Auto-vacation is cheating

Ugh, button fail... but the auto-vacation to stop you losing games has to change. I guess they want that sub money, and so the 'perk' will continue

I'm not talking about people putting themselves on vacation, I'm talking about the game automatically putting them on vacation when they run out of time. Then they come back and make a move an hour or two later like nothing happened. Since you obviously don't understand the distinction between the two, I'm not sure how else to explain it to you.

I'm going to agree with you. Feels a little bit like pay to win. The thing is, I'm premium and I've been the one to do this to someone. It honestly wasn't intentional, and really it's nice to be able to go to bed and not have to worry about waking up to lost games, but I felt really guilty when I won a game recently to someone timing out when I had been saved by vacation time. Come to think of it, I should shut off auto-vacation if you can do that.

It's a clearly stated on the website as a feature of premium membership so clearly isn't cheating any more than moving a Rook forwards is cheating.

GAME OVER

Continue? 9

Insert Coin

200 rating points?!  lol.  If you get more rating points you play better players and lose more so your rating naturally evolves to a true level anyway.  If auto-vacation didn't exist then people could simply do it manually.

It will say your opponent has 2 months vacation time remaining, you click on their profile and they are still logging in everyday playing bullet and blitz.

How is that different to the vacation mode that people who pay nothing get?

The difference is only payed members do it, the unpayed just lose on time.

Not if they really go to town and click a tick box.  It's hard work, sure, and just because people don't pay anything they shouldn't be expected to strain their mouse finger have to tick a checkbox but life just isn't fair.

It's okay I am not going anywhere, I'll wait the months for the payed members to time out as well

thanking them for the free rating points they payed for.

Basically, you can pay to be protected from accidental time-outs and negligence, and paying members get way more vacation time.

I totally understand paying for access to videos, lessons, tactics, etc. But vacation time is a feature which directly affects games. It's the only thing on the site that I am aware of that directly affects games which paying members have greater access to. Just based on a philosophy of having a completely level playing field for all games, I would completely support the site removing the feature entirely.

The only people who really lose out are those hoping to win games through the luck of their opponent timing out.  They're hardly a section of society likely to garner massive amounts of sympathy.

And if someone is so ill they can't even log in to press a button they probably have far more to worry about than timing out of a few chess games.

As paid perks go the ability to not be able to play Daily Chess is really not up there with winning the lottery!  Daily chess is for people who want to play slowly anyway. So if you have to wait a few more days while your opponent returns from vacation mode is it that big a deal?  Apparently to some it is, but around half of daily tournaments are no vacation tournaments anyway.

So when someone has flu they can't think accurately enough to log in and press a button?

I have no idea why premium members get so much vacation time.  I'm quite happy to have the standard amount.  The fact I apparently have 2 months, 25 days left and only checked that because of this thread shows I really couldn't care less to have more than 30 days which is enough for anyone.  But the amount of days is not the topic that was under discussion anyway.

Which was the fact that members who have the temerity to pay for membership are cheating by doing so.

If I didn't have auto-timeout then I'd either make absolutely sure I moved before I timed out, I'd manually put vacation mode on (because apparently unlike a lot of people in the thread I don't find clicking a button that hard - I've done it plenty of times!) or I'd simply lose on time.  I've never played a chess game on here that has been so important that it really matters whether I lose on time or not, but I prefer not to.

And the idea that you can maintain over 200 points above your true playing rating through the magic of not losing games on time is so ridiculous it is not even worth discussing.  Playing chess moves wins or loses you games.  Not timing out of one or two games every now and again doesn't suddenly mean you can beat players 200 points above your playing strength.

If I play 1900-2000 rated players I expect to lose most of the time.  I can do whatever gymnastics I like with my vacation time, but it wouldn't change that fact.  But then, of course, my true rating is only 1478 maximum anyway so I must play above my level a hell of a lot to beat 1650-1750 level players in games where I don't use magic vacation time.

I feel like I should make the point that I don't think it's cheating to using vacation time. I also think that the 200 rating point difference is a huge overestimation. I think it's slightly unfair, but it hasn't really affected that many games that I'm aware of.

I have lost so many correspondence games by time-out [usually by non access to the net] ;so many that I dont play it now. Clearly

I'm disadvantaged by anyone who has [paid for] auto vacation.

even auto vacation ends , I was relying on it tbh to not time out whilst I was offline , but it ran out and now my time out rating is ott ,

granted my fault , and obv my opponents must have been annoyed or relieved as I had some easy wins , but its online chess mate and here subscribers get auto vacation ,

but it isn't cheating , it might however give subscribers an advantage non subscribers don't get so id say yes level the playing field an either scrap auto vacation or let every chess.com user benefit from it

I obviously can't check personally that non-paying members can't enter vacation mode when they have moves to play, but since vacation mode would make no sense at all if that were the case I'll just move on as it would sound like a bug, were it true.

As for things that directly affect games.  If your opponent is using tactics training for hours per day during a Daily game you'd expect that to improve their chess ability which would also directly affect the game.

You also have the bizarre rule that it is allowed to use the opening database during daily games.  This is available to both paid and non-paid members but affects games far more than an occasional vacation mode because clearly not everyone is going to use that.   Personally I'd be far happier with my opponent slipping into auto-vacation mode from time to time that playing moves from an opening database rather than their own moves.