Why doesn’t the ladder view show when players are on vacation?
I don’t want to challenge players who are on vacation and it’s not obvious that you have to check each player’s profile to find out if they are.
Side question: why does their game clock say “15:00”? What does that mean?
when 15 minutes left on timer, auto-vacation activates.
Thanks.
Don’t you just hate numbers without units?
In most places it says things like “6h 21m (4)”, which I think means the player’s move will time-out in 6 hours 21 minutes, after which they have 4 lots of extra time. But for players on auto-vacation, it switches to “15:00”. If you don’t know about auto-vacation, this is puzzling.
Is this the right place to suggest features?
Before showing 15:00 it showed 16:00, it has nothing to do with vacation.
any Live game showing time like that, just in Correspondence games usually both players have more than 1 hour time left.
The players profile may give you more information as only the one about vacation.
You can make yourself an opinion if he is active, if he has more games running etc…
That information about vacation matters for you, it might be less important for others although I agree that I usually want to play asap when searching a correspondence game myself.
If we duplicate the information you can find already within a click or two is debatable as it would make the ladder offers less easy to read too.
Nothing perfect in this world.
Yes, other profile info might influence who you want to challenge, but someone who is on vacation is definitely a bad choice.
Newbs like me, who don’t realise what’s going on, challenge them and end up waiting for “dead” games. These stop me challenging players who might actually play.
There are plenty of neat ways to solve the problem without cluttering the ladder view too much. At least it could warn you when you challenge a player who’s on vacation.
When I started playing Go on OGS a bit again, I ran into the auto-vacation problem, which seems to be even worse than having an active player go on vacation.
I play with hidden ranks, so I basically just challenge people at random. But the ladder seems to be full of inactive players.
So my initial experience was this: I challenged people on the ladder, and most of the games ended up timing out and triggering auto-vacation. This turned into a huge mess with very long waiting times.
The advice I got on this forum was: just resign those games. But I don’t think that can really be a healthy solution. The next challenger will come along eventually and run into exactly the same problem. Should they also resign, leaving the inactive player higher up on the ladder?
Well, the ladder experience wasn’t exactly much fun.
As long as auto-vacation is enabled in ladder, the proposal about showing vacation sadly doesn’t really matter.
I still think it is a good idea though
So the player may not be on vacation when you challenge them but, after some time, they will be put on vacation automatically without ever playing?
Showing that they were on vacation would still help all the subsequent potential challengers.
Auto-vacation seems like a bad idea that mostly just creates delay and confusion. If I really care about my ladder position, I should learn to put myself on vacation.
Yes, it’s a fine place to do that.
If a person is on vacation, it says so right there next to the time-remaining, doesn’t it?
I agree that it appears this number could do with units.
If you could provide a screenshot it would be helpful to know the exact context that you saw it looking like this.
There’s a long topic discussing the pros and cons of this. A problem with topics like this is that it’s hard to see the point of view of the person with the opposing position.
Timeouts in correspondence games have issues that you may not have been exposed to - it’s worth some effort to help people avoid them.
That being said, I recall that the long topic concluded that auto-vacation as it stood was net-negative, and could do with some tweaks at the very least.
Maybe it’s time to bubble this up in the priority list.
If a person is on vacation, it says so right there next to the time-remaining, doesn’t it?
No, on the home screen, it just says “15:00”, which, after reading various forum posts, I now understand is because that is the time at which auto-vacation triggers. Problems with auto-vacation aside, it’s all a bit mysterious to new players who just want to play ladder games but end up wasting their quota of challenges waiting for dead games, with no idea what they did wrong.
If you don’t do that, then anyone interested in helping has to hunt around and guess how to find what you’re looking at.
The guy below is on vacation, as shown on his user page (https://online-go.com/player/1557527/):
It’s not shown on the signed-in home screen (https://online-go.com/):
(3 Days eventually changes to 15:00).
Nor is it shown on the ladder screen (https://online-go.com/ladder/313):
If it just said “Vacation” after his name on the ladder screen, it would be easy to avoid wasting time challenging him.
Ah I see … thanks for the great explanation.
“Mini-goban should show minutes indicator” is a proposal that probably warrants its own thread (the counter argument being clutter, especially on the “Watch” page).
I wonder if this is a bit like “when should I call back, if I get the engaged tone when dialling someone?”
Of course, only really old people probably even remember this question.
The answer I was told was “immediately - it’s just as likely that they finished their conversation as you dialled, there is no point in waiting”.
If you believe the probability thing of this (I’m not qualified to say) then the same applies to vacation perhaps … someone who is on vacation on the ladder is just as likely to return today as tomorrow.
That said, it is irritating to get magically into a game (by creating a challenge that does not require acceptance) only to find it paused, for sure 
I’m open to marking it on the ladder.
I’m also looking at the other suggestion (don’t consume a slot with paused games).
I’m also putting in place data collection to tell us what is the cost/benefit of auto-vacation - that information is not already available in the data that remains after auto-vacation starts.
I have some sympathy for a player who would lose by timeout in the middle of a game. My problem is with completely inactive players who have not put themselves on vacation, receive ladder challenges but never make any moves. Without making their state more obvious in the ladder view, I suspect this happens a lot and it degrades the experience. Labelling them as on vacation would not, as some have suggested, clutter the ladder view but, quite the opposite, it would make it clear that they were clutter.
Yeah, I think it’s fair that we should avoid pairing vacationers where we can.
It’s more like “When should I call back if I get no reply?” If they’re engaged, you know they’re alive, if they don’t reply first time, they may never reply.
Perhaps one improvement that could be made to auto-vacation if not ditching it entirety is to make it not trigger if you haven’t played any moves in a game. Then challenging an inactive player in a ladder, or a tournament game with them, won’t be delayed a lot from the timeout win.
This would be very helpful.
The only problems I had in ladder were players, who where already inactive and didn’t make a single move. With auto-vacation kicking in I had to wait weeks for these games to time out
Exactly. Auto-vacation makes sense for a game in which both players have made at least one move but, in a ladder, it makes a completely inactive player a persistent nuisance.
And, actually, you don’t have to wait for an inactive ladder game to time out. If you cancel it, it tells you that you have lost, but it doesn’t affect your rank. I had to discover this by reading the fora, it’s not obvious.
