Refund added time, or give partial time?

These are tournament games and I cannot control what the settings are. Further extending everyone to 36 or 48 hours (if available) will extend the game length most likely. We should still have a sense of urgency, but be able to protect against unforeseen circumstances.

I am talking about edge cases and not something that happens every game for me. I just know I like to keep mine in case needed, but sometimes my partner gets down to say 2 hours left, and I have to go to bed, so rather than risk them missing their turn I extend. Then they take their turn in an hour and I have wasted it.

I think DoughBoy is right. I like the idea of a reserve time of say 15-20 hours, and only the exact amount of time you exceed will be automatically subtracted from your reserve, when you take your turn a bit too late. >> Still keeping the 'add time system' as it is, for when you know for sure you will be largely too late to take your turn in time.

PS (edit): in team games it might be a team time reserve (multiplying what I said above) for example a pair should have let'say 30-40 hours of reserve time.

I'm still trying to figure out if you understand my point, so please do not try to promote or defend it. Your point has not yet come under attack/scrutiy.
Let's say we talk about the option you now call #2 (but was the first in the original post), where you add the whole 24 hours, but if your teammate turned out not to need those 24 hours, you get them back.

I have two questions:
1. Is there any downside to always give your teammate more time?
2. Can you think of any downside to not giving your teammate more time.

1. Yes...if they don't have an incentive to get it done in 24 hours and they use 1 second of the extra time it wastes my extension
2. Yes, if I wake up in the morning and they missed their turn potentially costing us the game (which has happened)

If I log in and am pressed for time but see I have 30 hours, I will just take my turn when I can. Then I log in 8 hours later, take my turn and all is well...except that I burned my teammate's extension on me. Maybe for #2 it should only apply when "gifting" an extension and not using it on yourself. I was trying to simplify things and not make it overly complicated as to what would happen under various circumstances.

And sorry for flipping them. I think the partial time is better.

We can easily fix that by just not adding the time until the timer actually runs out. Like what happens in absence mode.

Will there then be any downside left to always adding it?

Other than it being for 24 hours when it might only need to be for 8 or 12, probably no downside.

I would question how they would know I added it or not though. Sometimes my partner asks me to extend their turn (they might be out). How would they know I extended it? I can tell them, but do they trust that it will work? What if they log in with 5 minutes left and just quickly take their turn even though we haven't connected on strategy? What if I don't want to extend it automatically (but you are implying it should just take it automatically)?

Right, I needed to think a bit about this one. So far I've only focussed on the scenario of 'retracting your add time'. I think (if implemented well) that will completely change the add time behaviour, turning it into a 'you can always miss up to x turns and you'll get extra time'. That's not necessarily bad, but in this case I think we don't want that.

Your other idea (that I initially discarded) is different, as it adds time in little bits, rather then all 24 hours in one go. I have two main problems with this:
1. It'll complicate the UI further. The easier the UI is, the better. The less choices, the easier.
2. It's not really necessary. If your teammate only very rarely gets close to missing turns you can just do as you do now. If your teammate very often gets close to missing turns, why not play 36 hour games? That's why they're there. And if you don't want that, why not just you know, have him take his turns quicker?

1. I don't see the UI being complicated. Instead of a button, change it to a drop list with a default value of "Add..." and then options of whatever is left. So if hourly 1-40. If I had spent 4 hours it would be 1-36, etc. Each option might be 1 hour, 2 hours, etc. Then on change save the value. So the UI didn't change.
2. We play tournament games and I cannot dictate the time frames chosen. I haven't seen a 36 hour team tournament.

Absence mode appears to be the same as add time, so you could remove this and auto deduct x hours, or keep it and it will deduct x hours when applied.