Suppose there is a clock that determines the end of the game. Then Quidditch becomes similar to football (of the non-American variety) or basketball, with a slightly more hostile field. But it loses some drama from the Seeker no longer having a role.
I do think that multiple snitches is a good way to go, but video games provide the right role for them: power-ups. Then there's lots of room to get creative. Suppose there are, say, three snitches active at any time, in order to get their effect they have to be held (but they also attract the attention of the Bludgers, which has lots of potential for manipulation), and they all have a maximum duration of, say, two minutes, at which point the Snitch is depleted and is replaced by another one from the supply (and it reenters the supply to be available when the next one is depleted). Probably the seeker gets a faint glow of whatever color Snitch they're holding, both to make it more obvious to spectators and to make it easier for the other team to try to interrupt the Seeker's boosting of their team.
That's a very videogamey design, but still interesting.
I will point out that removing a player for two minutes at a time is already the standard penalization scheme for one major sport, so it's clearly not that terrible a frictional problem.
New chapter!
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 104.
There is a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: