Because then other people can’t challenge the receivers of the challenge spammer.
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Auto-vacation was implemented. As long as disable vacation isn’t implemented, the system is faulty.
In reality, any time setting that isn’t “play whenever the fuck you want, time settings are meaningless” is like it doesn’t exist.
So, either OGS does away with any setting that is shorter than a month, or it corrects this issue promptly. Giving me a drop down with 50 time settings that basically all reset to the same one, is useless.
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Auto vacation is not a bad idea since it avoids timeouts when people forget to turn on vacation, but 30 or 60 days of auto-vacation is a bit much.
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The auto-vacation feature is great for me personally because my life is hectic and it is really nice at times for me to be able to collapse into bed or deal with a situation without worrying that I might be timing out of a game. I think it has only activated for me 2–3 times, for <24 hours total, but it gives me significant peace of mind which is very valuable.
That being said, I think Gia’s concern is entirely valid, as is the objection to making the system so complicated that few users can understand and predict it. Hopefully what Johnnie D has outlined above points us toward a compromise between all of these wants and needs.
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too complicated
just 1 checkbox is needed: allow any vacation or not allow
and when “Live” time-settings are selected in Custom game, vacation always should be displayed as “off”, so all new users instantly understand that vacation has nothing to do with “Live” games.
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Just to clarify, I think it should be disabled in the automatic OGS tournaments, but keep auto-vacation as an option for user-created tournaments. It can be on by default, as long as there’s a toggle to turn it off. The reasoning for disabling in OGS automatic tournaments is:
The automatic tournaments are here to primarily to offer the players a baseline of activity, make it feel alive by giving a low-effort activity to participate in. They aren’t the most important tournament (assumption) as they are generic, automatically created and infinitely repeated. I think custom made tournaments are more important, as both someone had to care to manually create it, and the players had to go out of their way to find it.
I think the net benefit is also better for custom-made tournaments, as they are more effort to join, so (I assume) less lazy escapes and more dedicated players who will come back after accidentally auto-vacating.
My point was originally also for sitewide ladders, but the 3 OGS ladders are in fact more important than the OGS tournaments, as there is only one per size, and therefore people, at least at the top, take those games seriously. So I can see keeping auto-vacation on the OGS ladders as default on, combined with that “vacated games don’t count against the 3 active”-fix.
There is an imbalance in that “genuine auto-vacated games may reconnect within a week, but escapes definitely take 8 weeks.” A max time cap (3 days or 1 week) is useful because it can make the downsize less extreme while barely impacting the upside.
But it’s good to reduce settings, so perhaps a good idea is a lower fixed limit, example:
- auto-vacation always has a max length of 1 week, after which it disables automatically again.
Finally, what I forgot, is that auto-vacation in tournaments doesn’t keep just one player waiting, it can have the entire tournament waiting, and those are players not even invested in the game. The net effect is a bit worse than what I thought, so I’d still remove it from the automatic tournaments.
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Could a developer extract some statistics about the current effects of auto-vacation?
I would love to see a number showing the positives: how many games were saved in a month? By “saved,” I mean games that would have timed out, but where moves were played afterwards thanks to auto-vacation kicking in.
I would also love to see the cost to the community: how many days of annoying delay were added to games that ultimately ended in timeout anyway?
Doing this for April would be great. By now, we should have a final status for all the games involved.
My intuition is that if auto-vacation adds less than 10 days of delay per saved game, it is a nice win. If it adds more than 100 days of delay per saved game, then it was probably a mistake: a feature whose current state is severely damaging other features, such as ladders.
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I think that the adverse effects on ladders are clear enough that we don’t need data to support the idea that this needs a fix.
It’s possible that we’re all simply in raging agreement about this?
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Ladders need a fix to be protected from players who go on vacation
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Individuals need to be able to choose “no vacation” (or no “auto vacation”) on at least some correspondence games.
I say “at least some”, because I suspect that there’s a case for not being able to do this on the “long end” of the correspondence timescale.
