Feature Request: new way to handle timing out

Also

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If for some reason I’m timing out because I can’t connect to the internet, I won’t receive the email either, right?

I’m not taking a side, just pointing this out.

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It would be nice, if instead of timing out, the vacation would start automatically, but that’s another issue somewhere in the forum.

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@flovo Like this? Auto-vacation (auto-away)

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If we want a more forgiving system for ladder timeouts, I think I can provide a better proposal for handling them.

Proposal: Maintain the current practice of removing players from the ladder after a ladder timeout BUT if they rejoin within a month, allow them to slot in at a position just sufficient to challenge their old position. This would put rejoining players only one win away from their old position.

If (n) is the ladder position you held just before timing out then your new position (m) would be 5n/3(rounded down) or n+10, whichever is greater.

eg. Timeout from position 100, reenter at 166.
or Timeout from position 10, reenter at 20.

The same principle could be applied to people who choose to drop out of the ladder manually so that they don’t need to fabricate a TO. This would allow players to take a break from the relentless pressure of the ladder system without forfeiting all their progress.

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I agree with the sentiment that we are already crazily generous here.

If you drop out of a ladder due to time out, climb up again, and be more careful this time.

It really isn’t that hard.

At the moment, by far the most common report moderators have to deal with is “this person timed out on me”. We don’t need anything to encourage more timing out.

EuG.

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“It really isn’t that hard” is kinda of a huge understatement. It can take over a year to climb back up the ladder.
The whole purpose of the current system is to deal with players that have become inactive. It is not to punish an active player for timing out. That is not the goal.
All these things like vacation and notifications are in place to avoid active players getting hit by this timeout punishment, and yet active players still get hit by it.
I’m just proposing changes that would make it much much harder for an active player to get an unwanted timeout and be unduly punished.

I dunno - I’m only DDK and I can get back up over half way, and pretty much “as high as I can go” within a few games. Which on correspondence-time is not long.

I guess if you lost a top-10 position that would hurt a lot.

However, the purpose of the current system is not only to deal with players becoming in active - it is to disuade players from timing out also.

Time out is not good. Everyone hates it. Everyone complains about it. Please don’t do it.

EuG

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Right now if I look through my active games tab, there are a few where i have between 24 and 30 hours to make a move, but it’s not my turn. If I was away for a day or didn’t think to log in, those could easily turn into losses by time if I’m not careful.

It wouldn’t be that I was maliciously running out of time or wanted to prolongue my position in a league or something like that. I just simply used up my time and lost. I didn’t abandon the game or decide to not play another move intentionally.

I imagine a lot of players could describe their games tab as such. Should we all go on vacation every time we might be gone for a day? I don’t think so. I figure a small system to mitigate those short term time worries would be fine, so you don’t come back having gotten kicked from a tournament and a league cause your opponents played when you were away rather than when you were there.

One idea I had was an option to turn on vacation when you are like 5 minutes away from losing by time, but the downside is every inactive player ever delays everything 30 days, so that’s not great. I think a short-term answer like the one i proposed is the solution.

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You know, you can turn on vacation :wink:

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I don’t think you are taking the “victims” of a timeout into consideration here. Nobody likes getting the notification “X wins on timeout”.

Set up your email notifications and don’t time out!

Honestly, it is the easiest thing ever to not time out.
Pay attention to the number of games and time settings you accept.
If you are getting into situation where there is only 24 hours left to make a move and you often cannot get on for a few days at a time it was INSANELY rude for you to have accepted that game and wasted so much of the other person’s time.

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I guess you’ve never had an error where a tournament you’re in accidentally sets up double or triple the amount of games you’re supposed to play.

Or a sitewide tournament starts another round you weren’t expecting, since it can be fairly random when the last game in the round of a correspondence tournament ends.

Then you have way more games on your hands than you were expecting and you’ve to play that many moves nearly every day… on top of the games you were managing.

Insanely rude seems a bit of a stretch.

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Obviously site bugs that enroll you in games you did not agree to is a seperate issue… I would not think that it would require stating that bugs cause unintended circumstances.

Outside of site bugs… If you have trouble managing your commitments to games, take on less.

Otherwise, no not a stretch. If you make the choice to occupy months of my time I hope you would think about that commitment and approach it realistically.

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I’ve had this situation where a tournament sets up like 15 games in a day. It is difficult, but I would argue that this is a design flaw in the tournament, rather than a flaw in the timeout system.

It’s up to users to (a) avoid overwhelming tournaments or (b) manage their games appropriately (play/vacation/pause/resign). If they end up timing out, perhaps it is better for everyone that they are removed from the tournament.

A long time ago (around mid 2014 and earlier), the ladders did not punish time outs at all. They simply counted as a loss and players would stay on the ladder. This had the drawback of inactive players cluttering up the ladder and giving people an easy way to climb up the ladder (just by challenging them and waiting for them to time out).

When the system changed to the current implementation (where a time out drops the player from the ladder, unless a rare bug occurs), I made a proposal regarding that situation:

Note: my initial post is not advocating for any sort of grace period for the player that timed out, although that did come up in the further discussion.

Another note: my first concern seems to have been addressed in a later patch:

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Could the concern of the OP simply be addressed by increasing the time settings of the ladder to, for example, Fischer Clock up to a maximum of 7 days or stopping on weekends? (After all, this is also the time setting of most if not all official tournaments). I personally find the ladder time settings rather harsh, if only because it somehow makes me nervous when the time display changes from 2 days+ to 48 hours :slight_smile:

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Also a long time ago (circa 2014, maybe 2013?), the ladder time settings were:

  • Fischer
  • 3 days initial time
  • +1 day increment per move
  • 7 day maximum cap (this is the only thing different from today, where it is now at a 3 day max)

Since correspondence games with such settings can take a very long time to finish, the site owners made the change of reducing the maximum (cap) from 7 days to 3 days. The intent of such a change was to decrease the average duration of these games.

Back then, I made a bit of stink about that change on forums (across various old threads), since I felt that this change does not effectively speed up the slowest games, while coming at the cost of increasing the risk of time outs (from players that might occasionally miss a few days).

If it were up to me, I would experiment with increasing the maximum cap up to 5 days, but decreasing the increment to something around 16-18 hours. Some people will argue against dropping the increment below 1 day, out of fear that it may hurt players that only visit the site once per day. However, I think that in practice, the vast majority of players would still find 16 hours to be a sustainable pace, especially if there is a large enough max cap to bank up time.

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Before we mess with this, the proposed settings should be trialled in the Fast Correspondence group, as a tournament or even on that group’s ladder (as long as the settings aren’t slower).

That group has good experience already with games with Fisher increments <1 day … my recollection in that game completion drops off dramatically as you go under that, for exactly the speculated reason: people in different timezones find it hard with less than a whole day to get a response back.

I don’t actually think there’s any evidence that changing the settings is warranted: one person so far was cross that they got dropped due to a time out. I think the effect was the right one: this person has been alerted that it is more serious and rude to time out a correspondence game than they realised, and we’ve had a chance to reflect on the right advice:

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