Skeeky: Thank you so much for your feedback. We appreciate the time and pain you have taken in order to help us improving the quality of service on brainking.com. Your message is important to us. We are very much concerned with providing you with the best possible experience on brainking.com. You rule.

 The New Customer Service.

AbigailII: I agree. Maybe we could ask as a feature request that the player who goes through is picked at random.

alanback: Yes, for the reasons you said it is better to use the rating at the end of the match, as it is done.

But I don't understand your last remark about backgammon ratings. Since they don't work properly, backgammon tournaments with a BKR limit are skewed anyway, so the eligibility problem sort of vanishes. It remains a problem when the BKR is reliable though.

coan.net: Your example of a player timing out in all games looks unfair at first glance, but in fact it would be even more unfair if the ratings were taken at the beginning of the game. The rating points won by those timeouts are undeserved anyway, so the fewest points won the better.

pauloaguia: Well I can still read your e-mail address from your two last posts.

AbigailII: Ouch, I hadn't noticed that ! Now that is a real problem and will certainly stop me from posting there. , but third-party products suck !

joshi tm: Many many thanks to Fencer for that alternate Logik piece set. At last I will be able to play Logik without writing everything down on paper

Well, if I wanted to be nitpicking, I would say that I can hardly distinguish the new green from the yellow, and that I have tried to explain in the discussion boards why letters would have been a bit better than numbers. But that is of no importance compared to the new Logik pleasure I am about to enjoy !

By the way, the team tournament waiting room is a nice improvement to. After 2006 was a year of terrific improvements and I must say that I was a bit disappointed by 2007, this makes me very optimistic about 2008

seku: You are absolutely right.

danheg: That wasn't a silly question, I think that Atomic and Extinction Chess are usually implemented in a way that you can't castle under or through check.

Nevertheless, the rules are much simpler to state when saying "no check or checkmate", hence probably the version that we are playing here (which does hurt my eye a little, but that is no big deal IMHO).

Wow, the DB seems completely undamaged ! That recovery company did a great job

Too bad it was expensive, but the BK DB deserved it, it is pure gold. Thanks Fencer.

Fencer: I find fair enough that no game rules are changed unless there are pretty strong reasons to. But what procedure do you suggest for proving practically that a game can be improved ? "I've tried it with a friend and it was so much better" doesn't sound that convincing.

rabbitoid: Oh, you got this one too ?

pauloaguia: In my case it said "Brains order"

"Snoopy": It happened to me once and it took me some time to understand that a team I was in had just won a prize team tournament.

coan.net: Your schedule sounds good and I agree that there should not be too many team tournaments. Just don't forget that all backgammon variants can be played without or with the doubling cube :-)

Fencer: Sorry that I answered in your place

pauloaguia: I think it was because colours are a matter of taste and he knew that some people would complain whatever the colour. But now you have made it a much simpler feature request : swap colours between Amazon Chess and Extinction Chess. No new colour involved, no complain - hopefully :-)

Gabriel Almeida: I am afraid that Abigail is right, it would be a real trouble-maker. The problem is that people have very different definitions of what a "distraction" is. For some, it would be to leave the king en prise in a chess variant without checkmate. For others, it would be to lose a pawn to a 5-move combination.

Hrqls: No, he is right. I got some games sent back to me when my opponent didn't have the right dices to enter the game, although I did not have a full board.
But I agree with you that it makes no difference :-)

Family Man: I understand. But maybe this come from the illusion of having real dices rolling when one clicks "roll dices". I like to see the pseudo-random dice generator as if every roll on Brainking had already been rolled before Brainking even existed, but nobody can know what they are until they are disclosed in a game. But that is kind of an abstract difference anyway.

Family Man: If the sense of autopass is to speed up the game by allowing it to go on without having to wait for the opponent to make stupid "I pass" clicks, then it makes perfect sense that autopass is triggered when the dices you are going to roll don't give you any move.
Actually it would also make sense that "autopass" is triggered when you have only one legal move, since you will end up making this move anyway. This is what some people called "autoplay", and I have yet to understand why it was not implemented along with autopass.

Interesting discussions that I missed while I was on vacation...

As some other people already said, automatic tournaments are a good idea, but they must be rare enough to give them enough credibility, like the team tournaments actually have. The proposition of monthly tournaments + yearly championships + seasonal team tournaments sounds excellent. Not the top of my wish list, but if it is easy to do, definitely a good thing for Brainking.

I am less interested in an improved discussion board system, I would prefer the discussion boards to stay inside Brainking. What about giving the possibility to every member to create unlimited discussion boards in fellowships ? If the problem is of controlling the content, using fellowships sounds like the natural solution.

It is true that the possibility for some people to abuse vacation days in order to slow up their games is definitely unfair, but I propose to see the problem from another point of view. Having people buy vacation days is the easiest possible money for Fencer, and easy money for Fencer is good news for all of us, it means that he can concentrate on making the site better with a lesser need to care about profit. In other words, vacation days abusers pay for a part of our membership fee !

1. Alice Chess
2. Double-move Chess
3. Dynamo Chess
4. Avalanche Chess

My list is getting small because so many really good games are already here !
But although I am not fond of checkers, I agree that the "International" 10x10 variant is called for.

