Getting More Vacation Time & More Playing Time Into His Clock ???

i saw a twenty the other day that was realistic as anything! guy in the chippy showed me the one his wife had taken while he was out Rallying. he reckons he's not going again lol

Examining the capabilites of my Canon printer but that ''linen'' paper continues to be a problem. Why can't we just use plastic-notes like Australia, Canada and numerous others. 

I have reported this problem 1st time about a week ago.

So far nothing progress has happened. This problem keeps as hostage atm 179 Members of Chess.com. And it´s going to escalate, if not stopped.

The issue is, that one current member teaches the folks VACATION ABUSING by his own example :

http://www.chess.com/members/view/graven29#games

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/help-support/getting-more-vacation-time-amp-more-playing-time-into-his-clock?page=1

Many of his opponents have retreated from this Time Battle :

http://www.chess.com/home/game_archive?member=graven29

I think, it´s really the time to stop this Manipulation of Online Chess Clock via Vacationing & via Exchanging Premium Memship Statuses.

Do You really let one Vacation Abuser ruin Your business, Erik ?

Greetings from Finland

by Lauri Aikio.     

Don't play online chess if you aren't ready for vacation time. Just play live chess.

@Cnacnel

It is obvious some people found the way to manipulate vacation time.

Then he deserves a ban.

I guess if you change memberships, your amount of vacation time gets reloaded? That's...interesting. Except, they still have to pay the membership cost, right? Unless they're doing the "money-back-30-day-guarantee" deal, but I thought you could only do that once?

Indeed... today, my (again vacationless) opponent changed from diamond to platinum, and suddenly, his newly expired (again) vacation was refreshed.

This is blatant, deliberate cheating.  My opponent maintains hundreds of games, and refreshes his vacation regularly, to keep them dangling for months at a time. Many of his matches are won on time (when his opponents time out... only cheaters are playing with an unlimited clock, so the playfield is unbalanced) and others are simply resigned by opponents from even positions (possibly non-members who would like to compete in another tournament... his actions trap non-members into one tournament that never progresses.)

I have no idea why they came up with the idea that users who changed premium plans should be awarded more vacation just for switching. I can remark that I have a year's diamond membership, and the site keeps track of how much money I have remaining (paid in advance,) so if I were to switch between memberships regularly, I could do the same thing. I assume my cheating opponent has a similar setup, and no morals.

By the way, LauriAikio, I didn't realize until your last post that we have been talking about the same opponent.

Perhaps if the vacation time were refreshed only if you upgraded...

I knew it all the time.     

@mottsauce

Only when you upgrade wouldn't be good enough... perhaps only when you upgrade to a new level for the first time.  Otherwise, he'll downgrade to platinum and upgrade back to Diamond right away.  No cost, same result.

Frankly, I may be a bit biased about the big picture, here. I'm of the opinion that paid members (including me) should have no more vacation than unpaid members, nor should it "automatically" kick in when their time runs out. Both of those things give over-the-board advantages to paid members, and I'd rather the only advantage to paid members would be in access to the learning resources. As an extreme example, I should not be able to pay $10 and suddenly undo a move in a game played without undo--or pay $20 and get a new queen on the board. No one would consider that reasonable, because that's an over-the-board advantage. Our advantages from premium membership should NEVER translate into direct advantages over the board, or we're not playing the same game. Given that rating is tracked, we want very much to be playing the same game, so that our rating reflects our actual abilities. (By "we", I mean the non-cheating population of chess.com.  The cheaters would be quite content to have those types of advantages, or free advantages with similar impact, because they care about rating as a number, not as a representation of chess skill.)

Vacation---- a big problem on chess com, never saw this bevore by other chessservers. Why the oponents want play chess and  if they are loosing soon they go on Vacation!!

This is really unfair, this peoples want fly from this loosing board, but the fair player stay every day on chessboard and hope that the other play  a move.   Please chesscom----destroy this  Vacation.  Best wishes from XXL to all fair players!

@Thar: Oh yeah, I hadn't thought of that, good point!

I agree 100% that player should not be able to gain vacationtime over and over again. In another tournament this seems to happen too. This person has 1,5 MONTHs of vacation left.

Really.. what kind of person holds up ~90 people for such a long time just to win a couple games because people resign? I wanted to resign at first as well because Ill end up 1st anyway. Now Ill just wait. I am not going to give such a person what he/she is aiming for.

Also the time they get for their move is reset to the intial time. When the timecontrol is 14 days this is alot of extra time. So if one goes on vacation and has, for example, 5 hours left then he/she comes back the time should still be 5 hours. And not be reset to 14 days..

And in another game my opponent had 7 hours left on the clock.. and now he suddenly has 26 hours? It's 3 days per move..

Did he snap in and out of vacation and recieved a free day to "come home" properly? I dont think an awefull lot of people use these tricks to gain time or delay things... but I do hope chess.com will do something about it.

Orrrrr give a real good reason why it works like that.

@ElKitch

I agree; there is no reason why their game clock should refill just because they went on vacation.  However, it apparently does.

In any event, Lauri Aikio's post last week (which I found when I was looking for other people experiencing the same problem) inspired me at that time to post a cheating report.  They said (paraphasing) "your opponent has no vacation left, so please let us know if he somehow goes back on vacation again before the 15th".

My message last night (after 2 more "refills" by the same opponent) was this, and I'm sure we will all see the justice in the final outcome:

07 Feb 2013 08:02 AM
CHEATING CONFIRMED

His new vacation ran out again yesterday, and, lo and behold, by this morning gained another 1 day and 12 hours.  While discussing this neverending story with other players, the cheating method has been discussed, and seems to fit this incident.

Apparently, the site doesn't charge to change from one  premium plan to another.  For reasons that make no sense to me, changing plans automatically adds vacation time to the user who did it.  This user is deliberately opening huge numbers of games, and manipulating his vacation time to add essentially infinite vacation, then delaying games until opponents resign, or discover, after weeks of no moves, that they have suddenly timed out themselves. 

If you look at his account history, I think it is very likely that you will find this is the case... multiple switches between different premium levels, building as much vacation as he needs to delay for another day or two, and repeating the trick when the new vacation runs out.

This is deliberate, premeditated cheating, plain and simple.  This player is not only failing to abide by the time controls that he agreed to, but he is actively exploiting a broken vacation system to the detriment of hundreds of opponents, at the cost of delaying many tournaments.

I would like to again request a win based on time, since there is no reason he should legitimately have the amount of time per move that he has taken. If the opponents who have lost to him on time could have their scores reversed, I think they should. He was not playing on a level playing field... he had infinite time, against opponents who did  not, simply because they were playing by the rules.  Players like this spoil the experience of competitive chess for hundreds of people, in order to artificially inflate their own, now meaningless, rating.

In response, I received this:

Sorry for the delay, this member has been warned, and his vacation time removed. If he doesn't make his move in games, his time will expire.

So, as you can see, there were tremendous consequences for his delays of hundreds of opponents (and thousands of tournament players,) and for his "wins" as a result of his months of cheating. The consequence is... that he has to play like the rest of us!

I am certain this is a fair outcome, aren't you?

we've fixed the bug and contacted the user. 

Thank You, Erik.     

So far, so good. No VDs atm :