Feature Request: new way to handle timing out

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 groupā€™s ladder (as long as the settings arenā€™t slower).

That group has good experience already with games with Fisher increments <1 day ā€¦ 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 donā€™t actually think thereā€™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 weā€™ve had a chance to reflect on the right advice:

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