TarantinoFan: The no time limit option is useful to play with a friend that you trust not to hold the game forever. If playing with someone unknown to you, better make it unrated.

joshi tm: Why not simply adding these forums to your favourite forums list ?

alanback: Loved it too, nice one Fencer !

MadMonkey: It's rather the reverse way, you want to promote it to a knight because it is the only way to legally capturing the king !

MadMonkey: Time to RTFR - read the f* rules ;-)

emmett: Agreed, it is one of those small yet very nice new features.

crosseyed: I usually don't care much about looks, but the new look is so much better than the old one that even I am enjoying it a lot. Now, amongst the few that liked the old one better, why not finding someone to write a "Brainking old style" CSS for the new system ?

Hrqls: You can find their address in the source code of every brainking page :
www.brainking.com/css/simple-30.css
www.brainking.com/css/castle-30.css
www.brainking.com/css/nofonts-30.css

basplund: Even a prize tournament ? I admit that it should be a very rare case, but taking the BKR at the start at the game, or even at the start of the tournament (in which case it can be a compensation for having had the harder pairings), seems better. But perhaps not better that selecting the winner at random :-)

basplund: Makes me wonder, are we talking about the lower BKR at the time the game is started, or at the time it is finished ? In case of the latter, one player could sacrifice BKR points in order to win a tournament when he has a drawish position in the final.

MadMonkey: If I am not mistaken, in some Mancala variants, when you have no move you win all marbles still on board. I don't especially like such rules (as I don't especially like the stalemate rule in chess) but they do exist.

Fencer: LOL, then I have the perfect solution, come to my own conclusions and spam you with PMs. I like this system !
More seriously, OK, when there is any doubt I will post in the specific forum first in order to have other people's opinions.

Hello Fencer, I have a little question for you !
In the feature requests board, it is stated that feature requests that are specific to a game should be posted in the game's discussion board, when it exists. But do you really read all games discussion boards ? For instance, the backgammon board ? :-)
I would have some feature requests - don't worry, not only about backgammon - but I want to post them in a place where you will see them.

MadMonkey: I like that idea !

Antje: My guess would be that there was some sort of automatic search for duplicate accounts on the same machine, which "temporarily banned" your account (too aggressive settings ?) until the case was solved. Only a guess, of course.

It is very nice to have a third mailbox, but those users always ask for more... What would be of even greater help for me is a fourth mailbox where all non-personal messages would automatically go (notification of finished games, tournaments, etc.). It is a very repetitive task for me to delete all of them in order to keep only personal messages in my inbox.
(Especially annoying when playing match backgammon, where every single game generates a message)

furbster: I guess the answer is in the help on elimination tourneys :

"If a draw occurs due to the game rules or an agreement of the players, the player with lower BKR advances to the next round (in case of equal BKRs, the player who did not start the game - black player in most games)."

Fencer: Great job !! I hope that we will see on this board more reactions to these new features than discussions about action points.

Tycho: All games ?? That is impressive, congrats Marfitalu !!
Fencer, what about a new game so that Marfitalu does not get bored now ?

TheLamer: At least this would be clearly against the User Agreement (no computer help when playing), so any punishing measure could be taken against the people who would abuse the system in that way.

WatfordFC: That is correct, it has been asked by paying members in the feature requests board.

alanback: I have that from time to time, always thought it happened when the site was slow (I know that Mozilla is very impatient when he doesn't get a quick enough response).

playBunny: If I understand the present tournament system correctly, I also find it perfectly acceptable. The general ideas of tournaments with entry fees and prize money are :
1) To attract strong players by giving them the possibility to win some money.
2) To attract weaker players that have no chance to win a prize by giving them the possibility to play strong players against some little money.
That the organizer takes away 30% of prizes does not cancel any of these two reasons. And in fact, in our case these 30% could well be explained by the time, energy and potential loss of image for the site induced by fighting cheats :-)

On a different note, now that I read the user agreement again, it is indeed very clear about computer use, but shouldn't it also state that it is illegal to get counseled by another player ? I know that this one is hard to check, but it wouldn't hurt to make it clear to fair players that might not be aware of it, would it ?

Summertop: This is because it was a double round robin. *For each game you won* (as there was no draw), add the number of points of your opponent (that means, count twice the points of the opponents that you beated twice) and you will get 29.
Probably the explanations were thought with a simple round robin tournament in mind.

tonyh: You are absolutely right about the carry-over, sorry. Anyway, my comparison with salary was an extreme one. If you use all your money for the year, you are in real trouble. If you use all your vacation days, all you risk is losing some games.
I should quit silly comparisons and just state that IMHO the current policy is fine, maybe just a bit dangerous for those who use auto-vacation.

tonyh: Actually the current policy is strictly more generous than the "running total" one (I mean, it just always gives you more flexibility).
Imagine that you get a job offer where you will get an annual salary at entrance, and then an annual salary each 1st of January, would you decline it because you are afraid that you could spend all your money in January ? Well, maybe your answer will be yes, but mine won't :-)

Walter Montego: From the few times I have played in some similar "ladders", I remember that the biggest point of the system is that the person you challenge can't decline, so you will get to play opponents that would have declined your challenge in normal time.

Marfitalu: That would mean to check for the rating lists and to put them on your friends list when they reappear.
Not something which could be done by newbies, but well, it's OK you have to play some games before challenging the top guys, isn't it ?