I’m playing a bit of everything (live/normal, live/blitz and correspondence) and I feel like one option is really missing, and that is faster correspondence games
At the moment correspondence games are played at 1 day/move (fisher, weekends off). But in practice, if one player plays fast (let’s say, mostly answers within a few hours), this means that the other player is required to play an average of 3-4 moves a week. At this rhythm completing a game takes over 6 months.
Honestly, I just don’t want to be matched against people who wish to play this slowly. Of course most people play faster than this, but many games basically never end and it’s quite frustrating.
So I really wish there was a fast option for correspondence games. Maybe +12 hours/move, still fisher, weekends off, vacation time—in these aspects the current system is spot on. There might even be a public for +6 hours/move games (people who play on their smartphones and have a couple minutes here and there)
Yeah, the default corr is quite long, espesially if you’re matched with someone who lives at the almost opposite side of the world and have totally different schedule when they’re online.
Have you tried creating custom challenges? That way you can set quicker timesettings for a single game, or if you want to create tournaments with faster settings you might want to check up this group: Fast Correspondence
ooh, I’ll check the Fast Correspondence tournament! Thanks!
Also, I only just realized that it was indeed possible to create faster custom games, it’s only with byo-yomi (which like devs I think is inferior to fisher for correspondence) that the minimum period is 1 day… I guess I’ll create those from now on
Here’s an idea for a feature request: per day vacations
Similar to weekends, for games with this setting enabled everyone can select an 8hr (or whatever) block per day when their clock doesn’t run
This could have a default based upon your default time zone
Then +6hrs/move or maybe even faster seems reasonable
Actually, with Fisher time settings, sleep schedule issues don’t really matter. You can have a large buffer time (say, 7 days) and that won’t impact total game length that much in the end. But it will smooth out any requirements to make moves at a particular time during the day.
Essentially, if you go to bed with 4 days left in your buffer time, you’re not at risk of timing out before waking up… At +6 hours/move basically you have to make two moves a day to keep your buffer time stable, because half the time the clock runs for your opponent, not yourself. Though in practice it’s never exactly balanced so you’ll sort of end up needing closer to 3 moves a day.
+6 hours/move with a one-week max buffer and weekends off really isn’t as bad as it sounds
I’ve done several +4hr/move Fischer games, with a max buffer of 2 or 3 days (and no weekend pause). It’s perfectly manageable, especially with email notifications that make it easy to respond fairly quickly to your opponent’s move.
The key is just to recruit fast players, and maybe remind them in the beginning that the time settings are quiet fast (and cancel if they realize that it won’t work for them).
It would be a very nice feature if we could only get notifications for certain games. I could have 100 slow games and 4 and only get notifications for the 4.
The thing is that certain schedules are favored against other schedules. For example if both players make a move right before going to sleep and one player regularly goes to sleep slightly before the other, that player will be the one mostly responsible for making up the time buffer.
I mean realistically it’s not really a big difference, but I always assumed that was one of the reasons the default is 1day/move.
I think time zone (dis)advantage is a real issue in correspondence games, which shouldn’t be ignored. Perhaps correspondence games (fast or not) should have the option of automatically pausing both players’ clocks for 8 hours per day, during a time slot that each user can specify in their user settings (perhaps set by default to between 11 PM and 7 AM in their local time).
The thing is that certain schedules are favored against other schedules. For example if both players make a move right before going to sleep and one player regularly goes to sleep slightly before the other, that player will be the one mostly responsible for making up the time buffer. I mean realistically it’s not really a big difference, but I always assumed that was one of the reasons the default is 1day/move.
Of course this all makes sense. But that doesn’t remove the fundamental problem, in my opinion, that one move per player per day means 6-month games.
Yup, I saw this one! Tempting, but I’m often unavailable on weekends so I’m just too likely to time out with these settings. I’ve joined the groups though and I’ll keep an eye on the next ones
and only get notifications for the 4.