Some time shortly before you have a correspondence game about to time out ( about 5 minutes (*) ) the server will turn on your vacation (if you have any).
It will notify in the “Notifications” and email (if it can).
There is an opt-out for this, under Settings->Vacation.
The reason for providing an opt-out is you might need to avoid ever going on vacation if you are in a tournament that forbids vacation - you may prefer to time out a game outside the tournament if that accident is going to happen, rather than save the game but get disqualified.
However, this is not intended to mean “it’s OK to time out of correspondence games, so I’ll just turn this off”.
Actually, we will re-instate the processing of “Escaping” aka “Stopped Playing” reports about correspondence timeouts now. With this protection in place for “Real Life interventions”, there are really few reasons why correspondence games should not be politely and correctly ended. So unless you’re in non-vacation tournaments, it’s probably a good thing to leave on.
As with “live escaping reports”, there is a small level of tolerance of “escaping” that’s built into the system. This applies to correspondence as well, so not every reported “time out” accident will result in a warning. The tolerance level is “the third escaping report in the last 100 games is too many”.
(I probably should also mention that (obviously?) the escaping report assessment of live games takes into account whether it was thinking time being used or not - “timed out while clearly thinking” is a judgement call that is made on a case by case basis).
: right now the lead time is actually an hour, but we understand this is too long: you might intend to get back to a game within an hour and not welcome vacation being turned on. So there’s a change in the works to set it to 5 mins.
When this was discussed before I remember raising that it would mean correspondence tournaments/ladders could be delayed a lot longer by a player leaving the site: rather than timing out in 7 days it could take 37 or 67 days to finish. Is this seen as acceptable, or could their opponent complain to a moderator who then ends the game right now as escaping? If the latter, that has the problem the user could really be on vacation and would be justifiably upset at having an in progress game they had spent much effort on and intended to resume after their holiday being ended. So perhaps being on vacation needs to be distinguishable into 2 flavours: “auto vacation to prevent timeout” and “real vacation requested/confirmed by user” and mods can end games of the former but not latter.
I think that the mechanism for protecting tournaments from vacation delays is to forbid vacation in the tournament.
If this isn’t done, then use of the standard vacation feature is just part of the expected timeline of the tournament. It’s a bit like the wonderful “you accepted my time settings, now you’re saying hurry up - don’t be like that” meme.
One thing we have done to mitigate against “abandonned correspondence games holding up stuff” is to default new-user vacation to zero, instead of full. This is intended to mean that the sort of user who has accumulated “impactful vacation” is serious enough about playing here that hopefully they aren’t quitters.
This class of problem is thorny enough that we know there isn’t a perfect solution.
So ongoing brainstorming makes sense.
Can you elaborate on how this might work?
Given that we auto-vacationed to provide users with protection in the face of adverse real life events where they were unable to get in and turn it on, how would we justify turning it off again when someone says “hey I’m impatient to get this game going, and this person seems to be not playing”?
My gut feel is that “vacation is part of the game’s time settings, unless you ruled it isn’t, so be prepared for your opponent to be on vacation”.
Possibly this raises the prospect of agreeing to a “no vacation” game officially (checkbox etc)
Is it many steps from this feature to have games where vacation is overriden? It would make managing no-vacation tournaments (and individual games) so much easier.
That’s basically what I pondered in my last sentence above: maybe the time for that has come.
The biggest “apparent” technical hassle is not implementing this for new custom games, it’s making it available as an option in tournaments - right where you actually want it
I say “apparent” because I haven’t personally looked in that area for ages, I just fear it
Are there any cons to the idea? Why wouldn’t we do it, if we could?
I’ll note that, currently, if you are disqualified from a tournament, you still continue in all the games you are playing. Even if there are no other games except those involving disqualified players still ongoing, everyone has to wait for those games to finish before the new round begins.
It’s a complicated twist eh. I’d be inclined to support a TD who asks for termination of a tournament game where the player went into vacation in a non-vacation tournament.
Having “non-vacation” games looks attractive from this perspective as well
I think all “non-vacation” tournaments are custom tourneys, so there should be a TD who can manually disqualify people in case that is needed. Sitewide tourneys (and also most custom tourneys too) don’t have any rules against going to vacation, so having some “auto-DQ if vacation is activated” feature would only affect very small portion of all correspondence tournaments.
As a corr player, i would personally rather wait for my opponent to return to the site and continue the game, than to have an ongoing game end as a timeout ^^
There is also one very effective way to end any game, in case a player does not want to wait for the opponent to play the next move: they can simply resign.
… if the player is losing and just wants it to end, you mean, right?
It’s not cool at best, and sandbagging at worst, to resign from a game that’s not finished yet “because I got too impatient to wait for the next turn”.
So to use my personal example of how I used to play on OGS: the vast majority of my games were the site title tournaments (OGS Kuksu, OGS Honinbo etc) and 19x19 ladder. I very much wouldn’t like those events to forbid vacation: most people go on vacation from time-to-time (me typically one big 2-week one in the summer, and 1 week ones other times), so they would be excluded from them and the player pool and quality of games suffer. So I think my opponents seeing me disappear for 14 days once a year (plus some other shorter ones) is an acceptable amount of vacation use in such events (I might also use a day or two here or there when life was busy and I had hard games, perhaps a bit of an abuse of vacation feature, but they were never long), whereas 67 days from a “left the site” subscriber is a much bigger wait and not something that would often happen with a real user turning on their vacation flag.
A case this new system would have helped me: I had a bike accident and ended up in the hospital, and timed out a correspondence game I was due to play in had I got home normally. So auto-turn on for just a day would be enough.
Good idea.
Yes, I like that, but note:
It should be “ignore vacation” in this game/tournament, not “if you go on vacation, you are instantly disqualified”, so your clock just keeps ticking. So if you have 7 days on the clock in the no vacation tournament, but have some other game with 1 day on the clock, and go away for a 3 day long-weekend you can turn on your vacation flag and come back to both games, with 4 days on clock in the former and 1 on latter.
More work for you, but this feature would really complete the system by ensuring vacation is mutually acceptable, for tournaments and individual games.
