Stuck in a Quagmire with TT !

   I appear to be stuck in a quagmire with Tactics Trainer and the timer appears to be the issue. I managed to get back up to 1200 (1196) after a couple of months on my 3/5 free problems a day but, recently dropped about 80 points.

The problem has been trying to solve the problem too quickly, in order to get a good or even a positive score and this can result in disastrous consequences. 

I could solve over 95% of these problems without a time restraint (big issue with an older guy), do you think there should be a time penalty on these problems ?

I found that hiding the timer was helpful. Just focus on solving the problems, taking care to calculate till the end, and your rating will go up eventually.

Not necessarily. The rating system has changed rather recently, maybe in the last 12-24 months or so.

Now, problems which were before rated 1900 and had an average time of 2:00 minutes, are found at a rating of 1050 with an average time of 0:30 minutes.

Also, in the old system, you would get 12-25 points for solving the challenges at 100%. Now, the maximum is 8 to 9 points. So in essence, today it is much more harder to get to decent ratings than players who got their points in the old system.

As you can see from the OP, people playing live at 1700 elo are struggling with problems rated at 1100 (which, again, were in the earlier chess.com system found typically at ratings near 2000). The system is dubious.

If you look at all the people on chess.com with high tactics scores, they all obtained them before 2013. You will be hard-pressed to find individuals who got to say 2000+ within the last 6 months or so. There are some new IM's and GM's on chess.com who are rated 2500+ in everything else except tactics trainer 1100-1300.

Hmm... I just got back to using TT after a fairly long break, but it looks fine to me. Just to be sure I did a couple of sessions today (clearing my stats in-between). I also toyed around with the pace to see if that would change things much.

Before my break, I used to have a rating in the mid-1800:s with a highest score of ~1930. Now, if I gave myself about ~20s/problem I ended up at about 1500-1600 after 10 minutes, and when I manage to concentrate properly (my biggest problem right now when I'm playing, ideally I seem to take about 1min/problem), I ended up at 1700 after 15 minutes (25 problems, 21 correct). Lower than before, for sure, but I'm pretty rusty.

Are you using TT on your phone or on the site? I've had some problems before when switching between them and had to clear my stats for TT to work properly.

Btw, the rating change seemed normal as well. Some cut and paste from the stats (and yes, I did play a bit too fast ):

Thank you very much for posting that picture. I think my TT is broken? I can never get over 7 points for solving a problem, let alone 30-50 (!) that seems to be routine in your pictures.

And I was a diamond member just recently, so it can't be a free member related bug.

What could be causing this? I have always been capped to losing 9 points for every failed task, and gaining a maximum of 7 points for every correct one.

Or.. Did they change the scoring algorithm for newly registered players? If they did, that is IMO a horrible decision from the chess.com team. Different people should not be subject to different rules; The points should be the same for everybody.

What were the ratings for those problems? Where they significantly lower than your rating? (It is possible that the 25 problems I did in that session wasn't enough to stabilize the point difference, but I think the change was the same as in those other sessions I did where I did many more problems.)

About a year and a half ago, TT started giving me problems many hundreds of points below my level. I think they fixed that bug (IIRC, it happened after you exhausted all problems within your rating range — there was a different problem before when you could the same problem several times in a row, fixing that probably led to that bug), but I did have similar problems a couple of months ago after switching between the phone app and the site.

They were roughly around my rating or about 50-80 higher. But I never used the phone app, only the site. I have never gotten as many points as indicated in your picture.

Note that when TT first came out, I had another account. I got it quite easily to 2100 in TT. That was years ago. Now, because of this scoring system bug I can barely go above 1200.

As seen in your picture, some challenge with say a 88% correct answer awards you 55 points. I would get only 5 points for the same challenge at 88%, which is ten times less. However if I get it wrong, I always lose 9 points.

Those 55 points were just because I cleared my stats, after a couple of problems the change becomes smaller (the k-factor decreases with the number of problems attempted).

Ok, so I did some more problems today. (Had some other stuff to attend to so I wasn't exactly focused, though .) The rating changes seem to be stable (and normal) ranging from about -10 to +10.

If they're not too important to you, you could always try clearing your stats. As you can see above, your rating should converge pretty fast to its true value (in some sense).

imagine bumping this