Perhaps the most notable change was the alteration to SG3, changing the starting time of endgame from 30 seconds to 15 seconds remaining.
I can clearly see at least some of the logic behind this change. Matches have already practically ended in the first seconds. 30 seconds is more than enough time for high-tier teams to double park and be done with the match. In which case the match would be practically over with 20 seconds left. So, I can understand why this change would be made. I’m not going to make any arguments in this thread against that change and I’d appreciate it if nobody else did either.
However, the 30 second mark was a natural time for the endgame to begin. Every tournament I have been to already has the warning noise at 30 seconds remaining in the match. It has been that way for every tournament I have ever gone to even before Tipping Point. This not only alerted drive team members and audience members to a significant change in possible rulings, but it also alerted the referees to the fact that it was now 30 seconds remaining. They didn’t have to worry about keeping an eye on the clock and could focus on making the right calls.
So I suppose I have a request. It seems irrational to expect referees to watch the time remaining and watch for violations at the same time, and teams often tend to push that time limit to the edge (especially when desperate for another mogo). Could TM or whatever control software Worlds will use have a noise added to play at the 15 second mark? Or just move the one at the 30 second mark to play at the 15 second mark. I feel like such a critical rule, with so many instances of violations, that can swing match scores dramatically or DQ teams, at least deserves the warning that we’ve had all season.
Maybe this has already been considered, but I felt like it was important to bring up.
This is a good idea, but are you sure that it hasn’t already been implemented? I would hope the people running the tournament would think of this beforehand.
I think that it is definitely something that could have been thought of. But I had heard nothing about something like this. The 30 second noise existed before Tipping Point, so I was not sure that they would change it.
I can confirm that the 30 second sound in TM was moved to 15 seconds for Worlds a while ago. Right now it’s a Worlds-specific change, but including it in the public release of TM post-Worlds isn’t much of an issue if that’s what people want and if the GDC is OK with it (offhand I don’t know if there’s further official TP events after Worlds - if not then I suspect the GDC doesn’t care either way).
I think the most general solution would be to make it one of the Match Times/ Match Durations parameters so it can be changed easily - 15 second, 20 second, …
I usually have my team mates make it abundantly clear that I should not ram into the other teams platform. The change in the timing of the warning is nice however, dispite me never hearing it.
Here are the game files with the end game timer changed to 15 seconds left in the match. To use these, simply extract the contents of the zip file to the Games folder of your Tournament Manager installation, overwriting the Tipping Point files in that folder.
I don’t think it’s a huge deal, but there’s a small caveat that once you use a patched TM to open a database (either new or existing), the warning sound will be stuck at 15 seconds, there’s no reverting a TM database back to 30 seconds.
