On the subject of timeouts, is there a good way to check how many timeouts another player has recently had? I would like to be able to check that, it might help me decide whether I want to play a certain player or join a certain tournament.

pedestrian: .... then again, what is the problem with massive forfeits - if a person can not handle the games, then they will be forfeited when they time out. (I'm just throwing out suggestions - I don't plan to be much over 100 games at a time any time soon myself, and others timing out is not too much of an issue for me.. just throwing out ideas is all.)

coan.net: But if you were already playing close to 2000 games, then one single forfeit would effectively mean you couldn't start any new games for 6 months. Isn't that a rather draconic penalty for only one time out?

coan.net: It is relative
For one person 200 games is too much, for another 2000 is not enough ...

How about something like:

Rooks - if you have NOT had a game time out in the past 6 months: 2,000 game limit
Rooks - if you have had a game time out in the past 6 months: 1,000 game limit

Black rooks - 5,000 game limit. (another black rook perk.)

grenv: funnily enough I agree with the thousanders: I prefer a game monger who replies, to someone who has less than 100 games... and waits until the last possible moment to reply in each one.

happyjuggler0: What difference does it really make... 1000 games is enough to guarantee a move every second you are logged in... what's the benefit of more? Only that you will be slower in each game, which frustrates others.

Fencer: I agree with the others here; I don't think that there needs to be an upper limit on games played at the same time for everyone.

More sensible would be to find a way to clip the wings of those who fly too high and get into too many time forfeits as a result.

I like pedestrian's basic idea of somehow forcing people to prove they can handle lots of games before allowing them the ability to play a huge amount of games.

I also still like my notion that if you time out too many times then your tournament privileges are revoked until you have more vacation time available. With any luck the threat of the penalty would be enough to stop the problem before it even starts.

Fencer:

aaru: As long as you can handle them, there is no problem with it.

pedestrian & Fencer: I like my 2000+ games

Fencer: I didn't know it had already been a rule. I'm still a newcomer, I guess!

pedestrian: Actually, there used to be a 1000 games limit when the site had been launched. However, some active player had complained that "it says that Brain Rook can play unlimited number of games, so I want to have 10000 of them!" and I had been too naive to try to address every single request, no matter how absurd it was. Now I really regret it.

In other words, I am seriously thinking of reapplying the 1000 games limit again. At least for players who have serious problems to play more games than they can handle.

grenv: Thanks for the kind words... I've never played more than about 400 simultaneous games myself. Would that make me 40% genius?

coan.net: Good idea. I was looking for a compromise and that could be it.

pedestrian:1000 games at once? Good grief, that sounds absurd. I can barely keep context when playing 30... you must be a genius of the highest order.

happyjuggler0: Yea, so for the "Time per move:", you would have the following options:

standard vacation

fixed weekend only

no days off

limited vacation - 3 days

limited vacation - 5 days

limited vacation - 7 days

Options for tournament AND private games would be good (along with site & team matches). And of course, the limited vacation is if they have vacation days to use. And for tournaments, I would say per round - so if you make it to round 2, you get those days reset for the "limited". Maybe make those with a "black dot" to show the difference between the green & red dot games.

coan.net: I was about to object to that because that seriously limits anyone who want to go on vacation longer than a week without worrying about BK, but then I realized you weren't asking for a requirement of all tournaments. All you are doing is creating an option. Options are good, and potential tournament players can pick and choose which options they prefer.

Edit* This would be a good option for private games as well, not just tournaments.

I would like to see something else.

I would like to see tournament be able to be setup where it only allowed up to X number of vacation days/hours per round.

So instead of making a tournament with NO VACATION - we could make, for example a tournament where a player can use a MAX of 5 days vacation (120 hours) per round. [maybe with presets of 3 days / 5 days / 10 days -- maybe with different color circle for each type to go along with red circle games.)

... that way vacations are still available in case of emergencies, but hopefully keep out those who drag the tournament out. (Then again, now that the vacation "exploit" is fixed, hopefully once someone's vacation is out for the year - they will not get any more until Jan 1 so it won't be as big of an issue as it has in the past.)

happyjuggler0: I second that. Another possible formula would be something like:

I apologize in advance if this has been brought up before.

Regarding timeouts, I'd love to have a feature that makes it impossible to sign up for new tournaments if both of the following apply:

1) You have no vacation time left.
2) You have forfeited ___ number of games since the above condition happened.

You could then sign up for new tournaments once you have more vacation time again.

I believe that this would act as a way to encourage people to play only the number of games that they think they can reasonably expect to play. As things stand right now, some people simply don't care, and it delays round two of tournaments from starting, amongst other things.

Thanks for your consideration,
happyjuggler0

carlscott33: Yes, in the future.

is it possible to integrate other games like abstract strategy games into your network such as Perigon?

nodnarbo: Hmm. Mine takes me to the precise Event.

The one difference I DO notice though is that it doesn't preview the subject of the event when I hover my mouse over the number. (Which it DOES do on the message box)

It would be really nice if the red numbers next to the 'Events' link did the same thing as the red numbers next to the 'Message Box'. If you click on the number for Message Box it takes you to the oldest unread message, but if you click on the red number for Events it takes you to the Events folder. Does this have an easy fix?

El Cid: It was a joke. The 100 max limit solution will be implemented.

Fencer: By the way I forgot to say this is on other players (I have my main page limited to 5 games).

Considering that the only other browser I have installed is IE (even if it is version 8), I think I rather use Opera...

El Cid: I want to limit the number of games shown anyway (100 max would be good). That should solve it.
"Don't use Opera!" would be another workaround.

I know this should probably be in the Bug Tracker, but I think here is more rapidly seen (and it's kind of a "patch request"). When a user has many started games (I've noticed it on cases with 2000 or more started games), and when using Opera, there is a layout bug, that creates a blank top of the page, and the Bainking site (the top of the towers and the list of started games), start only at the middle of the scroll bar on the right. This happens in the Castle and Simple styles, but not in the no fonts. Also in internet explorer the castle style works correctly (I haven't tested the other two, but I believe they will work correctly also).

So the feature request is... could this be corrected?

That's awesome if this is fixed!

However, let's please move conversation about this over to the Backgammon discussion board, from here forward. http://brainking.com/en/Board?bc=26

Thanks!

tonyh: We should see some identical rolls--but not nearly as many as before.

wetware: le size was 152 games; I wrote 'seem to' but honestly, just haven't seen any identicals in the last 25 games or so.
What is your different problem?

tonyh:  How large was your sample size?  And if they have completely "disappeared"...well, we have a different problem!    :-)

Fencer: Well done, fencer; the identicals seem to have disappeared.

Thad: I;d still like to "like" the autopass issue!

Where's the 'like' button? I want to like the post three posts down. ;-)

Fencer: Thanks Fencer

That will be great help to lots of us i think

MadMonkey: OK, you can preview board description changes now.

I've just uploaded a patch that could (hopefully) solve the dice issue. We'll see soon. I don't promise anything, it needs to be tested.

grenv: Maybe you are right. Here are some game numbers from my sample I had downloaded, where the first two rolls are equal:

3661393
3661396
3663115
3664961
3665093
3665242
3667535
3667537
3674420
3674422
3674426
3674427
3690264
3690269
3690297
3690298
3690766
3692509
3692512
3692513

Thom27: But if there were, say, 4-6 games where the rolls were identical, you would have to assume that 3-5 of them were affected by whatever the problem is... so it would help.

Fencer: Maybe we are talking about different things. The bug I mean is: the first rolls of the two players are too often equal. E.g. white starts by moving 5 and 3, and black, in the directly following move, rolls 3 and 5.

I and others have tested this with a high number (hundreds) of games, and it happens about 4 to 6 times as often as it should.

It is a statistical thing, and one cannot give a single game that was affected. It are all games where the opening rolls are equal, so to say.

Pedro Martínez: Hmmm, maybe I have found a possible source of the problem. Maybe. I'll try to upload a patch soon and we'll see.

Pedro Martínez: Is there a game without autopass that would suffer of the same problem?

tonyh: Actually I don't take it seriously as much as 10 years ago. Since some people are never satisfied, it's not worth the effort. Don't take it personally.
I mean that I have many other interests and BrainKing is just one of them. Not the only one.

Fencer: http://brainking.com/cz/ReadBug?bgi=1754

Thom27: I don't know. I won't pretend that backgammon is my favorite game (because it is not).
Instead of a thread full of theories, can you give me some IDs of games that were affected by it?

I agree that BK is a great site, though not perfect. Nothing in this world is or can be perfect, but this is no reason not to try to improve things.

A good way to improve BK further would be to fix the opening-moves-bug in the backgammon variants. here is a collection of links on the topic. Fencer, are you going to fix this also before BK 3.0?

Fencer: There is nothing I (or you) can do about Libya or Japan! I cannot fix the universe or the debt induced crash. So, let us attend to the things we can fix, like making coffee or playing backgammon. Don't you take this great site of yours seriously?