i quite agree!!
Petition for a time cap on official tournaments
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Its not quickplay, but the speed of online chess is making many things possible which are out of the question with eg postal correspondence, so overall for me at least its a big plus. Maybe someone at chess.com with a statistical bent could perhaps look into calculating the expected time per round given the numbers proposed to be in the tourney, time controls and the group sizes then publishing same prior each competition start to inform those interested.
I'm with you panda. It's just the 2 guys holding up my tournament, on vacation for 3 weeks now with another 2 left, come on... 
Maybe we need some sort of elongated time control similar to live chess. If each players takes 2 days to make each move, & go thru 40 moves, that's 80 days each (almost 6 months total) to get to that point. Why not have a countdown timer of 60 days (1,440 hours) per game for each player. This would speed up tournament games greatly. It would force people in tournaments to check regularly to keep their hours from winding down too much. You would not have too much problem of 1 player letting it go for weeks before making a move, because if they did they they would be left with few hours near the end of the 4 months & they would be forced to be online constantly to wait for their opponents move & probably lose on time.
This procedure would ensure that each round only lasts 4 months. The way it seems most tournaments are going, they are going to take a few years to end. This for me is one reason I'm not entering any more tournments.
I really like that idea actually. T'would be a bit of a radical change though and although it keeps the game time down, you have no guarantee that someone isnt going to take 20 days on one move. I guess you could give people the option to play that in online games or have some tournaments where that format is played - certainly gives flexibility.
Aperson could take 20 days, but then they are putting themselves in bad situation where they would have to keep checking a lot more often if the other player made their move. It wouldn't bother me if a player took so much time to make a move, since in a tournament I would be playing other games at the same time, so one game that was stalled by waiting for possible 3 week move wouldn't get to me.
What if you have the idea that painter roy suggested but also have the 3day/move (example) timer. Effectively you then have two timers, one that makes sure they won't be absent for ages because they have to finish the game within a specific period and then the other (the current timer we have) serves to ensure that they won't abuse the new additional timer by not playing for 20 days on end (even if it does then leave them having to be online all the time)
Therefore the 3day/move timer makes sure they play regularly and the 60day/game timer makes sure they don't abuse their vacation time excessively What do you think?
How exactly would you "cap" it? And to phrase it more to the point, how would you "cap" it in such a way that doesn't encourage people to draw out lost games as long as possible in the hopes of weaseling out of their loss?
This is a terrible idea. The better solution(s) are this:
- No-vacation tournaments, for those who like that idea. I do not support making official tournaments non-vacation.
- Allowing the next round to begin when all deciding games are complete (rather than all games). I honestly don't know why we're still waiting on this feature; it seems pretty necessary.
Spiffe, the drawing out lost games is common place in tournaments anyway, take a look at any of the ones running atm. This would at least put a cap on the amount of time they could draw it out while still allowing people to have a bit of vacation time.
I like the second idea of yours though, t'would make a lot of sense. Though it still doesnt really solve the problem as youd have to wait for every single deciding game to be done and part of the problem is that a lot of the time the people who are holding it up havent finished any of their games, which means that they still could make it to the next round.
The problem is that, I might have a completely won game, but with only 2 days left "all together", and the opponent, seeing this, could just start delaying his moves untill he seems I´m offline, and do delaying moves, that normally wouldn´t do more than to delay my win a week. But now it could cost me the win all together, unless I have time to recheck my computer once every hour, which would kind of ruin the whole idea with Time Per move that´s more than 1 day.
I've said a number of times that this could be accomplished with a new time control that's available for all games -- not just limits on the round of a tournament: Time per game, X moves in Y days, hourglass or some combination of these would do the trick. I'd love to see it implemented -- I think no vacation tournaments accomplished little, and frankly, without certainty with respect to how long I can expect a tournament to last I wouldn't enter one with no vacation anyway.
What does it mean to cap a tournament? All games at date xxNNN are finished, both players win or lose or draw? In CC tournaments that do have end dates the normal course is to adjudicate games that reach it. This means someone, other than the players, must evaluate the games and come to a decision as to who wins, who loses or if its a draw. This does take time plus who does it? By what criteria? Ideally it should be a least a master and one who is higher rated than the participants. And they must be willing to do all of this for free, now!
Long times for CC tournaments cannot be avoided. Accept it or don't play. Playing with time limits, vacations, etc. will not change that. The only thing that might be feasible is starting succeeding rounds as soon as participants are finalized instead of waiting for all games in a round to end.
The problem of excessively long tournament times can be resolved, but hard time caps don't solve the problem terribly effectively because in order to make them fair you have to introduce adjudication.
This is why introducing new time controls that affect the game itself are the best way to address this problem. In live chess, if I enter into a 10 0 game I know for certain that the game will last no longer than 20 minutes. A similar time control for correspondence games (being an order or two of magnitude larger of course) would provide a guarantee with respect to the length of a tournament while still being fair as each user plays against his own clock as opposed to a shared one that can leave uncertainty with respect to who actually should be declared the winner. If you time out against your clock, you lose the game.
There are a number of other clock type options that will also provide the same, or similar benefit.
Here is a more exhaustive examination of some of the options -- I think the benefits far outweigh any potential drawbacks such as time-zone gaming:
http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/discussion-of-different-time-limits-for-online-games
Essentially this is a complaint and apologies for that, but the time official tournaments take to finish is ridiculous. How hard would it be to introduce a time cap on rounds? They could be quite long, say 2 months to ensure people can take their time if they so wish, but something is needed to ensure we dont get the customary 10 or so people holding up, for months on end, the other few hundred who want to get on with the next round. Apparently, the 1st chess.com official tournament still hasnt finished, and were now on the 6th!? Says it all really.