Old Thread: IMPORTANT Change Coming to Vacation Use!

You did not miss much.

This is a question i asked, no-one yet answered

Let's say that I go on vacation and I log on to chess.com to play live chess but haven't yet used up the 1 day of vacation or I log in and didn't realise that i was low on time.

Would I lose on time since I logged in?

go and play to avoid the problem, you have 2 games - that's 10 seconds!

OK, this time I did sort through all 10 pages (looking specifically for Erik's responses).  Two things:

1. Prawn -- you're right.  I didn't.
2. I also didn't see any reference to an inability to use other site features tied into vacation -- including live chess.  Vacation time applies to turn-based chess games only.  It doesn't preclude you from logging in and accessing the forums, tactics trainer, live chess or any other areas of the site -- only your turn based games.  I think that if this were a part of the change it would have been made pretty clear in Erik's original post.

I just have to ask - if you're playing 750 games at once and making moves in 10 seconds, then why are you even playing turn based chess? Why not just play a bunch of blitz games in a row whenever you have time? You'll end up with the same amount of games played, but you'll never risk "losing the thread" of what's going on in any particular game, because you'll only have one at a time. I just don't get it.

I play turn based specifically to take my time and look things up in opening references. This is why I stick to a small number of turn based games. When I want to play faster, or I have a bunch of time all at once, I'll play blitz or slow onine games instead.

1. I can stop online chess whenever I want. Even when I play bullet, sometimes I have to quickly go off and just leave the game. That's the main reason.

2. Online chess is more competetive - team matches, tournaments etc. - it's missing in live chess.

3. Online chess has bigger variety of opponents.

I initially misread the tone on this -- in my mind it sounded like the defensive words of an online-chess addict.... 

lol, funny...

yes right it looks like it but I hpoe you understand what I meant

Wonderful!

When is this change taking effect?

Sorry if this was already answered.

I don't think so, ( but I could be wrong). I had the impression players with too many games would be given some time to get their house in order.

What about the Gold member who went on vacation 45 days ago and never returned? Among the more than one dozen games he left behind, one had only 15 minutes left for him to make a move. Isn't that an abuse of vacation privileges? What can chess.com do to prevent it? The guy's clock is still ticking merrly away.

this is stupid. the reason it's called "vacation" is for people ACTUALLY GOING ON VACATION as much as i know you want to stop cheaters...this is ridiculous, i don't like it at all.

there is nothing wrong with going on vacation, is the ones who goes on vacation 2 or more times  on the same day.

And exactly those people are the ones who get hit by this policy. In fact, the new policy is brilliant.

This is what happens when the whole lot of us make simple armchair suggestions - we never come up with stuff like this. Which is why it's a good thing that some people really have this site as their job. (-:

I wholeheartedly agree with both of you.

I recommend not to introduce rules about vacation just because people say that something should be done about "stallers".

* Introducing the new rule presented in this thread would force many normal users to learn about and pay attention to a strange detail in vacation rules.

* Each time someone goes on vacation, he is seeing a strange box telling him to assure that this is "legitimate" vacation and no "vacation abuse". I think this is the wrong place to make all normal chess players worry about whether they maybe violate some rules and make them feel like suspects about something.

* Non-premium members have to make a move in all of their games before they are allowed to turn on vacation. I find that to be very counter-intuitive. When I notice that I have no time for playing chess and wish to turn on "vacation", this is certainly not the moment when I would like to be forced to analyze all of my games well enough to make the next move, or be forced to make quick moves in some of these games that risk to throw away the work of many weeks or months of analysis before.

(And I am not sure if premium members, who do not have that third problem, would like to have that kind of advantage in their games with basic members who may risk losing games because of possibly superficial forced pre-vacation moves.)

I am convinced that meddling with vacation rules is not the way to deal with stallers. It affects all normal users negatively by making vacation rules more strange, and it does not make stallers play faster.

In addition, meddling too much with vacation rules seems to carry the danger of making impatient people even more impatient. I have even seen many people starting to shout "abuse" in cases when people are just playing reasonable Online Chess by making good use of their time for analyzing a difficult position, making normal moves quickly and difficult moves slowly.

btw, looks like this change is going into effect in... 8 minutes

Just time for a 7 minute vacation, without penalty.

I suppose it depends on how the code is written