Old Thread: IMPORTANT Change Coming to Vacation Use!

Just curious-- how did you get that info on the time of implementation?

He was just guessing it from the notice that chess.com was going to be offline for an update some minutes ago.

So by my logic, it is already implemented.

Anybody (with lots of vacation time) care to test?

I was going to test it, as I have full vacation time and rarely use it, anyway.  However, I found out that it IS in effect without having to go on vacation.  When I went to set myself on vacation, the note about it being a legitimate vacation popped up, but added to that was a note about all vacation now being a minimum of a day.

Very nice. And thank you for reporting back.

I wonder how is he going ? CM Kacparov

He has been heavily reducing the number of his games in the last few days.

However, I very much hope that chess.com has been able to fix the bug he has pointed out. Because this bug will affect many premium members whose time keeps running down during their vacation. Unless maybe this bug turns out to be a weakness of the system that only shows up for people with very many games ... ?

Wait... so, if you fall into vacation. You use the same amount of time if you do it for 30 seconds than for one day? After 1 day, does it subtract 1 more day, despite the amount of time used after 1 day? 

PS. I'm not whining. Just clarifying. I can't be bothered to read 12 pages on this so forgive me if this was stated earlier.

You seem not to have read post #1.

 say that again in another way

jerry, yes, a 30 second vacation takes off a day from your vacation time just as having a one day vacation.

However, a 1 day and 1 minute vacation will take off exactly 1 day and 1 minute from your vacation time.

Right - the whole point is that they're removing the crutch that premium players sometimes use to manage their game load.

Just means that someone with a high game load will have to make moves once daily or so. Hopefully for their sake, it's not a ton of 1 move/day games!

So now when a premium member slips into vacation, they have no incentive whatsoever to come out of vacatiion and continue playing for 24 hours.

yep, slowing down the games.

Unless they like playing chess.

But for those with a lot of games close to timing out, they wouldn't want to come back during the same day unless they knew they could stay ahead of all their game clocks, or else they'd lose another vacation day on the same playing day.  It might be a little messed up for a few days for some people until their number of games adjusts to what they can handle with the added rule.

or choose 5-14 days/move instead.

I'm going to repeat a suggestion made elsewhere, since it apparently went unnoticed by the staff; maybe in this thread it will be seen:

IMO, after the automatic vacation kicks in, the returning player should be able to make moves without having to turn the vacation off.

Also, the automatic vacation algorithm should use some hysteresis and turn the automatic vacation off when the time left in the most urgent game exceeds some number of minutes that is greater than the time used to turn the vacation on.

Here's an example of a 90/180 minutes hysteresis setup:

Suppose that the vacation starts automatically when you have 90 minutes left to the most urgent game, a couple dozen games with <120 minutes, and several hours or more in the rest.

You come back from vacation (having used at least one obligatory day), play the moves in the first game (the vacation stays on), then play the moves in the aforementioned couple dozen games. As soon as the most urgent game left in the queue has 3 or more hours of time left, the vacation turns itself off automatically. Hopefully, you can make progress in the rest of the games without triggering the vacation on again.

The thresholds when the automatic vacation would switch itself on/off should be settable in the user's preferences.

Note that it is in the user's interest to turn the vacation off as soon as practical, so this entire setup is not likely to be abused.

Last few days? I've been reducing the number since June!