Please cap the number of correspondence tournaments users can join

Hmm, yes, good point…

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I had same bad experience. I agree that’s very annoying to wait months for a round to start after you’ve finished your games.

This is my solution for now: join the “fast correspondence” group and play fast correspondence tournaments.
It’s a new experience for me and my first fast tournament will start in 9 days. Looking forward for it.

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It would be fun to have some information on the page of the starting tourney how long this specific tournament category typically takes to finish. :smiley:

Weekly McMahon - modal running time: 1001 days”.

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I also don’t like waiting for months for a round to start. I joined two tournaments about a year ago without realizing this and they are still active (second round out 3), and is even more annoying when you realize the entire round is being held up over one single game left, nearly over, and one player refuses to resign or is on holiday.

But like it has been mentioned, you agreed to the time controls, and is not very nice to force people out of tournaments and/or playing faster just for convenience. The obvious solution to avoid tournaments that have very long time settings, or that have too many players (which is another per-tournament setting I believe). Or make your regular games correspondence but play live tournaments?

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Yes, these people are not breaking any rules. That may be so, but it is inconsiderate of the rest of the participants in the tournament. It is the same as trolling the chat in my opinion.

As a tournament director in real life, it is my job to make sure my players are having an enjoyable time and address any concerns they may have. If a person was talking too loud and disturbing the other players, while not breaking any rules, I would still be responsible for informing him that he is being inconsiderate. And if it continues, I would have to take action.

I think the tournament director or a moderator should at least talk to these players and make them aware that what they are doing is inconsiderate of the majority of the players and dragging out the tournament past a reasonable length.

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I agree that since slow players don’t break any rules, they shouldn’t be punished. We just need to change the rules!

The problem isn’t that there’re tournaments with slow time control + pauses + vacation, the problem is that it’s the default option. So if you want something faster, you can find 1 or 2 tournaments per month, and that’s it. We could make portion of automatic tournaments to not allow vacation time. We could make some tournaments that only allow players who take X hours or less to move on average. We could simply make automatic tournaments to have faster settings.

I think it’s also a bit of a problem that some faster players don’t realize how long this tournaments are. I sure didn’t when I joined them. So I’m all for showing a realistic estimation of tournament length.

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The answer is so simple. Goodbye Fischer, hello Canadian.

I also second the “no weekend / vacation pauses” notion. Make Correspondence great again!

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To me it makes sense to move the tournament to the next round if all qualified players have finished their games.

If people are okay with randomly being thrown into a new tournament round at the whim of one guy who takes years to finish a game, why aren’t they okay with the next round starting (randomly) as soon as all qualified players finish their games? People would just have new expectations joining a tournament, understanding that a new round might start while disqualified players of previous rounds are still playing.

It doesn’t seems like a really drastic change to me. In both cases you’re not really sure when you will reach the next round, and you should anticipate the new load of games coming your way regardless. Most people join multiple tournaments, or have other games going, instead of just finishing all their games in the current round and waiting for the next to start (with no active games going on).

So the experience of having a bunch of games on-going, and then suddenly having a new round of games thrown on top, will probably remain as a common experience that tournament goers are used to dealing with. Except the tournaments would finish a lot sooner.

I’ve voiced this out before but the vocal, who are mostly likely the minority out of all the correspondence tourney players, in the forums here defended the slow 1-5 players who hold up 90% of the months/years long waiting time, so I didn’t see the mods taking it seriously.
I suggested using spam mail to at least remind them to play faster if you couldnt punish them.

Also, these players don’t play slower because they cannot handle the large number of games. They INTENTIONALLY PLAY SLOW.

They devilishly play the slowest possible without breaking rules. Eg. Only making moves on weekdays, so the game never moves as long as the timer does not force them to. Taking vacation on weekdays and never using them on weekends to not waste them. Never make a move below the time given per move to max out thinking time. Never make a move when the the thinking time will exceed the the max thinking time possible.

A 3 day per move game will see these people only make a move every 3 days, FASTEST. To make it even more apparent it’s intentional, they will suddenly be able to make fast decisions ONLY if the timer is nearing the final hours/days to max out the timer again, then it becomes snail-paced again.

