If you want to skip past my introductory background information/general complaints, go to the paragraph that follows the title "COMPLAINTS."
I understand why one might want to implement a PvP timer. In the 2nd Age, I wrote a guide for Final Bastion (then Duelist101) about how to play as a jade death using Bad Juju. I also wrote a few guides about midlevel balance and fire, and ended the 2nd Age as the highest rated max level balance wizard. I did not purposely stall while playing on anything other than my death wizard, and I can certainly say that stalling was very frustrating to deal with. However, a 30 minute timer is absolutely too short and the fact that matches are decided by Diego is just offensive.
Whenever I come back to PvP, which I admittedly do so only intermittently because I am much busier these days, I notice immediately that the "meta" is much, much faster paced than I am used to. On my legendary fire, I play with max heal boost and run a balance mastery. However, I have no intention of stalling my opponent or "griefing." On one of my guides, I explained how running with high heal boost just makes healing more efficient so that dedicating more time to controlling via debuffs/buffs and doing more damage becomes possible. (If I only need to spend half as many turns healing as my opponent, I can spend more turns doing other things.) However, this doesn't mean that I end matches quickly. My playstyle revolves around building an advantage by using debuffs (like shields and infections), putting up my minions, and thereby using my pips more efficiently than my opponent. It is impossible to consistently win with this sort of playstyle within 30 minutes unless my opponent doesn't know what they're doing. Note that I say "consistently" because it is not impossible to get any wins in this way within 30 minutes, but because I cannot do anything to guarantee a win every time.
COMPLAINTS (and other thoughts)
1. The 30 minute timer does not readily translate to a certain number of turns. Some spell animations last longer than others. This makes it very hard to understand roughly how many more turns I can utilize before Diego comes out.
2. If one player is in a losing position, they can start waiting until the last second to pick their spells and thus "run out" the timer. I have personal experience with this. The first day I played after the timer was implemented, I was two turns away from having a guaranteed win, but because my opponent stalled the timer, I did not get the win (and because my opponent did more damage than me, or maybe because my Power Links healed me more than he healed himself, or for whatever reason really, Diego decided that I should not win the match, despite the fact that my opponent was at less than 100 health and I had 4 pips to use).
3. I am not sure if this sort of thing will be fixed by the new queue, but now I simply cannot win against a sufficiently leveled/geared ice (because I cannot win within 30 minutes). It is no secret that ice wizards have access to enormous fire resist once they can acquire certain crafted items. There are a few consequences of this fact, which somewhat generalize to some broader concerns. 3a. First of all, when one opponent has something like 75-80 resist to their opponent, they can afford to play much more recklessly. An ice wizard is not going to need to play very defensively against my fire wizard at the start of a match because their hits do a lot of damage to me and mine do very little to them. As a result, I must take it slow. If I try to race an ice wizard to the death when I have 50% resist and 3000 health and they have 75% resist and 5000 health, I will lose every time. Unfortunately Diego seems to weight overall damage done quite heavily when deciding who will be victorious, and it is simply inevitable that the ice wizard is going to do more damage than me throughout the entire match. 3b. The damage differential between fire and ice spells is simply not enough to compensate for the resist/health disparity, and these days it's no guarantee that I have more damage/pierce than my ice wizard opponent. So, if I want to win, I must bide my time and slowly develop an advantage. Perhaps I make use of minions to slow down my opponent's momentum, perhaps I use shields to make sure I do not die to a combo, perhaps I use my bubble to get rid of theirs, and perhaps I apply infections so that when I do start putting on the pressure (once I am safe from being combo'd), they can't just heal through my damage. Unless I spend a significant amount of time putting on infections, I will never be able to kill an ice wizard that heals. (Now, one might say that the timer is therefore a good thing. But my point is not that I cannot kill ice wizards as a legendary fire---I can. My point is that I can only do so after investing serious time into putting myself into a better position.)
