"Auto-vacation"

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21

This is how I imagine it to work, too.

Because now I can’t get on vacation anywhere, because I have a couple no-vacation tournaments.

So, I’m “not allowed” to use vacation in tournaments that allow it, because everything is under the same system. Also, sometimes I go on vacation when I have a feeling my opponent is going to time out but they are usually not neglectful, so maybe something happened in their life. I would turn on my vacation, hurt nobody, and keep that game going until my opponent comes back.

Also, another reason to not automatically DQ is there are always new players, and also new rounds. I’m someone who very much likes no-vacation tournaments, but on the other hand sometimes people forget, or are new and don’t know. Or there was time between rounds and they turned on vacation thinking they will be on again before next round. This is usually solved with a DM and they turn vacation off again. It would be unfair to just DQ them if the solution can be “use vacation as you like in all other parts of OGS (so just a click on the cockpit for the player as they wish), our specific games will keep running as per tournament settings (a click for the TD and settings as agreed for everyone)”.

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23

It’s a bit sad, that it slows down this way of culling out inactive ladder players :crying_cat:

But … it’s still faster than playing an actual game with an active player. A typical vacation balance is way shorter than a typical correspondence game.

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24

I was just put on autovacation. What triggers this thing? Im pretty active

25

so <1 hour left in a correspondence game?

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26

I dont think this was the case for any of my games, but perhaps the logs show different. My games have ~24hr buffer

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27

FYI, I’ve put up a proposed implementation for “no-vacation tournaments”.

  • TD (creator) can tick the box
  • Vacation doesn’t affect games in this tournament in any way.
  • A banner displays on the tournament warning that vacation doesn’t affect the games
  • The Settings->Vacation page lists games in progress that won’t get vacation
    • so you know, when you go to turn on vacation that you face this.
  • Game->Info highlights that the game does not get vacation.

I was motivated to do this because most of the challenges we face with “vacation effects” are tournament related, and our current solutions are manual workarounds.

We might as well just support it, it seems.

Note that this is totally prior to any input from anoek on the topic: I just did the implementation to show and review as a way of raising the idea in a concrete fashion.

So it might or might not see the light of day, but even so in anticipation … and with trepidation… I invite the inevitable “I bet you didn’t think of this” to commence :squinting_face_with_tongue: …

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28

GoldToken takes a different approach: Ask for the days off in advance. You want your birthday off? Cool, just mark it if you have the vacation days, and it’s yours.

29

I’m going to cash out the voucher from that recent home page revamp. :face_with_tongue:

30

I’m a bit concerned that Auto-Vacation introduces some built-in unfairness. In practice, vacation time ends up being silently folded into the overall time limit. So if a player has 30 days of vacation, their original 7 days of main time effectively turns into 37 days—while someone with zero vacation gets no such extension. That’s a pretty significant imbalance.

It also breaks common time-pressure strategies. For example, playing a complicated move on the last day to put pressure on your opponent just doesn’t work anymore against someone with a large vacation reserve. In effect, they can always fall back on extra thinking time, and there’s nothing the opponent can do about it.

For players who enjoy correspondence games, some flexibility is totally fine. Manually activating vacation is usually not an issue—it’s a conscious, transparent choice, and typically limited to specific situations. Auto-Vacation, on the other hand, is meant as a safety net but can end up acting like a built-in time extension exploit.

Maybe a separate, more controlled grace-period system would work better. In reality, genuine accidental timeouts are pretty rare. For instance, you could allow each player a small number of grace auto-requests per year—say, two. When triggered, a grace request would pause all their correspondence games, and then a fixed grace timer would start counting down.

To prevent abuse, there could be some conditions: the player must have been inactive for at least two days, and at least one of their games must be close to timing out. During the grace period, the opponent could choose to opt out—if they do, the clocks resume after subtracting whatever grace time has already been used. If the player comes back and the opponent keeps playing, that would count as accepting the grace, and it couldn’t be undone.

This is just a rough idea.

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31

My initial reaction here - and please forgive me for sounding critical - is that you appear to be overthinking it.

What I mean is that timing related psychologica warfare in correspondence sounds far-fetched.

You have no idea what time pressure your correspondence opponent is under. Thinking “hah, I will play a complicated move this time, because it will take them more than a week to work out what to do” … I’m not seeing it.

What’s more, if someone is feeling the time pressure from a tricky game, they already can just turn on vacation to give themselves time relief.

The scenario where someone is dithering under pressure for days and forgets to play their correspondence move as a result … long shot.