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Another useful stat would be the distribution of the number of days that auto-vacation used to save games.
If only 50% of the games were rescued after 10 days of auto-vacation, it’s not the same as if 90% of the games were rescued after 2 days. If the latter is true, we have a clear case for limiting auto-vacation to just a few days.
It’s just a variation of the question “how expensive are auto-vacation days”. This time it’s: “How expensive are the first few days compared to later ones”.
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I agree on both accounts:
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Someone already suggested allowing extra games in the ladder if your opponent is on vacation, and I think it’s a pretty neat idea. Not sure if it should be 1 to 1 (one extra game allowed for every oponent on vacation) or 1 to 2 (one extra game for every two opponents on vacation).to compensate the possibility they might come back soon.
Another thing I’d suggest, borrowing from OldGS, there used to be a little icon besides the player’s username (a couple of coconut trees on an island) if they were on vacation. That would be useful in ladders to avoid challenging absent players. -
You’ll never catch me alive playing so called “fast-correspondence“, however, if the no-vacation option already exists for tournaments, I don’t see why it should not exist for individual challenges.
This, however, needs to be shown, in bold letters, somewhere. For those of us who don’t really want to accept such challenges.
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Don’t you check the settings before accepting a challenge?
And not everybody categorizes the same. Please let’s not go down this road and decide to spend endless time finetuning “what exactly counts as fast” and just implement “no vacation” in individual games already, as of now I’m ACTIVELY PREVENTED by OGS to play fast correspondence games.
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Nothing wrong with showing conspicuously that a game has no-vacation enabled. We already have a warning for games with “unusual settings” (the server’s words, not mine). I do think that being able to go on vacation is a default expectation, so it is reasonable to warn when this is not the case.
By the way, I’m throwing vacation and auto-vacation in the same bag here. I think allowing vacation but no auto-vacation just punishes the wrong people. Compare, if there is an unexpected life event, these two cases:
- If the event is only slightly disruptive, the person might have the bandwidth to remember activating their vacation, thus saving their games. All is good.
- If the event is disruptive enough that the person just forgets to get there in time, or doesn’t think about it at all. This person is punished, just because they suffered a more serious inconvenience.
In both cases, if the person accepted a no-vacation game, well, that was part of the game’s time contract. They both time-out, which is expected.
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As I’ve mentioned above, autovacation basically erases the time settings. Player doesn’t have to keep any time setting at all (within their vacation days, which inb4 are way, way, way longer that a typical turn in a fast corr game). They accept a game with 24h/move but basically never have to respect that, they just go on with their life and let auto vacation kick in every time. Players are chased out for not “respecting” the system for the most minute and stupid reasons on OGS, but apparently time settings are OK to violate..
Also, inb4, I don’t care if vacation runs on my benefit as well. I don’t care. I just want to play with the settings I want to play, which are within the server’s available options. But obviously I’m deluded in expecting for this to matter.
I’m honestly surprised that I have to repeatedly ask OGS to honour the options they nominally give me, situation is getting ridiculous.
hi.
I think this is auto-vacation? Both went on vacation at 15:00
Do i have to wait the full 4 weeks now to get the option to challenge someone else? Or is there an alternative?
Can i just resign ?
edit: they are ladder games
When game has less than 6 moves, there is “cancel” button instead of “resign”. You can press it, your rank will not change. If their ladder position is higher, your ladder position will not change. If their ladder position is lower, your ladder position will become just 1 lower than your ladder position before.
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You are getting over-wraught about a situation that already existed, and is mildly exacerbated by a recent change - a fact which is agreed already.
It is not ridiculous that players use the vacation that we have had forever. Despite the fact that doing so slows your games.
It is not ridiculous that this happens more often now, because we rescue some people from RL events that would have otherwise seen them time out on you.
It is contentious that we have vacation at all.
This comes up from time to time. It’s something that OGS supports.
It is unfortunate that a feature intended to help make this feature more effective in one respect, inadvertently made things worse in another… a fact that is already established in this thread.
However, this situation is not "ridiculous” nor “broken”.
