Vacations To Avoid Losing On Time Is Cheating!

great post Kong

i'm not sure anyone here could disagree with Mackus.

Ofcourse, Mackus has a point. It would stop abuse and we would still have vacation for those who realy need it. I haven't seen any arguments wich would show any flaws in restricting the access to the games when one is away.

You clearly have no idea what the f*** you are talking about.  It has nothing to do with being selfish.  As I pointed out, my opponents wait an average of 2 more minutes for each of my moves than yours do for you (and there's been I think 3 times I've been gone for 3+ days, so when I'm in town, I probably move quite a bit faster than you).

If you can't let me take a weekend off, then f*** off, your opinion means nothing to me.

then you're not reading what mackus has written

interesting that an opinion that "means nothing" to you, causes you to act so aggressively and passionately. 

SensFan,

Finally a spirited debate! I love it! Hey, I'm sure you're a decent person and all and all not a selfish one. You know where I stand on auto-vacations/tournament vacations. I still think to use them is selfish and there we can disagree without being enemies. I like Canada. I like Canadians. I have even memorized the first two words of your national anthem. I can be selfish now and then myself. Sometimes when I'm entering a mall or something, I walk a bit faster so I don't have to hold the door open for the guy behind me.

How is it selfish?  Over the course of the game, I will usually make moves in well under an hour, unless it comes while I sleep. The fact I might once take a little over 3 days doesn't change the fact the entire game with me will likely finish faster than the same game with 90% of other users on the site.  Especially since, if I drop a piece without compensation, I often resign on the spot.

And forgive me, but when I go camping, I pay money out of my own pocket and spend over a month planning the weekend, so that the youth can enjoy themselves, and can have fun in nature.  So I don't know that the fact that maybe a handful of chess opponents on the internet won't get a move response in that time makes me 'selfish'.

please show us that you don't care about this discussion.

It's cheating.

Can we also have some courtesy in this debate. Fing and Blinding is totally innapropriate. Chess is a game for gentlemen - please do not bring it into disrepute.

 I would rather get hit by the car..face it..chess is by far more important..

(Just my attempt at satire..lol)

I agree that "vacation" on time should not be a benefit. The clock runs the same for each player, or it should.

Do you think that Chess.com would really allow this sort of "cheating", knowing that everyday the staff works hard to catch real cheaters and to develop new and more efficient ways to do it?

Every time I'm gone for the weekend, and my time is about to run out, the vacation time is the only thing that saves me. It may be cheating to you, but it's not cheating to me.

I doubt they would remove the vacation feature because it "is considered cheating." For the bulk of us users, vacation time is helpful and useful. Now, there's always a small percentage that'll ruin it for the rest of us, but you can't just blatantly call it cheating. I do understand why you are frustrated with the feature, but it supports the greater interests of the chess.com population. 

I'm sure the staff had known that vacation time abuse was going to happen, or if not, I'm sure they know now. This has been a problem for quite some time, which has been slowing down CC tournaments to a crawl. But, they still haven't removed the feature. There are some downsides to it, but it is overall for the best. You know, like cough medicine.

There will be a day when you will wish you had done a little evil to do a greater good.
-Kingdom of Heaven

When I signed up to be premium, I automatically received more vacation time than I would ever need ( more than 40 days ).  This is a lot.  It may be more appropriate to have 10-14 days, IMO.

( so far I have used zero seconds of this 40+ days )

How about a turn in the debate? Every account gets one vacation day per ten days of that account existing.  Think about it. What does this mean? The maximum increase in time is 10%!!!If a person uses vacation for just two weeks, that means that their account had to have 140 days, or twenty weeks, of little-to-no vacation time. This means they would have been playing their games within the normal game time.  Even in a 14 day limit game, thats an extra 3 days per two moves, about 28 days. In a one day game, which according to you can be slowed down almost indefinitely, this person would only get one extra day per minimum ten moves, more if you move even just twice or three times a day. Considering about a 40 move game, that time would go from about 40 days, guessing one move per person per day, the game would go from 40 days to 44 days. Now I dont think 4 extra days will impact anyone's tournament schedule that much. If its a 14 day tournament, you expect it to last forever anyway. 

I personally, have held up a 1day/move tournament for about two weeks. Why? I was on vacation  over Easter/spring break. I had about 25 days of vacation time stocked up. Why? Because I had been playing for 10 months with little vacation time, the max being a four days to just clear my mind. Now during those 10 months, I had gone through six or seven other tourneys, usually with no vacation time. I usually only use vacation time for my 24 hour games, because, literally, if I get online at 4:00pm on Monday, but have extra homework or just other stuff on Tuesday, I might not be able to get on right after dinner about 7:00. I would hate to lose 10 games because of a three hour difference!

On a side note, could you imagine how Awardchess, and some of these other guys that play hundreds of games at once, would be able to mentally function after losing this many games because of running out of time? Even they go on vacation. Awardchess has dropped lately, to a measly 130 games at once. Everyone takes vacations, and do you really think he would want to have to make all of his moves before putting on vacation? Imagine him doing that when he had almost 1000 games. He could have 100 opponents logged on at the same time. Imagine that! If that happened to most of us, we would go crazy. Even if its apparently not that important, its still several hundred games. Quantity over quality.

Personally, I think that Mackus's proposal would solve all of this. Vacation time is what it's supposed to be, vacation time. It's also helpful for unexpected delays. It's a nice perk for upgrading. Really, it's one of the points that cause me to become a member. I mean seriously, I would pay $2.50 a month just for the auto-timeout protection!

If erik and the rest of the staff just make it so that you can't see the board while on vacation, it solves everything. Vacation time would truly become vacation time. And it probably wouldn't be too difficult to do. Also, another point. If the auto-timeout protection was completely canceled, almost every single premium member would be in outrage. Some may even cancel their membership in protest. If they just make boards invisible during vacation time, only the "cheaters" will be in outrage. Then all of you guys can gloat all you want and only target the ones you are meaning to target anyways! 

cuz when it comes to knowing stuff, the chess.com staff is perfect.  god forbid they might have to make changes.

What I don't get is why the players who are upset about the vacation feature have invested so much time in a website with rules they do not agree to? Why not play at another site that has rules the way they want it? Or better yet, start such a site if it doesn't already exist... there seems to be quite a few players who want it that way, the site would likely be a success.

Doesn't matter.

i.e. You have a game with a move per 3 full days = 72 hours. Or suppose, you have 30 days where, i'm almost certain, you will not think about it more than 72 hours.

If you don't find the right move in 72 hours, you will not find it at all.

So, the only advantage of having more vacation, is that you can play more games at the same time.

And that has no interference with the game itself you are playing.

I didn't read all the posts before so, if i repeated someone, forgive me.

I agree. If you don't like the chess.com rules, why not play on another site? There are plenty of other free sites, but none that have as great staff, features, and responses to requests. You can even "campaign" for these other sites so that chess.com doesn't get your business. Personally, I know very few people that would rather play on another site than chess.com. Go erik! P.S. jpf, who were you responding too?

Because so much of this site is incredible, and the healthy debate on the few contentious issues can only serve to help the staff of this site understand what kinds of things they can do to make it even better.