AbigailII: Interesting. Why should recent activity matter? Do you mean because for many games, people get better at them as time goes on? To me, that would gradually start to show as time goes on. I imagine that's probably not it. Probably something I'm not thinking of. (Imagine that! )

MadMonkey: In the way BKR is calculated, the only factors that are relevant is the rating difference between players, and the number of games. If you have played 100 games, it doesn't matter whether you've played those 100 games all in the last month, or whether your last game was 5 years ago. It's just too bad there's no factor for recent activity.

But this is the way it is, and Fencer has said many times he has no intention to change the way BKR is calculated.

rod03801: Sorry, i agree with you totally with that. Needs to play more

I almost suggested once that no time out games should be allowed to be a part of ratings, but that would never work. I do think it should be discussed and looked into though. I do not mind losing games fairly, but when i think how many of mins are by time out, it makes me sick , even though i admit its my own fault (well the computers anyway lol)

MadMonkey: I wasn't saying he didn't have a point. I was just pointing out that with so few games played, his BKR isn't nearly as accurate as it will be after twice as many are played. Especially at the number he is at now. That's all.

rod03801: He does raise a point though rod which i have brought up a similar thing a while ago now

I actually asked, that i would like to know how many games that i had won / lost / drawn i would be on (and also my bkr) if all time out games were eliminated. Twice in the past now i have been with out internet connection for a time, and therefore lost many games by time out. Luckily enough it has not happened lately.

The point i am making is OK its my loss, and my bkr gets crucified on certain games (ones that i am pretty good at), BUT when i return and start playing again, most top players know who they can & can not beat, or give a close game to.

As an example, if my Lines of Action or Cheversi ratings went very low because of timed out games, and then i started playing again, and of course i would enter tournaments and take on the top players, many of which i would win, there bkr's would get crucified

I would like some way of this not happening, not just for myself, but anyone on either side of that coin. I think a happy medium should be reached

Übergeek 바둑이: Honestly, with so few games completed, the ratings/rankings aren't very accurate for you, regardless. The more games you play, the more accurate it will be. So, I really wouldn't look at as "dishonest". Through time, it will "straighten" itself out.

I see. I am playing several games in matches to several points. I think it is almost impossible to account for every case. In one game the player lost against me in the first game, then timed out with zero moves in the second. After his first loss he lost interest in playing. I find this happened mostly with Pawn accounts. They accept a game from the New Games list, then abandon the game. I am rated number 5 in Capablanca Random Chess. I have 20 wins and 7 losses. 10 of my 20 wins are by timeout, and 2 more will be added in the next few days. Without those timeout wins I would be ranked at least 5 places lower. I find that it is making my ranking look much better than it actually is. I don't mind looking smart, but what about honesty!

Übergeek 바둑이: Just to add to what Jason said, if the person times out in that period of time that a game can be deleted, it does not affect BKR either. So, while you can delete the game, as he says, you don't actually have to go through that effort. When they time out, you will see no changes in your ratings.

Übergeek 바둑이: you can according to this....
You can delete a started game until both players made two moves only. It means that after the player who has not started the game (black player) performs his/her second move, nobody can delete this game anymore. The main purpose of this feature is to allow players to get rid of a game where the opponent did not start to play at all without waiting for a timeout.
If your game can be deleted, i.e. it fulfills the previous conditions, a link "Delete game" will be added to the bottom of the game page, just nearby "Offer draw | Resign" links.
A deleted game is not counted for anything. Statistics of both players (number of won, drawn and lost games) will stay unchanged and the game will not be calculated for the players' BKR.

http://brainking.com/en/FAQ?ht=7

Very often people accept a game invitation and then they never move again after the first move. Then they lose the game because they run out of time. I don't like winning games like that and they just inflate my rating unnecessarily.
I wish there was some way to remove those games from my rating calculation. I know it is complicated to program something like that, but I think it would be nice.

Vikings: true but what if you normally want your favourites but not always? with css you can hide reshow at other times. I just went down each part and made a script to allow you to remove what ever you wanted. what you do with it is up to you.

mctrivia: you can remove any board from your favorite list, thus the term favorite.
you can also turn off the tip of the day

Vikings: unless things have changed you can only turn off the whole side bar. It is far better to have it server side but I just make programs to help people fill requests in the temporary.

mctrivia: Excellent! Thank you!

mctrivia: What is the purpose of removing the favorite boards or tips, when you can turn them off?

Ceiter check out http://mctrivia.com/bkcssmaker/

I recently bought my first paid membership, and I've joined a bunch of fellowships. I'm a happy camper overall, but there's one thing that irks me: the list of my fellowships always there in my sidebar. I'd love to have the option to remove them completely (or maybe have a show/hide link in the sidebar itself). Many of the fellowships have animated smilies in the names, which I find annoying and distracting (albeit not enough to leave the fellowships :) )

I think you could gain a lot by adding customization to the sidebar similar to the way we can customize the main page.

