back to the other thread, then so be it, but if you have nothing to contribute to this thread other than derailing the discussion with your mini-modding, it would be better if you didn't post at all.
 
Neutral:
"1000 turn limit"
:
There is little downside to this, but it is not very useful for ladder matches. One thousand turns may be okay for important tournaments, but frankly it is so long that a ladder player would consider forfeiting ten times over before getting to the draw.

Utilizing different draw rules for ladder games and tournaments, however, is an ugly solution. I'd prefer if there was additional clauses that allow drawing the game if at least one player wants it, as pointed out by Eien. (See the quote at the end.)

If those terms are unacceptable for tournament play, the tournament rules should state that both players have to reject optional draws.

(Edit: If we pick lower turn limits, we can see the problem with this kind of rule is that it's not correlated to the game state. It will tie a game at 6-6 just as it will tie games where you've gained a significant advantage. This means that the turn limit has to be very high, to err on the side of caution. You have to sit through many turns of a stalled game.)

Against:
"10 turns without pp usage"
:
This rule is easy to play around, and allows maliciously extending the game. As I said in my last post, if you keep switching with an Amoonguss and a Toxapex you have a sum total of 200pp and can keep the rule from triggering for up to 2000 turns.

This version of the rule is not practical as it only ends the game if both players agree.

This is going in the right direction:
"X turns without a KO"
:
This is the most competitive of the rules presented so far. Not a lot of ways to play around it and maliciously extend games beyond where they should be tied.*
It ties games around when they get stalled, when no player can press an advantage.

*: Sacrificing a Pokemon is always a major disadvantage, and it should allow the other player to close out the game if attempted.

---

The well-known fifty-move rule in chess is opt-in. A user must call for it to be enforced. However, there is a further rule that goes beyond fifty-move rule that is automatic and required. Whether or not we allow fifty-move rule or any other rule to be enforced or automatic, there should still be a final rule that is absolute in order to prevent any endless battle. For the record, this rule activated on by enforcing both a seventy-five-move rule and a fivefold repetition rule, which is to say it's simply a more extreme version of the other two rules.
 
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Zarel

Not a Yuyuko fan
is a Site Content Manageris a Battle Simulator Administratoris a Programmeris a Pokemon Researcheris an Administrator
Creator of PS
Ciele's post, with 32 Likes and zero disagreement:

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/endless-battle-issues.3596079/page-2#post-7430442

Yes, that would have forced the ABR-Tele game to be a tie, but there's no reason why we have to respect the play in that game as a potential win condition in the first place. It's not even possible to perform in a game played on cartridge, and yet, here we are forcing countless games to be played until someone disconnects just to keep it in our game.
For a moment there, I had hope that we could all agree on games not lasting five hours, but apparently I was wrong. Most people seem to be converging on "1000 turn limit, no other rules".

For the record, when I was using 1000 turns = 5 hours, it was a conservative estimate. The last time I actually saw a near-endless game on the ladder, I think it was 600 turns and lasted 4 hours. So 1000 turns is probably closer to 7 hours.

If that is really the consensus for the only rule you want, I might need to add a warning to OU battles, "make sure you have 7 hours free before you click Search Battle, otherwise you might want to play BSS instead". But I really don't want to do that. Please please please come up with a better rule than that.

It feels like you guys seriously aren't even trying, because you're too distracted by trying to convince me to adopt an "offer draw" button. Maybe the best solution is to split this into two threads. I'm going to do that, actually.

New thread at: https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/endless-stall-clause.3610486/
 

Zarel

Not a Yuyuko fan
is a Site Content Manageris a Battle Simulator Administratoris a Programmeris a Pokemon Researcheris an Administrator
Creator of PS
So, Zarel, you did make one particularly important point.

I entirely agree with you that there is no proper way to prevent long battles while also not wrongly detecting endless games with a force draw rule. So if we had to pick a side, I think almost everyone would rather err on the side of caution in this regard, having a very distant/rare force draw criteria so we don't prematurely end games that can end.
Would they, though? Ciele's post got 32 Likes and zero objections, and it pretty clearly says that they would rather err on the side of not having games last forever.

Remember, we're trying to get this done for an Official Ladder Tournament. Is it really reasonable to expect games in a ladder tournament (where people will have to play many games) to last seven hours?

I know that you said "needing request draws is a symptom of an improper force draw rule." Well, you're right. But it's not our rule that's bad, it's the nature of the game we play, and the nature of trying to build a rule around its flaws. There is no possible force draw ruleset that perfectly detects endless games in a reasonable timeframe that also doesn't wrongfully end games. So, to compensate for this natural imperfection, we can add a request draw rule. Especially because the force draw rule leans to the side of tackling endless games, not just long games, there is very good reason to let people prevent long games if they so incline.

Summation: So, the 1000 turn cap is in place to prevent truly endless games from going on and on, and almost never forcefully ends games against the wishes of the players. Even so, 1000 is quite a large number, and as such, 2 players may feel they don't want to wait fully until the 1000 turn cap, and rightfully so. But since we can't compromise the cap, we can add a secondary function: the request draw. The request draw solves the natural imperfection of a force draw rule, and allows players a shortcut if they mutually agree upon it.
I want to thank you for at least acknowledging my concerns.

Still, though, I think you might be underestimating how important my concerns are. Under your proposal, timerstallers can drag games out for over seven hours (1000 turns times 30 seconds/turn is 8 hours 20 minutes) simply by running out the timer and clicking "no" every time their opponent clicks "offer draw".

That is a really big problem to me. That's the problem I made (well, asked someone to make) this thread to solve, and your proposal doesn't solve it. I really want a fix for that. Can you help me with that? I don't know whether or not you've thought about how to solve that problem, but if you could spend more time thinking about how to solve it, I would really appreciate that.
 

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