Clock Lag Making Chess.com online game meaningless.

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Avatar of MacZKnife

Online gamming is a massive consumer of Internet Time and space and bandwidth. Almost all of  popular online games  have a built in clock that times the game play. Chess is one of them. Chess.com clock has deteriorated. the app interface looks old and  uninspiring. The clock has a severe and a very noticeable lag. In many of my games I experience a clock lag by  7,15, 20 seconds between moves. At times, I make a mating move with 20 seconds left and then lose the game because my play is not recorded. I lose the game because it is deemed "abandoned" after I make a move and wait for my opponent to make a move. I know there is Internet speed lag in different countries, especially in Third Word countries, which still use dialup. But this even  happens when I am playing against an American, or a European country which use Gigabit bandwidth in their Internet. So, I have decided to just stop playing chess at Chess.com. It is emotionally draining and really makes me angry when I lose 350 points in rating and drop to 1100 from 1450. All of it from lagging clock. I hate to think that I may have won games at times because my opponent experienced a lag in his/her clock. 

I have a very important question to Chess.com. How on earth can you conduct a legitimate online chess tournament with a lagging clock issues ? How ?

Avatar of Martin_Stahl
MacZKnife wrote:

...

I have a very important question to Chess.com. How on earth can you conduct a legitimate online chess tournament with a lagging clock issues ? How ?

The server keeps the official clocks and will adjust values based on the lag compensation algorithm. If you're seeing moves taking longer than expected then you're experiencing higher lag and or disconnects.

https://support.chess.com/article/423-why-did-the-clock-times-suddenly-change-the-clocks-seem-broken

There are some things you can do from the client side to minimize lag and connection issues.

https://support.chess.com/en/articles/8652402-how-can-i-optimize-my-online-chess-performance

https://support.chess.com/en/articles/8584209-how-do-i-fix-my-disconnect-lag-issues