Warnings re: Fair play.

I have lost a lot of games through "Connection interrupted" and then "game abandoned". 

Consequently a warning follows soon after that I have aborted too many games and I might have my account restricted. 

I have never disconnected a game on purpose, I am a paying member, what would be the point of that for heavens sake!

I've read the comments in the forums and the "help" pages, done the checks and everything else, (I do know my way around technology, so give me a break) nothing wrong with my internet connection/hardware, I fit and test the stuff for a living.

In February I shall bid Chess.com "Adieu" and never again renew my subscription.

This is a case of you most certainly do not get what you pay for.

How have things changed, via a vis, the disconnections over the years? Does it make any difference what type of connection you use?

Well I have what is supposed to be the "bees-knees" of broadband & internet connection in the UK,  and talking to them about this issue, they say my connection is absolutely fine.

Chees.com say they have no problem their end, I'm inclined to disagree, this problem is too widespread to be a coincidence.

Which leads me to believe that Chess.com don't really care about the level of service they provide as long as they can still attract paying subscribers.

There is definitely something 'buggy' aboutthe chess.com connections. I can be running various other apps/programs over the net using the same connection and only the chess.com connection goes down ... very annoying.

I agree that chess.com do need to have a look at the issues.

Nutty

The "connection" to Chess.com is not like the connection to other sites because those sites do not have to be refreshed once a second. 

Chess.com could do itself and its users a big favor by explaining in greater detail what is supposed to happen when moves are made and what are some things that can go wrong.

As I understand it, there is no constant connection between the server and the thousands of players online at any moment. An apparent connection exists whenever there is a move or other change in status. (A timeout, for example.) However, there is basically nothing that persists while waiting for the next move.

Meanwhile, other processes are going on. Free users have scripts running which may be fetching ads from third party sites. (It is not clear how often these run or how they are triggered or what happens when these other processes fail.) During a game, other processes run periodically. How often these run is not clear. However, they do not need to be run every second.

I don't know how chess.com tells if players have their devices listening for packets from chess.com. Is there a ping every second? (Or something similar.)

Giving users more insight into what has to happen to have moves successfully transmitted to a third party (the other player) and back might help to alleviate some of the hostility from users who can't believe that their cell phone connection, which may be good enough to download movies quickly (in one operation) or text their friends, three times a minute, may not be good enough to reconnect to chess.com with 100% reliability once or more per second for as long as a game may last.

I won't say there aren't improvements that can be made to the client but if you are doing a bunch of other network type tasks while playing live the problem is likely related to that.

I have had issues in Live when playing games if my kids are streaming videos and playing games. Heavy network usage can cause connection issues. 

Many other connections can handle interrupts well, through various mechanisms, such as buffering. Other connections don't need near real-time connectivity.

Network failures happen all the time and people don't notice due to the way many services handle those failures. In a regular connection for a service, dropping a few packets here or there or even 10% of the time, isn't noticeable. In a real-time connection, dropping packets becomes much more noticeable. 

Add to the local traffic volumes, you have every single network hop between you and the Live servers. Your other traffic probably shares less than 1/3 of the same path, so connection issues on one won't be noticeable with another.

Anyway....

https://support.chess.com/customer/en/portal/articles/1444918-my-internet-connection-is-fine---why-am-i-getting-disconnects-

@chesskidas007

I've gotten over the anger bit, just still very frustrated that it (still) happens.

@Martin_Stahl

I wish I could blame it on internal load on my router, but as there is only me here that particular reason for my loss of connection - and I must emphasise this next statement - "It only EVER disconnects during a live game" - does not apply here.

Do chess.com really care about this? The answer is a plain and simple "No!" Otherwise they would be bustin' their chops getting this sorted.

Why do I keep playing & paying? Love of chess is why, and chess.com do get an awful lot right - no doubt about that, and sometimes you "meet" some nice people.

I'm pretty sure the site cares. There is the issue there are only a few points that the site can really do anything about. Making the client code more robust, making the Live server code more robust, improving local server connectivity and maybe getting some kind of peering where they can limit the number of hops the traffic takes from one region of the world to the site's hosting provider.

I'm sure erik and staff do what is feasible with the resources at their disposal. They probably could make the process almost bullet proof but the cost to do so isn't something the site could absorb and still remain running. I don't know.

never had that problem, use an optical fiber.