Approved Embolden timer warnings when they dip below 10 seconds

[Greybaum]

In response to a policy review thread that went up this morning, I'd like to put forward a suggestion for reworking the timer reminders (i.e. PLAYER has [x] seconds left.) to be more visually obvious at lower values by emboldening the font when there are 10 or 5 seconds left.
As it stands, there's no discernable difference between "has 60 seconds left" and "has 10 seconds left", which leads to the messages not being given due attention.
This is further established by how supporters often type "[player] timer" in tour settings; it clearly does a better job of indicating to a player that they should hurry up than the 10 or 5 second automated prompts do.

Emboldening the font to make it more visually distinct should help minimise the amount of timeouts that occur.

Quick edit: highlighting the notifications to give it the yellow backdrop would also help, while also helping prevent some of the turn 1 timeouts that often happen on extremely slow ladders.

 

[DaWoblefet]

I like this idea a lot, especially highlighting. Having a notification of "hey, your time's almost up" if you've been calcing too long, or maybe you started a game on ladder and went afk or something, seems like it'd be very useful.

I'm not sure if bolding would help a whole lot; there's already a visual indicator for low timer that fills it with bright red that I think would stand out more than bold in chat would. I don't think it hurts, but I think highlighting would be far more effective.

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However I do think an implementation should be nuanced. You wouldn't want to say, be highlighted 4 turns in a row for having 10 seconds remaining if you're actively clicking each of those turns. Perhaps something like this?

Highlight the player when they have 10 seconds remaining, if they waited at least 20 seconds this turn.​

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or​

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Highlight the player when they have 10 seconds remaining, unless they have been highlighted for low timer in the last 10 turns.​

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"20 seconds" and "10 turns" are just numbers I picked off the top of my head, but you hopefully get the idea.

 

[Greybaum]

I agree with all of the above. The first solution you proposed sounds ideal to me; getting repeated highlights isn't something I necessarily see as a bad thing if the player is consistently hovering around 30 total seconds, and this would prevent it from being disruptive in Blitz formats.
I brought up bolding the text because I considered it to be the simplest way to distinguish between the timer warnings, but highlighting is probably enough, you're right. Thanks for considering the suggestion!