How do I try to offset their slow-ass playing? I make 20 or more deep and wide variations in conditional moves. This still takes months to complete even a mid sized board with these types tho.

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I’m quite surprised that almost none of this discussion addresses the topic of the thread. The proposal is to cap the number of tournaments that one can participate in simultaneously. Slow play is the underlying motivation, but it is not the topic, and the proposal is not to “punish” slow players or to create faster tournaments. Off hand, I can’t think of a good reason why everyone should not be limited to, say, 50 simultaneous tournaments rather than 60 or 80 or whatever the record is. (The exact number isn’t the point, and what it should be could be the basis of a new argument.) An additional benefit to limiting the number would be that it would reduce the load on the server capacity. How important this might be, I do not know.

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Actually it does. What others are saying is that it is an XY problem. The OP’s actual concern is to shorten tournaments, and he/she is just focusing on one way to address the issue.

I would say that the number of games is a consequence rather than the cause of lengthy tournaments. You get invited to the 2018 edition of a title tournament while the 2016 and 2017 editions are still running.

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Deimorz, care to say what tournaments…?

I know you say you don’t want to mention who, but maybe give us a clue…?

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No! No naming and shaming! The mods won’t allow this!

but is there anyone to shame??

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Obviously some people think there is, and regardless of whether or not it’s true, it still doesn’t warrant public naming.

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BHydden speaks well on this matter. Ultimately, the time control of any game of Go on OGS must be absolute in its authority. If a player remains within the time control then he has broken no rules, has not acted rudely or injustly, and shouldn’t be penalised in any direct or indirect way.

However. I have also noticed the problem that you mention: it’s indeed not that rare that a tournament round will finish several months after 90% of the games have finished. But what can we do about it? All that can be done is to make, and play in, tournaments that don’t allow weekend pausing or vacation time. But for those who are OK with those two things, and don’t mind having long lull periods near the end of rounds, they of course must be free to go about their own affairs and enjoy the game of Go without interference from others.

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Honestly this sounds like an issue with the rules of the tournament rather than the users themselves. Yes it is annoying when people play slowly to delay the game. However they haven’t really broken any rules. You may even avoid these users if it’s not up to their (slow) speed.

Plus limiting the number of active correspondence tournaments won’t really stop them from the real problem which is to drag out the tournaments as long as possible.

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To @CzarSquid’s point, and to elaborate on what I said earlier, it seems to me that the cap would unfairly affect players that are paired against slow players, more than the slow players themselves.

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To further @SanDiego ‘s concerns, in an extreme case we could also see entire boycotting of the tournaments these players sign up for so that players’ proposed limited number of tournament entries are not used up on the slow tournaments. This could in turn end up having a few players basically unable to play tournament games ever again because other people don’t like how they choose to use their time.

Hmm… I know i’m not the worst one when it comes to having more games than free time to play those games with fast pace, but i still feel like i’m more on the “problem” side than a “solution” right here.
I know that multiple times has a tournament waited for my game to finish so that the next round could start, sometimes my games have been ongoing for months as the sole last game of the round. I’m sorry if this has been an annoyance to others.

The thing is, it’s not just because a one slow player that games keep dragging on. It’s when i get paired with another slow player, when games really start taking their time.
If tourney’s timesettings allow (like they do in sitewide tourneys with +1d fischer and weekends and vacations), playing through a 300 move go game at a pace of almost one move per day on average can really take up a whole year, and i really do recommend that players will take that into notice when they join in those sitewide tourneys.

And bcause i very well know that i’m a slow player myself, i keep myself from joining any “fast corr tournaments.” I don’t want to come slowing everyone down when you clearly want to play fast.

My solutions are

  1. Feel free to create more fast correpondence tournaments. Since OGS allows users to run their own tourneys, nothing prevents YOU to start creating daily/weekly/monthly tournaments with fast timesettings.
  2. More variation for automatic sitewide tournaments. Some of those tourneys could be set to some brutal fast single elimination while others could be those lazy, laid-back simul mcmahons that we slowpokes love so much.

ps. adding more variations on sitewide tourneys would be great anyway, since we currently have leaderboards with both blitz 9x9 and live 13x13 being empty, because there just ain’t sitewide tournaments for those.

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