There's been three recent blogs by Purplegoo, Chavo, and DukeTyrion on the 4 minute rule, all giving very different perspectives. I actually think they're all correct, and I'm now attempting to give a fourth perspective that ties them together.

To surmise,
Purplegoo: It's in the rulebook, but the convention has always been to ignore it.
Chavo: Some people are painfully slow, and something needs to be done about it.
DukeTyrion: Rules are rules and should be followed, grey areas lead to problems.
Irgy: The central cause of the conflict is the fact that the 4 minute rule in question is simply a badly implemented rule.

How could a badly implemented rule lasted through all the iterations of the rulebook? Because the overriding convention has always been to ignore it. The fact that it doesn't suit the majority of people has never been an issue before because that majority of people have never had to play it.

Why do I say it's badly implemented? Well there's some indirect but fairly strong evidence, which is the fact that most people prefer not to use it almost all of the time. People like Chavo want to use it against painfully slow players, but still prefer to ignore it the rest of the time. People like DukeTyrion follow it because it's a rule, but they'd do that whether it was a good rule or not. Everyone else prefers to ignore it completely. Not a sign of a good rule is it?

But, rather than rely on that strong but indirect evidence, I'm going to explain exactly what's wrong with it. People often compare argue in it's favour by comparing it to the chess clock, so let's do that. In chess, players get a pool of time for the whole game. It's given to them at the start and they can spend it how they wish. Time is sometimes added on per turn as well, but the key difference is that time they don't spend on one turn can be spent on another. Sounds like a small difference? Well, it's not.

Firstly, in order to play under the 4 minute rule, people need to develop a time management skill to ensure they never, ever go over 4 minutes on a crucial turn. This is actually quite a difficult skill to develop. Sure, most of the time playing within 4 minutes is trivial. But on those highly complicated turns when it's not, it can be very difficult. By evidence of DukeTyrion's blog, there is at least one highly skilled and experienced coach who does not have it. In contrast, learning to play under a game-global time limit is a lot easier. The crucial difference is you have all the choice in the world of which aspect of your play to speed up. You just have to generally play faster, which is what people want. There's no sudden contrast between most turns when you have all the time in the world, and the difficult turns when you suddenly have to change the way you think and play.

Secondly, it interacts badly with real life. Which is the biggest mistake any rule can make. Playing online, people go afk and get distracted. This is a fact of playing online. If you have a 2 minute distraction with a 40 minute global time limit, it's pretty easy to manage. If you have a 2 minute distraction on a 4 minute turn, it's a problem. So the convention is not to time out for AFK. But it's wide open to abuse. Imagine I go AFK for 2 minutes, come back, play for 3 minutes. Now I have to proove that I was afk for 2 minutes and they only gave me 1 extra. What a way to spoil a game. Conversely, I want more time to think, and I type "brb, phone". Sit and think for a couple of minutes, play on, and get myself extra time that I don't "deserve". With a global time limit there's not such a need to make an awkward and both-ways abusable compromise for distractions. It just comes out of your total time and you have to deal with it. But because it is a global time, it's much much easier to deal with it.

Thirdly, the psychology of the timeout button is awful. It presents people with a choice to press it or not, and straight away you have a grey area. People are supposedly within their rights to press it, but most people feel like a prick for doing so. Any time you're timed out you know for sure your opponent chose to press the button and screw you over. The best way to fix this is to make it automatic, but that can't be done because of the afk issues above.

Fourthly, it's not even that good at acheiving it's goal of making people play faster. Making people have to think less about what they're doing is not a positive goal in itself, there's very few people who want that. Blood bowl is about fantasy football, about strategy, managing risks, playing the odds and reacting to unexpected situations. It's not about mental time management and making fast real time decisions. The only good thing the rule acheives is making games finish faster. The time allowed per turn then is based on the longest time anyone should usually need to play their turn. So then every turn is allowed to take as long as the slowest turns should take. Most of the time, people aren't forced to play any faster. By comparison, 4 minutes a turn is 64 minutes you need to allow for your opponent's turns. With, for instance, a 40 minute time limit people would be less time constrained overall, thanks to saving up time from their short turns, while having the total time you need to allow for significantly smaller as well.

So, there's at least a few reasons why it's a badly implemented rule, particularly compared to a global game time limit like the chess clocks people compare it to. It's only still in the rulebook specifically because it's such a bad rule that most people have just ignored it, so it's never really been raised as something to improve on. So why don't we respect the opinions of Purplegoo's majority who ignore it, and solve Chavo's problem of slow players with a rule that doesn't create DukeTyrion's disliked grey areas. A global time limit is not necessarily the only solution (indeed the previous solution of an extra time buffer also solved most of the problems) but I hope I've explained some of the reasons why it's at least one example of something a lot better.