4. In general, when I win, I do not do so by doing more damage than my opponent. I do so by making sure that my opponent cannot heal as efficiently as me by using infections and paying close attention to my pips. I cannot always make sure that I can build an advantage within 30 minutes. This is particularly true in the current "meta," which is relatively aggressive and quick. Often it takes quite a while for me to build a winning advantage because I have to oscillate between keeping myself alive and poking with small hits and infections. More often than not, if I am not dead within 30 minutes, then I will win within the next 30 minutes. (Of course this is not true against opponents that really do intend to stall.)
5. Wins by Diego should not allocate points/rating. In a situation where one player is 1-5 turns away from winning but loses to Diego, the 30 minute timer already feels particularly frustrating. Making that player actually lose rating points just adds insult to injury. In a situation where neither player wins within whatever arbitrary timer Kingsisle settles on, both players should draw. This would still discourage a stalling playstyle because it would not be possible for a staller to acquire rating by stalling.
6. The 30 minute timer renders many spells "not worth the time." For example, I very much like to make sure that I keep my minion up. This has nothing to do with stalling and everything to do with securing a victory. I cannot spend my very limited turns on minions because they do not do damage. The same thing applies with bubbles. It feels punishing to "bubble war" because it does not satisfy Diego.
7. There are ways to ensure that stalling is not viable which do not rely upon buffing damage to obscene levels or enforcing a completely arbitrary time limit on games. It seems to me like the Kingsisle approach to solving the "jade meta" problem has had three parts: (1) Give players absurd amounts of armor piercing. (2) Give players access to absurdly efficient damage-per-pip abilities. (3) Give players access to higher amounts of damage. The problem with this approach is that it didn't actually make jading impossible, it just made more nuanced play impossible. Because of the way that damage reduction works in this game, a sufficiently skilled staller will find a way to stall no matter how ridiculous damage/pierce become (this is hyperbole of course---please don't make things more absurd). Perhaps as a consequence, and perhaps because this sort of absurd damage profile wasn't as attainable for midlevel players, Kingsisle implemented an arbitrary timer. I repeat---there are other ways to ensure that stalling is not viable. For one thing, a stalling strategy used to be much easier to defeat (at all levels) when spells could be "multiplied" by enchanting them and reshuffling them. I could write a whole other post about why the loss of this mechanic was uniquely terrible for the game's pvp system, but instead I'll just say a few things about it since I'm running out of space. It used to be the case that I could alter my deck dynamically as a match went on. When facing someone of some school, I could multiply my shields to that school so that the ratio of relevant shields to the rest of my deck increased until I was satisfied with it. If I was facing someone who hit really hard, I could multiply my shields and heals to make sure I lived long enough. The big thing---WHEN FACING A STALLER, I COULD MULTIPLY HITS AND INFECTIONS SUCH THAT I HAD ENOUGH DAMAGE/HEALING REDUCTION IN MY DECK TO ENSURE A WIN. These days, particularly at midlevel, I often just straight up lack enough damage to defeat a stalling opponent because I can only carry so many hits and infections in my deck and I can only carry so many reshuffles. What was once a game about dynamically setting up one's deck so that it had the optimal distribution of spells is now a game about suffering "deck fails" without any counterplay. How does this tie into the 30 minute timer? It is just one example of how what I expect was an attempt to inhibit stalling (by, for instance, making sure that Bad Juju could not be multiplied) actually made it stronger. The point is this: stalling was absolutely counterable by a sufficiently good player when players could multiply cards with enchants. This is no longer the case. (And even if players could multiply their spells, it wouldn't matter anymore because who has time to reshuffle now?) Some other suggestions: Implement something like dampening, something that very slowly decreases the amount of healing that each player can do, so that after something like an hour, players really cannot heal much anymore. Give every player access to "Doom and Gloom" and give death a damage bubble.
I understand the need for a timer. There are serious problems with a 30 minute timer. There are other avenues towards a solution. Players can change their playstyles to suit the timer, but only at the cost of half of the game's spells and intrigue.
