We currently have a situation where one of the (if not THE top) top players in many variants is about to go from 30+ vacation days to 0 vacation days between yesterday and today and is very close to timing out in multiple games unless he logs in within the next half hour or so. I can see a few different possibilities as far as adjusting vacation days to help prevent something like this from happening again. Hopefully, he will be able to get his games reinstated. My thoughts as far as potentially adjusting the vacation days are: 1. Change their name to emergency hours and put a brief description under them stating that EACH game uses an hour each time it reaches a zero timer. 2. Change them to emergency minutes, which would help in some situations where one is running a few minutes late on a few games but not an entire hour late. 3. Actually make them into vacation days, where one doesn't have to log in for x number of days without worrying about any of ones games timing out. In that case, I think the limit to the number of vacation days per year that a player can have should be lower than 40, since otherwise 7 day per move (+weekends) games would take a ridiculously long time to complete with two players with staggered vacation schedules.
Message was edited by: watsu at Oct 18, 2017 9:16 PM
Retired from TB Pente, but still playing live games & exploring variants like D, poof and boat
Yeah, I think an adjustment might be necessary. By my count, Ivans73 forfeited 45 games today, all in the last couple hours, despite having thirty DAYS of vacation time as recently as yesterday afternoon / evening.
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Re: vacation days
Posted:
Oct 19, 2017, 4:59 AM
yeah don't get me started. I've bitched about this until I just gave up. I mean 10/30/60 vacation days you can buy in packages but really they aren't "DAYS" they are a hole in the bucket that can all be gone in 1 DAY!
play enough games and the loan shark rate vacation depreciator kicks in. as why I don't play in the ladders or get too many games going anymore unless I get a 7 day timer. That's the kind of auto-vacation I can count on.
My 2 cents. 1. When game is accepted or created with a specified number of days, for me it feels as if I have agreed to that time frame contract. If I don't managed to comply with those time frames, I accept the loss and move on. 2. watsu's first 2 ideas to more clearly define how vacation day/hours are used seems like a good idea. 3. Dont see how it makes a difference if the player forfeiting games is "one of the (if not THE top) top players" or not.
There are several reasons that Watsu mentioned Ivans73's status as one of the top players:
1) Hivans73 has obviously dedicated a lot of time and effort to the games he has played here. A site needs players like that to thrive.
2) Because of Ivans73's tremendous volume of games, there are thousands of games in the database of high level play that people can learn from.
3) He willingly accepts all challenges from players of any skill level. Not all top level players are willing to do that. As a result, players of all skill levels have an opportunity to learn first-hand by playing one of the best.
4) He's polite and friendly during any in-game chat, willing to discuss her game position and offer insight and analysis.
5) Most important, he apparently paid for a lot of extra vacation days, which ended up being a waste of his money because the 30 vacation days didn't even extend his active games by one actual day. He forfeited close to 50 games, and lost 24 sets as a result. His record coming into today across all games was 745-30. e was one of the highest ranked, or highest ranked players in all 9 turn-based games; and he was koTH or tied for KoTH in most or all of the 9 hills. Having 50 games forfeited cost him much more in ratings, crowns, and overall stats and records than it would have cost anyone else.
6) It wou8ld be a shame if Ivans73 left the site because of this, but I imagine he will be highly disappointed to discover that his 8 or 9 months of thousands of games of hard work were negated by some sort of emergency that seems to have left him unable to log in and make his moves. Several of the forfeits were on move 1 or 2, in games that hadn't even really begun yet, and many of them if not all were in games he was almost certainly going to win. He could be in the hospital for all we know. And isn't that why on would buy 30 vacation days? To protect one's prestige and records against some sort of emergency? As a top player who willingly accepts all challenges, he had 80 games going simultaneously, which means his 30 days of vacation didn't last him even one real-time day, whereas a player who only has 6 or 7 games going would have gotten far more vacation time.
I find it odd that a player has more vacation time eaten up just because he is willing to play more games and accept all challenges from anyone. If anything, I would want a vacation policy to be most helpful to those who engage in and participate more in the site and in the advancement of the different variants of Pente on this site. I would think a vacation policy and overall policy would b aimed at encouraging more top players to engage in as many games as possible. Everyone benefits.
when a game is set to timeout, and the player has vacation days left, 1 hour is deducted from those vacation days and the timeout is postponed by an hour. If another game is set to timeout 20 minutes later, then its timeout is postponed by 40 minutes until the end of the vacation hour that was deducted. All games that are to timeout during that hour of vacation time have their timeouts moved to the end of that hour. This continues until the player runs out of vacation days.
Is it possible to have vacation days equal a real day no matter how many games you are playing? ie... if one game goes past the time frame, then use a vacation day and reset time on all games by one day
I believe that's the change I made now, except it doesn't go by the day, but by the hour.
Once a timeout is detected and a vacation hour kicks in, all games that have a timeout in that hour have their timeout moved to the end of that hour.
So now if 36 games were to timeout in the course of 2 hours, their timeout would be extended at the cost of 2 hours of vacation time. Before, that would have cost 36x2=72 hours of vacation time.
