Has Chess.com ever had a worse idea than Vacations?

Seriously. I've been trying to think of one. But I'm not coming up with anything.

Vacations are automaticly abused by trolls, who can single-handedly hold up a 90 person tournament by themselves for months.

Vacations are exactly the kind of mistake trolls feed off of.

What ounce of benefit vacation gives honest players, is overwhelmingly outweighed by the hundreds of pounds of abuse trolls heap on us with it.

Don't get me wrong. I think most of the time Chess.com makes good decisions. Just this one day, somebody must have come into work very drunk, to think vacations would make this site more enjoyable.

This is correspondence chess. One game is expected to take 1-3 years. If you don't like it, play Live or OTB or enter 1 day no-vacation tournaments.

there are tournaments with no vacation time. you should choose one of those tournaments instead and the same goes for non tournament games as well you can choose to only play games that have no vacation time.

problem with that is I am only allowed one tournament.

So I cannot enter another tournament until 1-3 years. (When my last remaining opponent makes his next move.)

Unless I withdraw from this tournament. In which case he will win, and tell all his troll buddies to abuse the vacation time, to save a losing postion, and they will all start doing it.

You can run/play tournaments outside of chess.com tournament format.

I agree. There should be an option not to allow vacation when we are starting a Game.

....which is the real bad idea here.  Vacation is good and its abuse is a necessary evil, but when combined with the one tournament limit it does get somewhat ridiculous.  I always would advocate for a three tournament limit.

I think that vacations are a great idea because for example i am an active player who plays a lot of tournaments in other cities or countries. So i think is necessary. 

How exactly am I supposed to "schedule my games more carefully"? A single game of correspondance chess can take months, and a tournament will take years. Should I only sign up for a tournament if I plan on not going on vacation for more than a week or two in the next 4 years?

Vacation can be useful and legitimate. If someone goes every year on vacation in summer where he does not have internet access, cutting the vacation basically means he won't play any time control >3d/m, and will probably be reluctant to play even at 3d/m (risk of long endgame). And it also means that all games (between such people) should start on September...

Possibly a way around that would be to consume vacation time not by days but by weeks, ie every started week is consumed. It would limit the abuse while still answering the problem of people going away.

About your precise situation, I heard rumors that if you are completely winning and coincidentally your opponent gets on vacation, you can ask chess.com to adjudicate the game.

That's actually a great idea.

Or better yet, how about if a person taking vacation does not reset their clock. Like, I had 4 days left when i went on vacation, I have four days left when I come back? Would the entire universe collapse if chess.com set it up that way?

 My opponent is currently on his 13th vacation, on the same move. And most of the time he has spent not on vacation. Just watching his clock run down, so he can reset it.

I have no problems with vacations, but that does not mean vacation abuse does not exist.

Vacation, by any defenition, is a fairly major event. It's not something that happens 3 or 4 times per week, or even multiple times per day, in some cases.

Maybe vacation should be limited to 2 instances per month. It should bw used for real vacations, or unexpected RL crises, not for putting games on hold because you don't feel like playing a game you agreed to.

If you have more than 2 crises per month, maybe give up chess for a while and sort out your life.

Nonsense. I don't live next to my computer. I take vacations as needed, sometimes several times a month.

I will take two vacations this upcoming week. Sunday through Tueusday (for a Colonoscopy on Monday), then playing again Wednesday through Thursday, then another vacation over the weekend as I enter a 3 day long OTB chess tournament.

I won't even enter any more chess tournaments that do not allow vacations, I learned my lesson last year when I had to travel for a week with no internet connectivity and lost a pile of games. 

You guys have the option to enter "no vacation" tournaments; enter them.

And no, you are not limited to "1 tournament", you can enter as many as you like. For example, I am in about 7 right now. So this is factually incorrect.

The only people this might apply to are people who play for free, and they of course do not have a right to complain. Complaining is for paying members that are supporting your ability to play on this site at all.

Ah, there it is-only paying members can complain. On a site that advertises you can play for free.

But, hey, ubik, thanks for supporting us freeloaders.

Well, as a paying member, I'm limited to 10. Because of this, I can only choose no vacation tourneys, otherwise I'd soon be waiting for 10 dead tourneys to finish before I can enter another.

Ubik, would you say that this is a "typical" week for you? Do you often really need 2 vacations per week?

And for the record, free members bring an immense value to this site.

If all paying left the impact for me will be less than if all free members left.

There it is Al!

I guess you and I are part of the 47% of freeloaders Mitt Romney was talking about!

Thats great. You choose no vacation tourneys, I choose vacations, thats why there is choice, each fits our own lifestyle.

I don't lobby to have ALL tournaments vacation tournaments, because I understand that you can pick your tourneys to suit you. My needs arent the same as everyones.

Vacations are a great idea. If chess.com didn't have them, I would take my business elsewhere.

Here is an idea: if you don't like them, choose no vacation. Don't see one? Start your own tournament and make it no vacation. its really that simple.

Greqt idea!!

When the current tournament I'm in ends in another 2 years, remind me of that!

LOL

At least until chess.com ran out of money to pay their electric bill and had to replace the chess pieces with 6 little advertisements.  The ones for car insurance would be pawns, the advertisements to lose weight would be rooks...

And of course each time you click to move a piece it opens a new window to their site.