In contrast, an emergency like a car accident that makes them miss their daily slot where they play games that are due today … that’s precisely what auto-vacation is for.

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32

Maybe I’m overthinking this. I’ve only been on OGS for a few months. I always thought “vacation” was meant for actual holidays, travel, rest or something—a way to get a time exemption when you’re really away. I only turned it on briefly during one holiday. Using it at other times, just to extend my own clock, feels a bit like cheating. Like, “I’m not actually on vacation, but I’m telling the server I am, and I’m taking advantage of people’s goodwill.” I know it’s allowed under the rules, but I assumed people wouldn’t—or at least rarely—do that when they’re not genuinely on vacation. And auto-vacation is essentially a default timer for when you’re about to time out, regardless of whether there’s an emergency or not. It feels like something that was supposed to be a rare emergency button has just become a regular way to get extra time on the clock. I appreciate auto-vacation. Personally, I’d prefer it to be reserved for more genuine emergencies. Maybe I’m just being too narrow-minded about what “vacation” means.

And forget what I said about time pressure—that wasn’t a good example. For me, when a situation gets complicated, I’ll often switch to looking at my other corr games or just play an intuitive move I haven’t fully calculated. When my time is running low, I’m much more likely to make mistakes. I honestly don’t know what others do. Maybe turning on vacation is just a normal thing around here.

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33

I think the confusing idea is “the correspondence timer is there to impose a time limit on thinking”.

The timer in live clearly makes “managing the time to think” part of the game.

I don’t believe that this is the case in correspondence. “Correspondence” is a class of game where time is essentially unlimited - you can think as much as you like, in practical terms.

Of course, we all stack correspondence games in around other life, and they can tend to feel compressed, but this not imposed by the clock, it’s imposed by our choices. You could double the clock and still have the same pressure. You’d just do more around the edges, procrastinate til the last moment, and play a mistake anyhow.

The clock in correspondence is simply an agreement about how often we’ll play turns and thus how long the overall game can be expected to take.

Which means vacation isn’t a “way out of time pressure that would otherwise be there”, instead it is an allowance that the game may take a little extra time - use it as you need.

Or at least, this is my observation/experience of it.

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34

My point has never been about time pressure, and I haven’t personally had any issues with timing out. What I mean is this: for example, if we agree to a game with 3 days + 1 day per move, I’m supposed to make a move within 3 day. But with auto-vacation, as long as my vacation balance allows, I could legally take 5 days per move. That breaks the agreed pace. This helps players who are being inconsiderate — those who deliberately delay. I’m happy to give my opponent extra time to keep the game going, but not too many extra occasions. And auto-vacation just keeps triggering. It has shifted from “use it as you need” to “use it every time”.

But, if the view is that correspondence games are essentially unlimited in time, then my concern would be misplaced. I really appreciate the new perspective you’ve given me — it does change how I think about vacation. Maybe most experienced correspondence players see it this way. I’m still relatively new, so I probably need to adjust my expectations. Thanks for the explanation — it’s very helpful.

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35

It is actually a controversial feature, for the reasons you describe: it changes the “contract” about how long the game will take.

… unless of course you already realised that vacation is part of the contract.

Your reaction is totally reasonable, and quite likely shared.

I guess one mitigation is that there isn’t “so much of it” (vacation allowance).

It’s a tricky multi-faceted beast.

I think this could be a mis-representation of what I said. Thinking-time-pressure is not part of correspondence. The amount of time available for correspondence games means that “running out of time to think” isn’t a factor in the way that it is for live games.

Correspondence games are limited in time - that’s the contract about how often each of us will play. If it’s a 3-day-per-turn correspondence game then it’s limited in time such that there is a turn every three days, plus vacation.

The “new” idea that you are encountering is that vacation is part of this contract.

What’s the alternative? An inappropriate timeout?

Did you want to win because your opponent got distracted with a movie last night and forgot to play?

Or would you rather win thanks to your skill on the board?

Often players will pause the game when their opponent hasn’t played, just to give them a chance to make their turn, rather than have the game end prematurely.

Another aspect is that this helps disuade rage quit.

Most players who are winning want their opponent to end the game “honorably”, not to just stop playing.

Now if you simply stop playing because you’re cross that you are losing, now you stand to lose all your vacation as a result.

I’m saying all this just to put out there the many considerations. I will say again that I think your response is entirely understandable. It’s just that I also think the considerations I’ve outlined are more compelling than the 'this breaks time-pressure strategies" objection.

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36

Thanks again. To be clear, I’ve already retracted the “time pressure” point in my second post — I don’t think that’s an issue.

