There a correspondence game holding up a whole tournament, meaning everyone has to wait on those two to proceed to next round. I pop up from time to time to see when will it finally end, since one of the players has been on vacation for weeks (the usual drill, hoarding games and then using vacation because they think so highly of themselves resigning from a game they can’t commit to doesn’t even cross their mind. To anyone saying “but they want a break”, you are not taking a break if you keep subscribing to tournaments during your vacation, duh). Well, when this player’s vacation days dried up, the other player took up and went on vacation us well. I expect they will keep doing this until all of us die. Maybe they are friends and have the same views regarding good manners, maybe they coincidentally have the same poor manners, don’t know.
If it’s such a life-changing game that you want to play it to the end but can’t commit to a single move for months, maybe fork it and play it next decade? But leave the tournament alone?
Yes, I know, it’s allowed blah blah blah.
It’s poor manners. If you are doing this, accept the fact that you have poor manners.
The things you are allowed to do in this world are many, maybe choose better?
I think an option for games and tournaments to have vacation pauses disabled would be ideal. I would personally always turn on such a setting. If my opponent does indeed need to take some time off, they can tell me and I would agree to a pause. Pausing the game without a word is very annoying, but an unfortunate feature of the site.
AFAIK there are tournaments where vacation is not allowed by the rules, but there is not a toggle somewhere to disable players from using vacation (which is basically what we are asking ).
If there was a setting for this in tournament creation, then people could participate legitimately while still being able to use vacation for the vast majority of their other games.
You are quite right about the original correspondence game attitude, rooted in chess games by mail. A close friend and I started 8 chess games by mail when I was in college 45 years ago. After 3 or 4 years, we used to joke about the longest correspondence games on record. Now they are moribund (my friend owes the moves); I wouldn’t want to restart them because I am much weaker today.
A word of caution about no-time-limit games. There is no such thing on OGS (unless a change has been made recently), You can set up a game with no time limit, but it will time out anywhere from 5 to 7 weeks without a move. It is unclear what the default limit is, as I have dealt with reports that differed.
Just a word of caution: the fact that an “original” attitude existed, for a specific complete set of circumstances, doesn’t mean we can take that original attitude and plaster it on a similar set of circumstances.
A game by mail (actual mail, the one with the envelopes) has its own circumstances.
Online correspondence games should be true to their own circumstances, not on those of another thing that happens to share a name.
(Even with my limited knowledge, I could probably name a dozen things that we do differently in Go on OGS, in IRL tournaments, in Go in general, because we don’t live 1.000 years ago or even 100 years ago, we live now.)
If it were so, we would never progress on anything, since “that’s how it has always been done”.
That being said, I wouldn’t mind at all if I had a mail game that took years to finish. Because that would be the understanding on both sides.
People seem to think that we are a bunch of people who hate slow players.
The issue is people who agree to play a game because they want to play all the games and then decide they don’t want to play that game, but at the same time don’t want to not play that game, but kinda it’s their game and they don’t want to leave it and you can’t take it from them it’s theirs, but also they don’t care for that game enough to play it? Times x100.
Also, I’d like to know how conditional moves worked back then.
Did they have a servant assigned and told them “if and when a letter from Mr. X arrives, open it. If it’s unrelated to Go, pretend you didn’t see it. If they say they played B4, send back the envelope I’ve marked with A. If they say they played C4, send back the envelope I’ve marked with B. If it’s neither, leave the envelope on my desk.”
It just occurs to me that this is an opportunity to re-post a haiku, originally written for the 2017 Christmas Go Haiku thread, concerning the longest correspondence game on record:
Christmas tradition:
Playing go against Santa.
Takes generations.
Lately OGS has had a lot of server troubles, it feels like there is some problems on weekly basis nowdays. In these cases - like few minutes ago when i couldnt load my overview page - my first reaction was to put vacation mode on. Just because, if it happens to continue more than few hours, and gameclocks would stay running, i could/would timeout from more than one game.
