Timer Continues to Run During Triggered Abilities, Even if You Don't Have A Response
I had Sarkhan the Masterless on the field and 3 dragons when my opponent attacked me with over 80 creatures (most of them tokens).
I'm playing on PC.
Sarkhan's triggered ability went on the stack for each creature attacking me, and the ability started doing 1 damage to each attacker for each dragon I had (3 total). I had no instant/flash speed spells and no untapped mana, but as the animation for each trigger played out one at a time, my timer wore down, and eventually ate away all of my timer extensions, which in turn caused the game to decide to skip my blocking step (presumably due to inactivity), even though I had creatures that could have otherwise blocked.
Triggered abilities should not cause either player's timer to run down unless they have a response. I know that if there is a lot of your opponent's triggers on the stack and you have a way to respond, that a 'Resolve all' button will appear along with the regular 'Resolve' button, however no such button appeared for me (whether that is because it was my own triggered abilities or because I didn't have a response to begin with, I am not sure).
I would have suggested that when that many triggered abilities go onto the stack at once that they should be resolved as a group, however, since some triggered abilities could trigger other triggered abilities, that would not be feasible. I would have also suggested that Sarkhan's ability should, instead of animating each dragon dealing the damage to the attacker one damage at a time, have it animated in a way that deals the damage more quickly, but that would only solve the problem for Sarkhan when I'm sure that similar problems exist elsewhere. Instead, the only way to fix this issue that I can see would be to make it so that neither player's timer runs down during situations like this. This is probably easier said than done with the current setup of two timers, one for each player, where one of those timers is always running down, but, if a third, universal timer were added that only starts running when situations like this occur, where neither player has a response but things are still resolving, then that should fix the issue for every situation of this kind.
Admittedly that 'third timer' idea is not without flaws due mostly to my own lack of knowledge in how things are coded for the game. If the timers are intrinsically linked to the players, then that would mean that the universal timers are considered 'players' and that would cause issues with how to decide which player has won the game after one of the two actual players loses, since there would still be the 'player' that is actually just a computer timer. It also might do weird things to turn order since the universal timer would either need to memorize which player is supposed to have priority after it's done or there would need to be two universal timers, one in between each player (which would coincidentally help to figure out how to code a four-player format if you ever decide to include that on Arena). Both of those potential problems with the idea could also be fixed by having the universal timer(s) themselves be intrinsically linked to the players, and only activating in situations like this where that player doesn't have a response to the multitude of triggered abilities on the stack.
In short, the current code for triggered abilities is a bug that can be potentially exploited most notably by or against token decks, whether intentionally or not, to cause one or both players to lose all their time extensions and either force an opponent that is in the lead to suddenly be on the back foot or result in a draw due only to a bug in the code, and not any kind of strategic gameplay or even the dumb luck of one player drawing the right card.