The only reason this is a topic that is popping up so much now is because of how egregious the delay has become in the latest update. This is not a new issue, it is one Blizzard has allowed to persist and for years, and is long overdue for a different resolution.
BLUF: Blizzard needs to redo how the timer operates for buy phase and set it to start after the last fight has concluded, rather than at the start of combat. This can be helped by forcing increased combat speeds to fit all animations into a specific time window.
I’ve seen the blue post talking about how they try to “normalize the time when detecting FPS drops to support players on slower connections.”
My wife and I play duo’s very often when we’re doing battlegrounds. If one of us is playing on the phone, that person is always finishing combat up to 30s after the other regardless of what kind of connection we’re on. If we both play on the computer using the same internet on ethernet connections single player matches still don’t make it out of combat at the same time because WHAT we are fighting plays a bigger role due to animation speeds rather than when the match “should” end. The timer for the buy phase is always shifted based on how long it took for our teams to finish combat, longer fights removing more time from buy phases. Maybe it’s supposed to be considered incentive to build comps that can end combat faster, but that’s not always feasible, possible, or desirable based on what that person is trying to put on their board and how nice RNJesus decided to be today.
The explosive reaction happening right now is because there’s so much focus put into animations that entire turns are being skipped or (if you arrive with minimal time on the clock for buy phase) your game freezes or crashes so you can’t do anything anyway. Some players elect to close the game as soon as the fight starts and come back just to skip the bs. This shouldn’t be necessary, and for players who end up on those slower connections talked about, you can’t always reconnect even if you didn’t actually die in the fight.
If normalizing times is the goal, it’s obviously not just FPS drops that need to be a criteria. Rather than start the buy phase timer at the start of combat, either start it at the end of all players combat, or set an internal timer to each match to force increased animation speeds when a fight goes on too long. For example, if an internal timer was set to enter the buy phase after 60s, either set it up so the total length of all possible animations is shortened to fit in this window, or insert a function that would progressively increase the speed of the animations as time went on to reach the same point.
The frogs have always just been annoying and exhausting since they were introduced back in 21 and they aren’t better now, but the frogs themselves have never been the actual problem.