i don't feel like 8 minutes is ever really necessarily, i have really never had a game over 3-4 minutes.

6 mins imo is a good timer. this game is too fast for 8 mins we just copy pasted it from another ruleset rofl

How many stocks do you guys play? 3? I usually do 5 min for 3 stocks.

imo 3 stock/8 minutes is fine. There are a couple of matchups that actually need the time to play it out, that being said this game wouldn't be bad w. 4 stock/8 minutes either. Less than... 6 is def too short though.

Glad someone made a post as I was going to do one soon. Anyways, the standard is 8 mins and 4 stocks.

We should bring the time down to 6 mins, as characters die a whole lot sooner than they used to. No more draggy fights. ( Only when we have two zooner or spacey characters fighting)

I've had almost-timeouts with 7 minutes that felt fairly fast-paced, so I'd be uncomfortable with 6 minutes: it's very doable to time out when neither player was camping, which feels imposed and is anti-hype.

What TCS said. I've been having way more slow-paced games especially vs some players and characters (Hardknockday's Megaman, for example). I've hit multiple time outs since the inception of Beta, and I have not timed out a single time in my 1.5 years of 9b.

With the general reduction of killpower, I have a hard time seeing where the call for lower time limit comes from. In fact, I would recommend the complete opposite.

A lot of people I have talked to have wanted a 3 stock 6/7 minute match instead due to how prolonged games have become especially when both players are playing completely for the win. I talked to DE about this and we decided to keep it at 4 stocks 8 minutes unless experience suggests a major change is needed.

4stocks extend the match too much also on 0.9b the kills were easy but now its more floaty and difficult to get the stock soo I play 3

I honestly do think lowering the stock count to 3 would be ok, matches are often going past 3 minutes left for me, and I'm playing aggressively the whole time. Maybe 3 stocks 7 minutes.

Just like the beginning months of v0.9b, people don't seemed to be used to the new punish game yet. As well as online needing to be tooned to be a bit more stable so players execution can be more consistent. Match-up will become longer for a while, especailly when you factor in slowdowns and shifts. Playing at 3-stocks (online) for now could be a good move, but lower time is insensible.

While this game is pretty fast, we are unoptimized in a adjusted game. In addition, there are still plenty of slow-paced characters that extend the length of the match to easily reach 6~ minutes. Much like in Melee, the long timer is for our slower match-ups to not end in timeouts (Zelda, Jigglypuff, Pac-Man, Mega-Man, Issac), not for our faster MUs (Fox, Marth, Falcon, Falco, Sheik, etc.).

The problem I'm seeing with slow matches is that players are incapable of turning a win in the neutral into a proper punish. It makes sense that games are way slower now, due to players needing to get used to the changes and figure out the optimal playstyles for their respective characters. Double this, due to the rapid influx of players from other games who don't exactly know what they're doing just yet, and you have a meta that plays out like 2002 Melee. I refuse to accept that a problem exists unless the community is able to provide hard evidence that 4 stocks 8 minutes is bad. Reducing things now is only going to hurt the metagame later if the game gets faster and people refuse to change it back because "this is what I'm used to".

I'm looking at you, Sm4sh community.

Exactly my thoughts. Give a 4-stock 8-min timer some time for people to get used to new punishes. If it turns out after a large number of tournaments that 4 stocks is too long, then we should talk about trimming back the stocks and the time. I might just be too used to 4 stocks, but a lot of the time I feel like 3 stocks just ends abruptly; it's too short. In recent games it still felt nice because there were plenty of neutral game interactions to show who was the better player, but that was usually because I couldn't convert into big damage (thus I HAD to win neutral more often in order to close out a game). I'm sure they would feel unbelievably short if players could get 30-50% off of a neutral game win, take a neutral win into a combo to death, or even just secure an edgeguard most of the time.

EDIT: I also wanted to mention that due to the inherent nature of an online connection, matches are going to feel slower. In an offline setting, the pace is firmly grounded in real-time. It feels faster. There's a huge difference in pacing, and that's something stock/timer should try to account for when coming up with a universal ruleset, in my opinion.