I was reading on the comments of the last update from Quake Live, and i have had this discussion in the cpm community before, about timeouts especially timeouts when playing a duel.

When you play a duel you have to be aware of many things, you keep track of certain item times, while having other items and routines done unconciously. A duel is usually 10 minutes, when someone does a timeout i usually am surprised, and what happens then is i lose track of pretty much everything in the game, this happens because its a sudden and unforeseen thing out of my hands that just happened, in the same league of spilling coffee on your keyboard. You lose track and you lose the timings and feel of the game. All this happens because some other player can directly influence your game because HE have problems that makes him want to do a timeout. However the timeout is not a surprise to him, as he knows he is going to do it. Is it really fair to put your enemy off his game completely by doing one or more timeouts in a 10-15 minute game? By playing thousands of duels i've seen this abused so many times, even by good players which i won't mention here.

In the teambased modes i think its a bit different, the timeouts are still very disturbing and annoying because 7 players have to wait for the one guy who has a problem, but its ok when its legit, because being 3on4 in a game like Quake can be quite devastating.

What do you think, am i all wrong?