Vacation time and respecting others

It really, really, really irks me when I see people having 150+ correspondence games open and going on vacation, especially while they keep playing live games.

If you don’t have time to play so many games, don’t commit to so many games. It’s not my fault that you have hoarding tendencies.
And if you really have to go on vacation, it’s literally seconds of your time to ask politely in the game chat. And if you ask, most probably I’ll just pause the game or use my vacation time to help you out.
But, if you really don’t have time to play, consider resigning from the game. The game being in correspondence time settings doesn’t mean you get to drag it forever (and it can go literally forever, since vacation time fills up periodically). You clinging onto your rank is not more important than my time.

The solution is not me to stop playing tournaments, which I’m sure a number of people will readily suggest, the solution is people learning to respect others.

I know this will never happen, but I wish using vacation time would be forbidden in tournaments.

(Yes I’m ranting, I’m feverish with a sore throat but also people with no manners get on my nerves).

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What if I am just slow to move? Does that annoy you too, if I have that many games going? I get annoyed with Vacation time, mostly because it makes it harder for me to see the games that I have 12 hrs left in because they will get buried behind games that people are on vacation or on a weekend pause. I try to go sometimes when I am on, but I know that I can be slow to move, and I often do live tournaments. If you would like, I can try and prioritize my game with you to get it done quicker. I do have less motivation to do some of my games that I know are lost, I just play to know how badly I will lose by, but I do make an effort to not timeout, and always have more than 3 hrs on the game clock(12 hrs when I go to bed, just in case).

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if you play slowly, you still play within your time limit, which was accepted on both sides before the game.
If you go on vacation for 3 weeks, it’s something completely different.

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I always feel bad about it, I just sign up for too many correspondence tournaments and can’t get through all of them. I am also not always the right person to ask on this, seeing as I try and apologize for everything I did or could’ve contributed to. I almost apologized to someone once in a live tournament who times out, and I wasn’t sure if I contributed to the problem by moving 2 minutes after it started. For context: we had 5 min + 3 30sec byo-yomi periods. I never know when I am causing a problem or contributing to one, so I sometimes apologize a lot, and the people I am apologizing to usually don’t care(It is mainly me apologizing for forgetting about live tournaments or saying something in the chat that isn’t inappropriate but just not needed. I have also apologized for winning games that I shouldn’t have won, because I just don’t know what moves to play when, and my opponent didn’t want to play the move for some reason. Also someone in the chat around move 15 said they were being nice by not playing somewhere(with the non-visible during the game chat) and then I won at the end after a mistake by them, and I felt really bad. I even had to apologize for pausing a game, because I didn’t know that someone didn’t want to play in a tournament and it took an extra 5 minutes in a live tournament, which we were all waiting after my mistake.) I make a lot of mistakes, I am a human, and nobody is perfect, but if I am told or think I should stop doing something, I at least make an attempt to stop doing it. That is how it will work here. If people want me to stop doing this, I can try to stop doing this. It doesn’t mean it will 100% work, but I can try and get some results hopefully.

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It depends what you mean (not you specifically, I’m trying to explain my point). If you sign up for a tournament with 3 days/move, and you know you need 1week/move, it’s wrong to abuse vacation time to make up for it. The right thing is to not sign up for that tournament.

Not at all what I mean (also please don’t :slight_smile: ). Moves within the time settings of the tournament is what both players accepted and I have no problem even if you move with 35 minutes on your clock out of 7 days. I try to put at least one move per day, but that’s me. I also encountered some players in 7-day games that I know they’ll only play during the weekend. I guess that’s their schedule and I respect that, it’s within the rules.
And if someone needs an extra day or more, I’ll pause the game for them.

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My target really wasn’t you tho. :slight_smile:
Generally, people that I’ve exchanged a few words already I’ll send them a private message if something annoys me. :slight_smile:
It was a rant because I see it a lot. I see a tournament on hold and it’s one’s person’s games all in progress, and they are on vacation with 100+ games in progress as well. It’s not proper.

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My thoughts: Everyone else cares so much about all my decisions and me timing out and me moving slowly in games, and losing games that they should’ve won.

What most others say(I don’t know there thoughts so how can I say them): that they don’t really care, I have even been told that I over apologize. It is hard for me to describe the way people feel because this is general apologies and they are about all different things. Most don’t care about it though.

I almost would fall into your category that you don’t like, but my trip to HA got cancelled. I might be in the summer if all of my travel plans don’t get cancelled, but that would be because I am travelling to a few different places in the span of about a month, and it would be easier to be in vaca mode so I wouldn’t have to play when with my extended family or when I am trying to just chill on vacation. I would still try to get some moves in, but I would go on vaca mode to travel.

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Yeah, you might be overapologizing a bit. :stuck_out_tongue:

If it were me, or if you asked my opinion, I would say maybe during that time don’t have tournament games open, so you won’t need to go on vacation. And if you have some left, say in the chat you’ll be on vacation mode because something came up.

Usually I apologize/ explain because I think it’s the right thing to do and not really care if the other person appreciates it; it helped me calibrate the right amount of apologizing a bit. :slight_smile:

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What I do is this. When I am unable to make moves in a timely manner, because of travel or other commitments, I turn on vacation mode. Later, when I’m able to make moves in my games again I turn vacation mode off.

Isn’t that why the feature exists?

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This is what I would be using it for. I thought that was why it existed, although it is good if you aren’t going to play for a little bit. The Fast Correspondence tournaments try and avoid vaca and pause, so you could be kicked from those, but if something is taking an excessively long time, you can try asking the tournament director to PM them that they need to move. If it isn’t excessive, I don’t think anyone can really do much about it, unless it specifically says “No Vacation” for the tournament or the game.