MrWCF: I like this game. I home no license is required to implement it.

Fencer, just a little mention (as you mentioned new games) to Dominoes as it has not been brought up in a while

I think it would be VERY popular here and would work well.

Start with just a normal set (28 tiles) of 6 x 6, the maybe build a 9 x 9 & 12 x 12 sets

This of course could be set up as either 2 player or multi-player

I would like to see Camelot offered on BrainKing. Camelot is one of the finest abstract strategy board games ever invented.

Camelot is a tactically complex, yet easily learned and quickly played mixture of American Checkers (British Draughts) and Halma (Chinese Checkers). Camelot is played by two players on a board of 160 squares. Each player begins the game with 14 pieces: four Knights and ten Men. The pieces utilize three different move types: Plain Move (one square, any direction), Canter (leap over friendly pieces), and Jump (leap over and capture enemy pieces). Knights may combine Canters and Jumps in a single move. The game is won either by moving any two pieces into the opponent's Castle, or by capturing all of the opponent’s pieces.

Camelot's forerunner, Chivalry, was released by George Parker in 1887. In 1930, a few changes to the board and piece setup resulted in a name change to Camelot. Camelot's greatest popularity was in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. Camelot was discontinued in 1968, then reissued as Inside Moves in 1985, and finally discontinued again in 1986.

You can learn much more at http://www.worldcamelotfederation.com/

I hope it will be available in real-time only ... I cannot imagine playing cards in turn-based system ...
Andy.

Yes, it is time for this to stop now. Back to what the board is for, please.

Vikings: that is a good point.

All: I think we have gotten a little off topic. For myself I will not post more on this topic.

mctrivia: If you will notice neither you nor anyone else in this discussion has been banned or threatened of it. The banning was because of an ongoing flagrant abuse of guideline #3 of the discussion board user agreement

mctrivia: sure, but temperature of this board goes way beyond a silent wish list ...

KnightFighter: true he has to do nothing. but this is the request board. people make and debate request here. not weather fencer truely has to make them.

mctrivia: And you expect the owner of this site to make you happy (and many others) and do nothing but to listen to your demands ? Show me other site like this one that the owner is "visible" and you can actually talk to him ... show me ... tell me please, because I am getting lost ... do you still have fun playing a game or making a move after 7 days of vacations ? Do you still remember what you were planning to do ?
Fencer granted you services but he never promised you to add/modify anything ... and this is what you want constantly ... and MadMonkey has the whole arsenal of site remodeling ... sometimes changes are so unimportant that it makes me laugh when I read them ...
Andy.

Fencer: if you want to act like that you should be willing to refund people's memberships. Those of us that paid for longer memeberships have done so believing you will continue to grant the same services you have in the past. You are not obligated to add anything more but to take away the major privileges of posting in public forums is breaking the trust and reason people signed up.

To say his messages were off topic would be fair though.

KnightFighter: Playing games is something I do for fun. I work some times 40 hours a week some times 80. I can't promise to get on a sight every day of the week as some times my job requires me to travel so I pick 7 days because I know I can play it. I usually play in 1 though. But it is possible at 7 days for a game to take months or years and I can't post pone my honeymoon next year because of a game I started this year. My point was just that the most vacation days this site even offers is 50 so how does someone use 120.

diogenysos: I don't know, maybe I am really funny ... If it was me, the owner and programmer, there would be only half the features you "enjoy" ... it will be pure gaming site with probably many more games, but much less forums, boards, talks and albums ... but this is me and Fencer probably pays the price for what I would try to avoid ...

KnightFighter:

Although i agree with the idea of more competetion, i would find it unfair to remove the option of vacation.

If my priority will change temporarily tomorrow due to the circumstances of life, i am still happy
to stay here and play slower tourneys,

like Bobes right now - he used to be a smart, quick and competetive player here but now he decided to
slow down in order to have more time for his baby. Thats how it is - and he is right.

All usere here are free to chose how they want to play, to start fellowships that feed their needs etc., like Marfitalu did, for example.
The "here-and-now"-players can come together and play here and now, but it wouldnt be good,  neither for a paid-site-owner nor for its various members, to disable a good feature named vacations... .

Jason: I don't think so ... they are coming here to play not seeking vacations ... Even if we loose some players, new players will come ...

