One situation that I find pretty annoying is being the second player in a lightning game. It goes like this:
Some player, let’s call them Shusaku, creates an invitation for a lightning game with 10 seconds per move.
I accept the invitation.
Shusaku is black, I’m white.
Shusaku now has 5 minutes to take their first move. They will likely not be very fast for this first move since they may have fallen asleep / gone to the bathroom / etc while they were waiting for someone to accept the invitation.
Once Shusaku has played their first move, I have 10 seconds to play my first move.
This means I have to stay focused for several minutes, ready to answer in a few seconds after having waited several minutes. That’s not particularly pleasant. Usually my heartrate goes up quite high.
So if you’re not ready to play and it times out, it’s not that much of a problem (unless you do this every game for many games). Equally if you get the notification you could swap tabs or open the game and cancel it, though it may be quicker/likely to just let it time out.
I guess that might be something one can just switch off though, so I can understand some kind of want of an alternative instead trying to alter ones own behaviour.
I might just cancel the search myself after waiting a while, if I’m likely to be distracted in the timeframe. Then requeue when I’m ready again.
Someone who went to grab some apple juice from the fridge because their opponent took 5 minutes to make the first move
I would really like a shorter timeout before the first move. I realize I can just cancel a game, but I think it would be good if the site just had a standard timeout that everybody knew rather than have to decide each time how long to wait before canceling.
Awesome, I think I’m just talking about making that time shorter rather than abolishing it (think about a 20min main time byo yomi game - much worse than waiting 5 minutes!) But I definitely agree with the sentiment that a 5 min start clock isn’t very fun for white.
I didn’t read that thread yet (edit: now I did) but I am against an abolition. I often play games where you would have 5 seconds for the first move, if they don’t start immediately it is not always easy to react in time. When the creator gets white it’s common that the game ends after move 1.
I wouldn’t be against getting rid of it for correspondence. I believe it has been the source of many timeouts since it can be lower than the actual time you’re supposed to have for the game
As currently implemented, there’s no first move time that would be fair to White, who might need it as much as Black. So I voted for zero.
But when playing Black in live tournaments, it’s also annoying to have to wait for the full main time plus byo-yomi for an absent White player to time out.
I like the suggestions that the special time be applied to each of the first two moves, with main time starting after that. But it should be configurable of course!
A confirm accept dialog would also be useful to correspondence players who want to create multiple challenges, but don’t want all the challenges to be accepted by the same player.
Only for correspondence actually. You can have more than 2 live games against the same person at the same time. If you already have two correspondence games with a user and you try to accept a challenge from that user, it says “Already playing a correspondence game with this player, consider sending a direct challenge instead”.
See also Correspondence: same player restriction looks great!
Edit: I must correct myself, it applies also to live games. I got confused because once I played 4 live games at the same time with the same person but they were direct challenges.