I think our only concern should be to give some degree of fairness to people whose ISP disconnects them or when the chess.com server flakes out. This may well cause an outage way longer than the time limit of the game. An ISP outage of a half hour should not automatically cause someone to lose their 15 0 game.
Also, if the chess.com server goes down for, say, 3 hours, I suggest allowing maybe 6 hours to reconnect.
As someone who has played on playchess.com for many years, I really think the best solution to this problem would be to adopt their policy:
Personally, I think this will be a large area of abuse if players are allowed a 7 day resume option. Meanwhile there will also be a lot of frustrated players. Online chess entails having a solid internet connection IMO.
While it is true that getting disconnected is annoying, the relative small amount of rating points makes it frivolous to try to adjourn games - just adds more stress to both the staff and members of chess.com
It is much better to just live with losing a couple of points than having to worry about logging back on again to finish a game - it could also be hard on the "winner" of the adjourned game to find that he actually lost it by forgetting to log in within the given time limit, thinking that the game was finished.
To return too the game the only logical time period should be only 1 or 2 hours and no more. More time doesnt make sence!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Having an adjourn feature is just asking for abuse. Although it sucks to lose a game because you got disconnected, there really isn't a solution that people won't abuse. I think it'd be better if the feature is removed.
I have been subjected 2 repeated disconnects recently. every time I reconnect and click resume I am dc again. so 4 me the ansswer 2 the prob lies in the server. if that was corrected then anyone who deliberatly dc should lose.
I think if they are serious about the game they will log back on within 15 min. if not they lose... simple as that
I have a few suggestions
How about a frequent disconnecters list, for ex. if you have more than 6 adjourned games, you will lose every game after in which you disconnect until you clear all the adjourned games. Or if you disconnect all the time, you can be put on a list of disconnectors and then you lose every game. I realise the black list is probably not realistic considering some people disconnect because live chess is still not perfect and some don't want to switch to a different browser, or some maybe can't.
hello. just happening right now: i am currently playing a game with someone from india. he got in my trap and lost his queen. when i took his queen with my queen his time started running and he lost three or four minutes. then suddenly its says: game adjourned. I can see him being online still when i click his profile. is this a strange server problem or is it an example for misusing this option?
well it's getting even better! I can observe him right now playing with someone else.. obviously no server problem...
Bad idea!
Adjournment has always been by agreement or at a fixed time. To allow a player to choose this route clearly can confer advantage if timed right.
Adjudication is similarly fraught with problems. The adjudicator must be of the highest standard. But I am told that the rating of the players will be taken into consideration. That starts to get random.
Most players realise also that a pawn advantage is a winning advantage in king and pawn endings (mostly). So, *with accurate play* it is often possible to exchange the pieces to reach that state.
An adjudication therefore has to be such that: either a pawn advantage without *clear* compensation is winning, or the game will be decided on ratings!!
Very unsatisfactory. I want to opt out!
Just found this feature for the first time today. Three moves in my opponent saw that his position was hopeless and adjourned. Probably he was hoping I would fall for some opening trap, and when I didn't, he bailed. Please disable this 'cheat' feature.
For the record, I like the promise of the new feature, but it needs to be tweaked. I think the best solution is just to allow the player who disconnected to log back on and resume the game. The clock should continue running. If the server is unavailabe and logging back on is not possible, that's a different story of course, but that's a matter of making chess.com more robust, not this feature.
Interesting. Noticing that the adjourning player was still online, but was not responding to resume requests, I observed the entire game he was currently playing, then hit resume as soon as the game concluded. The game resumed! Yay! Then three moves later he disconnected again...
I agree that the adjourn feature seems not only to be open to abuse, but that it's also being abused.
I reckon the best approach is just to let the clock run down in absentia - if you can't reconnect in time, then tough. I know this is annoying when you can't reconnect and it's not your fault, but it seems a fairer and cleaner approach than adjournments.
I like the ideas of letting the player who's been left sitting on their own decide what the outcome should be. So, after a certain percentage of the total time of the game has elapsed, the remaining player could be faced with five options:
1) Claim win by absence
2) Wait for opponent to return (let clock run)
3) Pause clock and wait for opponent
4) Adjourn game until later
5) Abort game
Maybe five's a little over the top (!), so you could conflate 2 and 3.
What do people think?
Solution
Those of you who have broadband (I also have it
) are simply discriminating against those (in some countries) who haven't when you say you do not want the "adjourn" feature. Otherwise people who have flaky connections will be barred from Live Chess forever.
You can successfully eliminate the abuse of this feature if it becomes mandatory to download and install some sort of Java applet (java is very safe, and has no abuse potential) which will communicate to chess.com server every 30 sec. Then people who have a connection but intentionally disconnected can be judged and made to lose. Otherwise laws say you cannot judge somebody guilty unless proved.
People who really got disconnected falls into three categories:
1) Temporary dis-connection due to customer side- hardware is OK. Give them prior instruction that in case of losing your connection, reboot your computer. That should take a max. of 10 minutes. Keep both the clocks stopped upto 10 min. or until disconnected person logs back in. After login force him to join the adjourned match - leave him no other option, and start the clock.
2) Disconnection due to hardware failure - this is due to no fault of the player, but occurs few and far between. The disconnected player have to accept a loss in such case, even if he had a winning position.
3) Disconnection due to Chess.com side problem - adjourn. If game lost - draw.
There should be a feature for you to see how many games have been adjourned. I assume there is this feature for those doing the adjourning, but what about the other player? The other player should also be able to track adjourned games in their archives. If this feature already exists, I do not know where to access it. Also, I resumed a game yesterday with a player and the game did not resume, it simply started over. They then disconnected again and we didn't resume, but in the seeks column it had 3 games listed w/ this person to be resumed. How did 1 adjourned game turn into 3?
For blitz and quick games I think disconnection should forfeit the game.
Blitz will be pointless if players can disconnect or 'adjourn' when and if they wish. If two players jointly agree to adjourn because of the complexity and interest of one particular game then fine - the adjourment is mutual.
For longer games I think there is more need to look sympathetically at disconnections - and disconnections are the problem here - not adjournments - With the best server in the world there will always be the odd disc. and some provision should be made to take that into account. Some prior agreement/arrangement can surely be built into setup to take account of this.
I think I agree with David Forthoffer - disconnects of less than - say 2 hours - should be allowed reconnect, resume. disconnect of 2 days, tough. loss.