Should Chess.com Change How Vacation Works?

I think it would be nice if you made it customizable, in tournaments and club challenges. Now we only have Vac or No Vac, instead it may be practical for a TD or team admin to be able to chose a vacation limit for the event when he creates it...

Now, first of all it should be dependant and up to the sides. It should not have any limit. It is a correspondence chess, it is between me and the adversary: the post (chess.com) should not have a say in our vacation time, we are the players and we should decide how much we can go. chess.com serves here as a post through which I send and recieve my moves. It can not have a say in amount of time I can delay my move, my adversary can have it. Now you may say what if I go to vacation till eternity? As I said, it should be dependant: the sides must set a maximum days of vacation in advance to the game. I want to play a casual daily game, when I issue a challenge I shall set the vacation time like "up to 20 days at most." That is all. When my opponent surpasses that limit, he loses. Likewise, when I am scanning the challenges I will accept in a similar way and when I do not comply to it, I will lose the game.

In team matches  (like chess.com world league), the match organizers will set the vacation time like all participants of this match can 10 (or any amount) days of vacation time.

And Here is my proposal about daily chess time control (novelty): https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/proposal-new-type-of-daily-chess-with-only-a-specific-time-for-the-whole-game-shall-be-used 

It is entirely different.

...same as it works for Timeout ratio for example

Here are my thoughts....

• I think Auto-Vacation should be removed completely. Or maybe you get 3 or 4 Auto vacations per year (for real emergencies)  This will make Vacation VERY intentional.
• If you are on Vacation and you log in, You will get a Popup "Your opponents are waiting for you to move"  Click either "GO TO GAMES' or "STAY ON VACA (just here to read the news)"
• If you have more than 100 games open your vacation time will run out faster because it is divided between ALL the games

I think that once you are on vacation, you cannot access your account.

Some people activate vacation time, and they still log in everyday.

That is a logical but rational?. I sometimes do that (not with the intention of stalling though).

I become busy, can not think on my daily games but to entertain myself play blitz or solve tactics or puzzle rush a little bit.

One can argue "instead of playing blitz think on your move and make it." But then, daily chess is not something like over-the-board. It is to be played when you can spare time for it instead of being obliged to spend special time for it.

These are some great ideas! I used to play a lot on online-go.com and i quite liked the fischer time setting in correspondence games for that exact reason. I would love to see that time option added, but I don't think that will resolve the issue of vacation. I feel like some vacation abuse is caused by players starting too many games and getting overwhelmed. I know this is when I end up wanting to use vacation. But I feel like this is part of time management, same as in a live game. If you can't keep up with your clock, you will lose on time, and this is as it should be.

For that reason I think the auto-vacation is the main issue that should be removed. That way we don't have to wait for someone who just checks out and isn't going to come back. They should have to intentionally turn on vacation if it's going to be turned on at all. I also agree that live games should be disabled while vacation is on. 

If we are to replace vacation, a possible alternative is to instead give players a certain number of 'bonus time' uses per month or year. One use of this would refill the clock on all their games. So if they are playing a 1 day per move game, the clock would go back up to one day, if a 7 day game, back up to the full 7 days. This could be on a per game basis, or apply to all ongoing games at once. This would serve the same purpose of vacation without allowing users to just disappear for months. 

I agree most cases I've seen are about people getting erm... overwhelmed.

You start out with a couple of say... tournaments,  maybe miscalculate the burden... maybe that tournament starts late because you should consider that every tournaments needs to gather a certain number of players,

next thing a friend invites you to HIS tournament and you don't want to say no, he's a friend after all and maybe he joined a group of yours, plus you0ve forgotten all about that old tournament...

however that other tournament is still lurking in the background and at some unspecified moment it just starts...

so the number of games you are playing starts to erm... soar, without you even noticing, you try to keep up... and then eventually start dropping games along the way (or going on auto-vacation if you are premium).

I think this may be a quite common case.

Then you are facing the fact that your rating has been zeroed and also you have lost your rhythm and motivation and perhaps leave all the other clocks to tick, if not the Site altogether. 

So, one useful 'thingie' could be somewhere where a player can actually see, I mean visualize how many pending games he has in pending tournaments and team matches, possibly even in-between rounds, something like a counter.

Daily chess is a good way to learn chess, you can think before you move unlike rushing. You don't have to spend much time on it because you just do 1 move a day.

I think vacation can also be canceled. You can set your game time limit to 2 months, before you start your game. Chess.com should detect if you log in everyday but if haven't moved in a month, it will give you a warning saying "Are you still playing daily chess?" to remind you.