My real concern is about repeated disruption of the agreed pace. If we agree to 3 days per move, I expect that to be respected. Auto-vacation is great for genuine emergency. But how do we define “emergency”?

If the same player triggers auto-vacation multiple times in a single game, that starts to feel less like an emergency and more like a lack of respect for the agreement. They’re not really taking the game seriously. And honestly, that feels disrespectful — to me, and to the game itself. At that point, I’d like to have a choice — for example, the ability to refuse further time extensions for that opponent in that game.

Right now, I don’t have that power. My only options are to silently accept it or to resign — and resigning when I’m winning also feels bad.

So this is really about: is vacation a goodwill gesture, or is it a rule to be exploited? My original expectation was simply to have the ability to say “no” when an opponent too frequently takes extra time without a real emergency.

When someone manually turns on vacation, I tend to believe it’s genuine. But auto-vacation blurs that — I can no longer tell whether my opponent is having a real emergency or just taking extra time as a habit. But if it is meant to be an encouraged strategy, then honestly, I have no problem with it at all.

Thanks for the discussion. I’ve learned a lot. Just to be clear — I’m not against auto-vacation. I just think adding some limits could be constructive. Maybe after 5 auto-vacation triggers in one game, the opponent could have the option to say “no”. Or something else.

37

I think your qualms are really with vacation, not auto-vacation. Auto-vacation just makes vacation easier to invoke.

FWIW I happen to not like the extensive vacation allowance either. I dont think it will (or should) change, but do see where you’re coming from.

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38

I do share some feelings of uncomfortableness with auto-vacation with boonego, as someone who played correspondence games for about 7 years.

There is a difference though: I don’t think many users manually turned on their vacation flag for 30 or 60 days (I never did), however that can happen with auto-vacation automatically now. So prolonging games / tournament rounds for that long will happen more now.

39

If “disregard vacation” were also an option for individual game challenges that might address many of these concerns, by ensuring that both players have agreed to that vacation is or is not fair play.

(In the status quo one tacitly accepts vacation by using OGS, but one can consider vacation unfair while still wanting to play here.)

Whether one morally is really on “vacation” or in an “emergency” or just “taking extra time” because of “life” is really too ambiguous for this setting (global server with participants of different ages, occupations, etc.)–and really, blurry for anyone (overtime work, sick child)—so it would be better for “vacation” to be a clear aspect of the rules of the game to which everyone consents before playing.

40

Already in progress from a post from GreenAsJade elsewhere, but it doesn’t help for the site-organised tournaments/ladders because:

  1. those aren’t individual challenges
  2. they shouldn’t be ignore vacation forced on

But also doesn’t address the crux of the issue for me:

  1. I don’t mind my opponent going on vacation for 14 days for their summer holidays if they manually turned it on, because that indicates they plan to return and keep playing after
  2. if they manually turned it on for 30 or 60 days that might start to be annoying, but that’s very very rare
  3. if someone abandons OGS, auto-vacation turns on, and then I don’t get the timeout win for 30 or 60 days (or however many days they have, new accounts starting from 0 does help mitigate this), unnecessarily prolonging the game/tournament
  4. if someone has a real-life emergency which means they can’t get to OGS and are about to time out (my bike crash example, home from hospital that day), then turning on auto-vacation for a few days would be enough if the emergency meant they could return to OGS in a a few days to either turn off auto-vacation or confirm it as a real manual vacation
  5. if someone has a real-life emergency which means they can’t get to OGS and are about to time out, then turning on auto-vacation for a few days would not be enough if the emergency was very severe and long and meant they can’t get back to OGS for many days like 30. So this is the case auto-vacation for your full vacation allowance is good.

I think case 4 emergencies are likely to be far more common than case 5 (particularly these days of smartphones and wifi and mobile data everywhere, when I started on OGS in 2007 I had a dumb phone and only played on OGS from my desktop PC), and both less common that case 3 happening. So the negative effects of case 3 will I fear predominate.

So perhaps one way to address this: limit an auto-vacation to a smaller number of days, like 3 or or 7. If the user logs in during this time they can confirm it as a real vacation that would then be able to use up all their allowance. This avoid the abandoned game from being prolonged for ages, just a bit. The downside is the severe and long emergency case 5 where you can’t even log onto OGS for a minute to confirm the vacation within a week isn’t saved by it, such as being in a coma for 2 weeks after a car crash. But how common is that?

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41

I thought I read that he was doing tournaments but not necessarily individual challenges. But it would be good to have the option for both.

This seems reasonable. The downsides I can think of are more development work and more policy confusion for the average user.

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