but is there anyone to shame??
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Obviously some people think there is, and regardless of whether or not itâs true, it still doesnât 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 shouldnât be penalised in any direct or indirect way.
However. I have also noticed the problem that you mention: itâs 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 donât allow weekend pausing or vacation time. But for those who are OK with those two things, and donât 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 havenât really broken any rules. You may even avoid these users if itâs not up to their (slow) speed.
Plus limiting the number of active correspondence tournaments wonât really stop them from the real problem which is to drag out the tournaments as long as possible.
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To @CzarSquidâs 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 âs concerns, in an extreme case we could also see entire boycotting of the tournaments these players sign up for so that playersâ 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 donât like how they choose to use their time.
Hmm⌠I know iâm 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 iâm more on the âproblemâ side than a âsolutionâ 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. Iâm sorry if this has been an annoyance to others.
The thing is, itâs not just because a one slow player that games keep dragging on. Itâs when i get paired with another slow player, when games really start taking their time.
If tourneyâs 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 iâm a slow player myself, i keep myself from joining any âfast corr tournaments.â I donât want to come slowing everyone down when you clearly want to play fast.
My solutions are
- 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.
- 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 ainât sitewide tournaments for those.
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What can be done about it? See my post above. Itâs simple. Canadian time instead of the abomination that is Fischer.
You get the benefits of not having to sit in front of your computer for hours on end, the comfort of knowing precisely how many moves your opponent will (at least) make within a given timeframe and since games rarely if ever go beyond 300 moves you also get a fair idea of how long both a game and a tournament round will take to finish.
Iâd like my 9x9 corr tourney to conclude in 3 months (itâs been 4 and the first round isnât even over because of 2 slowpokes). I know there will be three rounds. The longest 9x9 I expect would be about 80 moves. In order to finish 1 round in 4 weeks, we can choose 20 moves per person per week, which comes down to about 3 moves a day if youâre playing at a snailâs pace.
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I always found it interesting that the weekly and monthly simuls are more or less the same tournaments: groups are typically 9 players in monthly, 8 in weekly; both have 3d + 1d Fischer time (but arbitrarily only the weekly pauses on weekends) and the player caps differ only slightly. Perhaps one of these could become a faster paced tournament, for example with 20 moves per week Canadian time
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Seems we think alikeâŚ
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This seems sensible. We donât want to eliminate slow-paced tournaments, only provide faster-paced ones alongside them.
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I was just thinking that when I joined last year I signed up for two tournaments a couple of weeks apart from each other (both of them still ongoing). Thinking back of it, the fact that they were named âmonthlyâ gave me the impression that they were hosted every month (obviously) but because it started and ended that very same month.
Like bugcat just said we donât want to eliminate slow-paced tournaments but add the possibility to play faster ones. I think a simple re-branding in the title should suffice to let people know what kind of tournament they are signing up for. Especially for new players joining the site so that they donât get discouraged (in every tournament/round Iâve seen thereâs at least 1 player that just left and maybe is because of this).
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Iâve seen few tournaments and at first I thought just like you that a âmonthlyâ tournament would last a month, before a new one started.
Now I know how it works and Iâve seen at each second round start some players resigning all of their games or begin disqualified because they timeouted their first move.
Slow players ARE an issue in tournaments. I donât blame anybody, but definitely will look for something different.
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I join tournaments just to play games, itâs never occurred to me to that there could be an issue with slow players other than the tournament taking an amount of time to complete.
As someone whoâs been on OGS for a long time (groan, groan, sigh, sigh) I never experienced any feelings about a tournament being slowâŚ
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Wait. Are we sure this is a big problem? I jumped in because I remember thousand-year old swiss tournaments but theyâre no longer spammed automatically.
At the moment we have three types of tourneys that run automatically: âCorrespondence Weekly McMahon 19x19â, âCorrespondence 19x19 RoundRobinâ, âMonthly Simultaneous McMahonâ. Round robin is really fast because itâs only one round and it occurs every 3 days so only few people join, recent example: https://online-go.com/tournament/37296. And even if thereâs a slow pair, it hardly affect anyone, since itâs only one round. Other two are slow but theyâre run once per month/week. In the end, if you want fast tourney - join round robin, otherwise - McMahon. The only problem is that not everyone knows this.
And just to illustrate how long can these âweeklyâ mcmahons take: https://online-go.com/tournament/14387, with one remarkable game which lasted April, 2017 - February, 2018, didnât quite managed one year, huh.
In conclusion, just slap âtakes 1-2 yearsâ in descriptions of mcmahons.
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Not a very big problem indeed, but annoying because you never know when that last game will finish and the new round will start.
I joined a fairly âquickâ tournament with these timesettings:
Clock: Fischer: Clock starts with 3 days and increments by 8 hours per move up to a maximum of 1 week. Pauses on weekends
Because of the 8 hours increment many players did timeout.
Nonethless, the third round had a very slow start because of a single game that lasted more than three months, despite of âquickâ timesetting.
Again: I donât want to blame anyone!
Also, this is a simple McMahon tournament, so itâs just one game at a time. No big problem.
But when this happens to Simultaneous McMahon and I canât have any clue on when Iâll get ten more games to play, this can be stressful.
Before realizing this, I joined three Correspondence Weekly McMahon (Simultaneous), in september, october and december 2017. The last one is still on its first round. Itâs about two months that everyday I open that tournament and look at the last three ongoing games trying to figure out when will they end. 
Yes, I know, my anxiety is part of the problem. 
Group size is another part of the problem: before the start you can read âMinimum Group Size: 4â
But very often group size is 10. Nine new games at a time per each round. I would prefer smaller groups, but this canât be known before start.
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Anything up to a week should be considered long.
I looked up some automatic tournaments and their length.
371 finished âCorrespondence 19x19 RoundRobinâ, average: ~4 months
45 finished âCorrespondence Weekly McMahon 19x19â, average: ~18 months (~1.5 years)
4 finished âMonthly Simultaneous McMahonâ, average: ~23 months (almost 2 years)
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Round Robin tournaments really do seem to be the holy grail solution to all of the problems listed hereâŚ
But the reason the Round Robins are so fast is that 1) only 10 players can join, and 2) it only has a single round. It also lacks the benefit of he McMahon bars, so itâs quite possible that a 20k has to play a 4d, which is not a lot of fun for either of them.
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Is there an option for tournaments to disable vacation times?
This is in my opinion the biggest point for time delay on tournaments. If you can disable it in the tournament settings, you can create tournaments without the vac time and the whole discussion is moot.
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