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What you are describing is a sensible use of vacation time (if you were about to go on vacation for 3 weeks though, and I were your opponent, and we are playing a 1 day/move game, I might appreciate a heads up, so I know when to check back in).

Also, the people I’m taking about have literally hundreds of games paused, it was not a figure of speech. They basically take all the games they can find, knowing they won’t have time to play them, and put the burden of their decision on their opponent, by making the other person wait for much longer than they signed up for.

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I have definitely bitten off a little too much at times… At its worst I would generally make 2 moves a day per game, having close to a 100 moves when I got up in the morning, and maybe 50, 60, or 70 when I got home from work. With fast correspondence tournaments: if I skipped a full day it would set me back so far in the time countdown that I would eventually start timing out overnight or throughout my work days. I would use vacation time but still continue playing as much as I could. I remember getting warned in a couple “fast” tournaments. With all that begin said, I never would be playing a blitz or live games during these times as I’d already be way too overwhelmed. I have since balanced what I can and cannot handle so as I don’t burn myself out too much. (I have never paused games intentionally–I
do misclick it sometimes).

I’ve also used vacation time on vacation… and I did generally try to warn all my games that I was going to be gone for set number of days and tried not to join additional tournaments.

(@Gia: Is it supposed to be Non Player Character? It’s the first thing I thought of).

R E S P E C T! :smiley:

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As mentioned above, you’d probably like the fast correspondence tournaments. If someone has gone on vacation you can ask the tournament director to end the game.

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I haven’t exactly tried to pause games for my benefit, instead once I tried to pause in a live tournament and they still didn’t come on, and once I paused a correspondence game against someone I know, who was banned and in the appeal process. This was after they had already timed out against me, because before that, I didn’t think of using the pause button.
I wouldn’t just pause a game because I can’t go, although I may have paused a few while learning how that and vaca worked. I at least wouldn’t do that now, even if I would’ve done so in the past. Now I know that me trying to do that, is me signing up for tourneys that I don’t have the time for, which is not something I need to be doing.

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Yep, good catch. :+1:

If you know you have lost then the correct etiquette is to resign. If you want to carry on for some reason then I’d suggest saying so in game chat. For example, you might like to practice the endgame say.

I think that playing to find out how much you lost by in scoring is probably not a good idea. Most people of they have clearly won a game won’t worry that much about finding the best moves or what the exact score will be, so you could lose by 10 points or 100 points and it won’t tell you anything about the game I’d say.

Anyway, please don’t apologise or take it as a personal attack or anything. Just pointing out etiquette as I understand it. I’m sure there are lots who don’t know it. It would have the side benefit of reducing the burden of too many games going on at once!

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I always thought that if I lose by 150 points in one game and then against that person I only lose by 145, it is a sign of me getting better, at least at playing them. I am also sure that when I think I’ve lost, I haven’t always officially lost yet. I know that my endgame sucks, mostly because I don’t know when it ends or every move needed to end it, but this won’t necessarily add a ton to the larger game boards. I use my games to get the most accurate representation of my rank, and the stats in these games will not change no matter if I lose 10 straight or stay the same rank. I also know the saying “Winners never quit and quitters never win”. To me this means that I am quitting when I hit the resign button, but I am staying in there to get to the end. If I hit the resign button, I have no chance at winning, but there is always a chance of winning if you don’t resign, right up until the game ends. This leads me to the question, If I quit, does it really help me at all? Usually the answer is no, even if I know the game is lost. If I get too frustrated, I will quit, but I mainly resign live or blitz tournaments when I no longer have the time to play(I often underestimate how long the tournaments will take).

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This is one of the more eloquent statings of the issue that I have heard thankyou.

Unfortunately, the vacation entitlements are effectively a part of the agreed game-clock unless expressly forbidden by a tournaments rules.

I haven’t time to respond more fully but there’s more discussion of it here: Weekend pause, Slow tournaments & Vacation

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Great to have all these thoughts. Feels like it could deserve a whole thread on resigning!

I don’t think this is true. It might just mean that they didn’t bother quite as much or that they got a bit better. There’s a good Hikaru no Go scene about being strong enough to control how much your opponent wins by.

There is a big difference between thinking you’ve lost and knowing you’ve lost. If you think you’ve lost, play on until you think you can win or you know you will lose. If you know you’ve lost then resign.

I’m not quite sure what you mean here but it sounds like there is a bit of confusion between the endgame phase of the game and the actual end of the game. The endgame phase can easily turn a game around with a good sequence of sente moves.

Totally understandable but not really true. At the point that both players pass, one has more points and has won. The move before this the winner will still win because essentially all those points are secured. A few moves before this the winner is still likely to be in a winning position with the number of points on the board secure. If you go back over the game there will be a time when the winner had enough points and they were secure enough that nothing the other player could do would change the result. In this case there is no point continuing and the right thing is to resign.
It is true that in a ddk game seemingly secure points are not actually secure…
And what do you get out of it? Well if you resign and use the time you would have otherwise spent playing out the rest of the game to review and study it then that would be better. And learning to count during a game is a key skill to inform your play so getting good at knowing when to resign will actually help you get stronger.

Don’t do this! This is not a reason to resign (unless you also, calmly and rationally, know you have lost). If you are frustrated, take a breath, consider the whole board and keep going in a new direction.

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I should’ve lost, but I didn’t know that I was supposed to play a move before we ended the game. I should’ve played this one spot in my territory at the end before the game ended, but I thought "I don’t need to respond to anything if I am not getting attacked. I then learned at the end of the game. This is one thing I mean when I say I don’t know endgames. That I don’t always know how to end the games. I also realized in one live tournament, that when I would make a last ditch effort, the other people would pass and end the game.