It is part of the natural flow of improvement: trying, assessing, improving.
What is quite ridiculous is being hysterical and theatrical about it.
Of course, that is your right.
But you in particular have been here long enough to actually know what the effect of this is on the actual person who has to prioritise fixing the situation (me in this case).
This isn’t a conversation you’re having with a bunch of people subject to the whims of some unlistening entity called Oh Gee Ess.
It’s you the user coming here and engaging directly with the actual person that implemented the feature you don’t like, who is here to talk about how it can be made better for you … complaining loudly - and with completely misplaced entitlement - without even noticing when your complaints have been heard.
It is ridiculous that you both know what the effect is (it annoys and demoralises) and yet you do it anyhow, despite the fact that you supposedly would like this urgently fixed.
A more mature approach would be to find the place where it was agreed that this needs a fix, quote it and say “hooray, I’m glad you understand, I can’t wait for the fix”.
The fact is: doing so would be a motivator …. in contrast to crying about how some idiot broke your toy - which is a massive demotivator.
If you weren’t aware of that before - well, now you are.
The status of the actual discussion about the actual problems is that
- It’s agreed it’s a problem
- JD’s post outline the most coherent set of suggestions for improvements to fix the problem
- It’s in the queue to be attended to, subject to percevied priorities and motivation.
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Yeah, I’m the one overreacting here… I guess we’re past the “let’s talk about this rationally” stage. English is your native language, not mine, and still it seems I can tell better than you how your whole message reads in this confrontation.
A. Don’t lecture me. A more mature approach would be not to take this and everything every time personally.
B. So you won’t right a wrong because you took it personally and you’re annoyed?
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It’s not my fault that you take this personally, because you implemented this. If you can’t see how it is different from vacation, and how auto-vacation is basically the death of fast settings, I can’t help you.
I’ve been here long enough to know, if I were a serial timeouter, a cheater, a bigot, an abandoner, a sandbagger, the effort to find a way to placate me and make my life easier, without me having to put any effort to do better, instead of supporting the people I create the problem to, at the expense of my upstanding opponents, would be measurably higher.
That’s the discussion we’re having if you’re calling my hysterical.
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And my deeper response is, I understand you are frustrated. Auto vacation is a net positive. But it destroys fast correspondence games. It IS broken, fast corr IS broken with auto vacation. It’s not a “nice to have”, I’m not asking for an improvement to enter the line; auto vacation, while good intentions, broke something.
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I’m not sure how many more times I have to say this.
You don’t need to put on a performance about “how ridiculous the situation is”
I agree that the problem you are describing needs to be fixed.
Did you read it this time?
Your complaint is valid, and will be addressed.
The only thing that remains is “how” and “when”.
“How” was well tackled by jonniedarko, though there’s still some discussion.
“When” depends on the motivation of whomever is going to fix it, along with other competing priorities.
What you seem to either be missing, or don’t care about, is that real people are involved here, right here.
A real person has to care about fixing the problem you want fixed and you are talking to those exact people here.
You moan about “OGS not honouring this or that”, as if you’re entitled to something from some faceless remote organisation, where the people concerned don’t give a damn…
… while all the while you’re actually talking to those exact people right here who are trying their damndest to work out what’s best.
I’m not asking for “gratitude” or grovelling or anything silly. Just some politeness and a sense of perspective, along with understanding that we’re here doing our best.
I mean “we: the community” - in this case JD, Uber, Leira, stonedef …. everyone contributing ideas here to make it work out.
And I do think it’s important for you to know that your dramatic rhetoric is demotivating. You can spit at that and care less: fine.
But you can’t say you didn’t know that you are part the problem when someone like me can no longer be bothered with the thread that you’re moaning in without even properly listening to what’s being said.
Wait, what?
What is this even about?
If you have a problem with how we manage problem behaviour on OGS, how about raise that in a thread and lets talk about it sensibly.
I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about, nor what it has to do with this thread.
We systematically warn then suspend those exact classes of misbehavers 
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