If you haven't logged on, then it won't say that message.

Vacations are great how they are - no change for me please.

I have a busy real life and need to have the option "vacation" for all my matches. Does it make sense only for few of them???

Also as admin......less vacation would mean my members reduce their matches.....or lose on time when on vacation and not able to pause the games. 

JD,

Why have any change at all?  chess.com already has no-vacation tournaments, and an option to play no-vacation games.

Too many people on here abuse vacation time and just refuse to move when they are dead lost, such as mate in 1 which I have experienced, some of them do it because they get some kind of joy out of making their opponents wait for them to decide to move and it has nothing to do with them being too busy as they are on here doing all kinds of other things, leave the vacation time as is but change it so that if you are on vacation then you can not play blitz or do tactics or anything else unless you also answer your games that would put a stop to a lot of this crap!

All valid points, but why change things to to make the honest players suffer?  I don't get this mind set of change for the sake of change?  Especially change that will do noting to prevent people from abusing vacation.  If chess.com wants to be serious about trying to minimize vacation abuse, then set a limit.  After "X" amount of games where someone abandons, they are given some type of penalty.  Or...(shudder the thought) they are actually held accountable.

1) You may have tournaments for strictly non-vacational players (no automatic vacation and a perfectly even situation);

and

2) tournaments for ultra-vacational players (many don't really care if one out of say 30 games is paused, they just go ahead and play the others and maybe take advantage of the time in which a particular game is paused to brood over it or just savor the final victory); 

These two cases are already covered, methinks. It is already possible to choose between these two options.

3) But then some tournaments may be very long and - out of experience -, many players who anticipate this are skeptical of strictly NO VACATION tournaments.

These are not only not necessarily time wasters, maybe just players who like to play consistently and respectfully, but do anticipate periods when they may want to pause for say a week (over a time span of say months);

I think it is this case which is not covered yet and I think it could be, if maximum vacation time could be customized.

This option would also be nice to see in team matches, basically for the same reason.

Then it would be possible to adapt the maximum vacation time allowed for each specific event, based on the size of  the event, number of stages, anticipated duration of the event, etcetera..

Many have the habit of taking moralistic stances towards this kind of issues.

This is quite common and that is why I bring it up.

I would not speak in such general terms of 'dishonest players'.

What if someone just had personal problems? Or suddenly got married, for instances.

Why imagine someone is being 'dishonest' because he is not moving in a game?

Such cases certainly exist, but they are not a majority of cases, plus it may be really easy to judge incorrectly.

In any case, I wouldn't want to be the one judging. I don't think it is a good idea to always think our neighbor is being dishonest, only because he did not act as he was supposed to, maybe he couldn't, maybe he suffered a surgery.

It may always turn out that someone had really serious reasons for not playing for a while and I wouldn't want to be the one who has been thinking that he erm... hadn't. 

I think a practical approach to such issues would be much more constructive.

I agree, I do not want to punish the honest players and there does need to be a punishment for the people that abuse vacation time but from what I have seen so far chess, com does not want to do that they abuse vacation time and yet it seems like nothing happens and they just go on!

About 5 years ago under an old account, I went on vacation for 3 weeks.  I clicked on the "vacation" box, and even put in a message that read: "In London for 3 weeks."

Did any of that matter?  Nope...I was getting messages about how i was stalling, trying to cheat by trying to get my opponent to resign out of sheer frustration.  

Simply...people are impatient, don't pay attention, and we have to suffer for it.  I don't play chess here anyway, so it doesn't matter to me personally.  Just throwing in my .02

I think that "vacation" is already fine.

I have a busy real life and sometimes I am not able to think on my daily games (Currently I have more than 50 daily games). But, I have to become online even on the vacation times, because I am admin of many teams and I should do my works regarding them. 

Also about Auto-protection, I know some members who purchase premium accounts mostly for using this feature. I have seen such problems in my country that you are not able to log-in for some days and this feature can help.  

This is correspondence chess not live. 

I don't play Daily anymore (though may again in the future) and think that having options is a good idea. So, individual challenges and tourneys could have a no-vacation option, a limited vacation option, and the normal vacation use option.

I know if I'm truly on vacation, I'm unlikely to be able to commit sufficient time to a Daily game, so the argument that data is everywhere, doesn't help much.

I really like the way Red Hot Pawn do things, where each game gets a 3 day timer that refills, and a 7 day timer that starts counting down when you run out of the 3 day. That time bank never refills, and if it all goes you timeout. 

These values are customisable on each challenge 

No more automatic vacation