To Dmitri's points about why I specifically mentioned Ivans as a top player, I'll just add that unless or until one has reached a rating level in a variant which is at or near the top rating in that variant one may not have a full comprehension of how difficult it is to rebuild that rating after just a single loss to a significantly lower rated player. My TB poof pente rating is only a few hundred points higher than others in that variant and yet to gain significant points in that variant I need to sweep sets against players who play very well and are learning and improving in each set they play against me, so I continually have to come up with new ideas in order to advance my rating. If I accept a set from a player with a rating significantly lower than mine (say 400 points, for example) I'll gain a couple of points if I sweep and lose about 30 if I time out a single set. Now, look at the competition one faces in Pente at the 25-2700 level in a game which is much more "solved", databased, computerized, etc. and consider how much more difficult it might be to win sets at the top level in order to regain well over 300 rating points which were lost in a single day of not logging in and you'll see why I thought it worth mentioning...
Message was edited by: watsu at Oct 19, 2017 5:43 PM
Retired from TB Pente, but still playing live games & exploring variants like D, poof and boat
Still don't understand why a person's skill level should have anything to do vacation days. In fact, the more skilled player should be more likely to know the rules. I agree the vacation day/hour policy needs revising, just not because a highly rated player is about to time out and lose rating points. Its possible the other person is getting tired of waiting for the tardy person to play. That's why there are time limits to play.
It may look like I knee-jerked and changed the vacation policy just for ivans73, but getting brf to play more again is a bigger motivation than that.
In the past I only heard his complaints about the vacation policy and couldn't understand there was an issue, since the vacation rules were written down and not obscured. I didn't change the system for complaints of one player that I didn't see as unfair.
Now that more players have chimed in, I saw more reason to change the policy. A thread about ivans73 kick started it, but I see that the voices in this thread all wanted the change, not just for his sake.
Without this event and hearing these voices I wouldn't have changed anything for a while longer.
"Still don't understand why a person's skill level should have anything to do vacation days. In fact, the more skilled player should be more likely to know the rules."
A successful site needs its top players. In this case, we had a situation where the top player on the site (Ivans73) was dramatically and negatively affected by the vacation policy, and the next three highest rated players (Watsu, Brf, and myself) were all expressing displeasure with the policy. That's a pretty good reason to consider revising the policy in question, and that's exactly what RainWolf did.
It's not just Ivans73's skill level - It's his high volume of play and his willingness to play any challengers of any skill level, all of which is good for the site and good for the other players on the site.
I'm pretty sure I already explained all this in my previous post.
Anyway, with regard to the remark that "a more skilled player should be more likely know the rules," I'm sure ivans73 was aware of the rule; that isn't the point. The point is that his 30 days of vacation time didn't save him from forfeiting 45 or more games and losing all his hard-earned achievements. In the process, several players gained a high number of undeserved ratings points. I mean, some of his forfeits were at move 0 or move 1.
The point of all this is that perhaps it wasn't until the dramatic negative effects of the previous policy were plainly seen in the case of someone like Ivans73 that it became apparent that the previous policy might need to be revised.
I noticed that ivans73 has ten new games in progress; 5 sets of games that began in the last day or two. He hasn't logged in since October 17th, before he started forfeiting numerous games.
At this point, it's quite possible that something has happened to him, hopefully nothing too serious, although it's certainly possible that it IS something serious, in which case he probably wouldn't be too worried about all this anyway.
But there's little point in speculating. Hopefully he's okay.
In the meantime, I have an additional suggestion: Once a person runs out of time in a game and vacation time starts to kick in, I suggest that any pending invites sent by that player be frozen/suspended/locked or whatever we want to call it.
Because, as it stands now, 5 new sets (ten games) have been started during a time period in which ivans73 has already forfeited over 50 games and obviously isn't able to participate in any new games. He's going to forfeit those ten new games, further redistributing significant amounts of rating points in games in which he never makes a move and isn't even aware have begun.
How each opponent handles this situation is a matter of personal choice.
At the very least, I would suggest that any of his opponents in the 5 matches that just began click the "request cancellation" button, and if they do, that RainWolf use some sort of override to process the cancellation, since ivans73 obviously isn't around to accept the cancellation himself. Again, this is just a suggestion, but I think it's what we would all want if we were in ivans73's position.
If anyone has a game in progress against ivans73 that is obviously going to be a loss, for example, ivans73 has a clear win on the next move by making a winning 5th capture or a 5 in a row, it's certainly an option to resign the game. That's what I would do. (It's what I do anyway; except instead of clicking resign, I place a stone on A1 and send a congratulatory message along with the move). If there's a game in which an opponent has a clear win against ivans73, then obviously no action is needed.
For games that are in the early stage, or are otherwise unclear, that's a bit trickier.
Assuming that ivans73 is okay and reappears at some point, I'm hoping any games he forfeited to me can be reinstated. Even if it's too complicated to adjust the ratings, at least reinstating the games so they can be played out to their strategic conclusions would be better than nothing.
Regarding games in progress- of which ivans73 has a few more against me - is it possible, if Ivans73's opponent requests it, for the forfeit timer to be postponed or suspended indefinitely? I have 3 remaining games in progress with Ivans73, and all of them have undetermined outcomes. And I'd like to play them to their conclusion, whether it's in 3 days or 50 days.
RainWolf, obviously much of this would depend on the programming difficulty of these suggestions (I don't know anything about programming), so I do apologize if I am suggesting things that would place undue burden on your time.
