TimeBase was used at a competition yesterday (BASC 59 SSF), and the competition ran about 2 hours behind. This was partially because the comp was stationary, and it was also a newcomers competition, so it was harder for many of the new competitors. There are still quite a few bugs that are going to be worked on, but until WCA approves this system (which probably won't happen for quite a while), this is going to add a lot of time and probably incidents too (scrambling takes longer and sometimes the nfc cards don't read).
Eventually (at around 4:30pm), we were on 3x3 round 2 (which was the 4th round of the day, and we had started at around 9am). There were still 6 rounds left in the competition (skewb hadn't even started), so we ended up not using TimeBase for the rest of the comp, and stopped having the comp as stationary. This made everything go a lot faster, but it did take a while to move everything around. We had less stations, but a lot of competitors had left by now (119 registered for skewb, only 64 competed, although this was partially due to a few people not showing up in the first place). The competition ended at around 8:15pm, while it was scheduled to end at 6:40.
I was also on staff for this competition, and running/scrambling was very stressful. Again, this was partially because it was stationary, and we were often in need of judges so that competitors weren't sitting alone at a station. Many competitors didn't know how to judge (even though there was a 30 minute long tutorial in the morning), so extras were very common and I had to explain how to judge multiple times (and I'm not really an expert).
Overall, this competition wasn't the greatest experience, but I'm not saying that TimeBase is a bad thing. It definitely will get better once a few bugs are fixed, and once it is allowed for it to be used without scorecards, competitions will probably run even faster than competitions without it.
forum.worldcubeassociation.org