What i wrote earlier in this thread is still what i believe at:
I am respecting all my opponents and all my games by putting the vacation on, because i feel it would more disrespectful if i just time out from my games.
I personally dont think its fine to timeout from 3-4 correspondence games, which would happen if the site now would break for 24 hours without me having vacation mode on.
It would be worse for me. I let all of my games get low recently. I think I would timeout of over 100 games(I would still have an issue if I was on vacation, and I don’t feel the need to use it so I don’t).
This happened to me recently. My opponent (currently in 46 games) went on “vacation” for the second time this Summer. Not cool. I could understand it happening in July, may be they actually went on a vacation then! But now again. Some of their games are in very early stage (like move 12). Why start a new game, when you know of a vacation coming up in a week or so?
It may be that my annoyance comes from this being only my second game with long time controls.
A “vacation”, as I understand the term, never comes up as a surprise. I think it should be disallowed, if you have joined a new game within the last week or so.
If there is a real life emergency, just resign.
May be make a system wide limit to max 10 correspondence games at a time? The exact number is not important. I just think it a bit rude to spring such a surprise to all your opponents.
Vacation as a term in this case is more “vacation from OGS” as opposed to “I’ve planned a trip” or something. It’s a built in feature that is reasonable to use, in my opinion, unless you’ve entered into a tournament with rules prohibiting it. (In that case, I’d expect the TD to disqualify such a player for breaking the rules they hadagreed to.)
There are any number of reasons they may want to step back; it’s not up to us to speculate. OGS accrues vacation time slowly, so this isn’t something anyone can do indefinitely. You can see their max amount of vacation time remaining in their profile. Personally, I think it’s a better option than resigning or timing out for sure, but from the perspective of consideration for one’s opponents as well as ratings pragmatism.
Yes, it does come as a surprise sometimes.
Also: Not everyone has enough time to play Go every day, so it’s a good thing it’s possible to leave OGS for a few days here or there without having to end all your current correspondence games.
If I had to resign from all my games every time I am too busy to play, my rank would drop to 20+ kyu and I would be sandbagging…
Edit: @Luiskaotsa I see, this is your only ongoing correspondence game.
Well… For people who play mostly correspondence, it’s common to play many games at once. Some play quite fast (several moves per game per day), some very slowly (one move per game every two weeks), and all of that is fine - but it’s of course boring for a fast correspondence player to play only against slow players.
My typical solution is to join tournaments then and to start a few new ladder games. Or you look for people who also like fast correspondence games - there’s a group and tournaments for that, by the way.
I thought that is the reason the correspondence games have time settings up to 3-7 days. Those can accommodate a busy day or a weekend even.
But I guess it is pretty normal then to go on “vacation” like this. It just took me by surprise.
May be in the future I will check in advance whether the opponent is currently playing many games, and simply turn down a challenge from such a user? Would that be considered rude?
No, imho it’s always fine to turn down a challenge without explanation.
But you should know that most people play many games and not just one or two - although it still makes a difference if it’s 10 games or 50 or 200, and how fast these games are played.
I once played against someone who had a kind of “official rank warning” by a mod on their profile that said something like “This player used to be a 3d, but had to resign many games recently due to overcommitment.”. And they still had at least 150 ongoing games or so.
When you create a challenge, you could set a rather short time and make the game’s title something like “Fast game - no vacation”, so your opponent knows what they’re signing up to.
When I started to play on OGS I also overindulged in just too many games at the same time. Playing 40 to 60 (mostly correspondence) games simultaneously did not make me happy, rather restless and uneasy as a matter of fact.
So I decided to trim it down: finishing or resigning the ones I was in, no more taking part in correspondence tournaments (which usually take a long, long time to finish) and started to participate in ASTs (finished in 1-2 hours at the most).
Going for quality instead of quantity, never regretted this decision.
).
And they still had at least 150 ongoing games or so.