KnightFighter: Brainking would lose alot of players if that ever happend , you are funny though ,

KnightFighter:

I lost a cruel high amount of self-created "one-day-per-move - no-vacation-days" games... ;-)

i created them because i like those games with players who put their priority on the "competetion here and now".
and if i finally lose by timing out, i deserve that loss because the game was not so important for me then for my opponent.
(of course there are exceptions: three years ago my home burnt down and i didnt play for a couple of days, that was bad luck...
but this is life).

for the same reason, being focussed even more on one game, i created the idea of those new time-limits i mentiond at the beginning of this thread, by the way... ;-))

but of course it is not the solution to cancel the vacation days completely. the players who want the competetion here and now should create and sign in in more tourneys with no vacation days and/or simply _not_ play the vacation-tournaments... ;-)

mctrivia: You know what ? I do not really understand this kind of arguments. You say: " I can't play no vacation games because I like to take vacations some times and work forces me to keep to 7 days per move ..." ... then you should probably try to find a correspondence club and if you take vacations, just blame UPS for any delay ... if you don't care if someone takes 40 days +seven then PLEASE accept also 120 days BECAUSE someone likes to take vacations, but a little bit longer than yours ... all these makes no sense ... internet made you lazy, you abuse the privilage of not being forced to move like in life tournaments ... If I want to play in a tournament I like the competition, NOW and HERE and taking vacations kills the whole fun ...
If I were Fencer I would never create any vacation option ... forget it ... you would like my torunament
from day 1 and you would take your vacations after the tournament is over ... period. Fencer was trying to please you, to be as flexible as possible, but like in a famous saying: give someone a finger and he/she soon will take you the whole hand.
Vacation idea should be completely removed from this site. I someone cannot find time to play 28 days of tournament, or 21 days tournament, then I have a proposal ... find another job or stop playing tournaments ... vacations are good after the job is done and not in the middle of it.
Andy.

Fencer: i can't play no vacation games because I like to take vacations some times and work forces me to keep to 7 days per move. I don't care if someone takes 40 days of vacations +7 days to make his first move. I would care though if he took 120 days of vacations to make his first move. There needs to be a feesible limit of say no more then 40 days vacation can be used in 1 game in a 6 month time frame. For most people this would not effect what so ever since they do not get that many days off but would fix those that abuse the sites.

Pedro Martínez:
a life time member does not meen they are happy with a site. There was a time when Fencer was happy to fix bugs take suggestions and even if he did not want to do something he was nice about it. I liked these qualities in him and bought a life time membership. I was fooled though because the things I liked most about this site are no longer here. The only good thing about it is there are still lots of great people in fellowships to chat with. sadly many are slowly choosing to leave when there memberships run out.

Fencer: Do not take the above wrong I do not mean it as a personal attak against you. I do not know what sircumstances are in your life and can completely understand being busy(I have not updated aigamez.com in several months). The time limit problem does not even effect me. I am just trying to push that some fix needs to be made to stop people from using unlimited days off in a row. Maybe even something as simple as adding an abuse button so people can report games they think people are abusing vacation time.

Fencer:

Well, we all know the internet and we all know our computers (that might crash in such a situation, too ;-)) )
Such a thing can happen all the time, and the user who decides to play such a game knows about that possible risk before.

It may be interesting to give it a try
and a very special amplification of BK's power!

...and btw. we already have a similar risk here, on one-hour-games...
the ones who like that take that risk!

Fencer: That would be the part about balancing happy users against unhappy users

diogenysos: Until the server goes down after you click on a game and before you make the move.

Fencer:

This is exactly why i asked.
Knowing that an idea may not but into life easily.

But i still might not have been able to show my point: Its a time-setting system which does not affect the game-time-limits.
But a limit, a countdown that counts backward _as soon as you accepted to move now_.
By clicking on a certain game, the time you have to think for one move starts counting.

The downtime is n ot affected, because if the server is down, noone can accept to make a move anyway...

diogenysos: It is a good idea. However, it would require to change the way how BrainKing handles occasional site down events (caused by upgrades, temporary line down problems etc.).
As you know, BrainKing automatically disables timeouts for 24 hours if a downtime is longer than 60 minutes. It would not help in case of, say, 10 minutes site inactivity, which would cause all 3 minutes games timeouted just when the site comes back to online status.
What do you propose now?

MadMonkey:Aaah! Now i can see _your_ point at least and yes, this should be fixed in a way!

But i still believe my request was a different one: if a player _accepts_ to move by clicking on the game, then the countdown counts
and the timing out may happen within that move, e.g. after 10 seconds for _oned_ backgammon-move or three minutes for one logic-move. or lets say there is a 7-day time-limit for a chess game but as soon as you move, you can not exceed ten minutes moving time for the whole match.

And fencer, i agree that the option "no vacation" excludes the discussed problem - but tell me what dou you think of the mentioned idea of mine!

mctrivia: There is an option to play games with no vacation. Then nothing like that could happen. Furthermore, this problem is more an exception than a rule.

Fitzmertz: 1) Some people will be always unhappy (I don't mean MadMonkey but I could name a few).
2) No product can make you 100% happy forever. When I bought my current home computer in 2006, I had been very happy and satisfied with it. Now I am not but it does not mean that I would start to send unhappy emails to the vendor and ask him to make the disks faster and WiFi adaptor more stable.
3) The Paid Membership page clearly describes what you get when you buy a membership. It says nothing like "once you become a paying member, the site owner is committed to make you happy until your membership expires".
4) It is very important to keep a balance between happy and unhappy people on BrainKing. The past showed us that all attempts to make everyone satisfied are direct ways to our doom.

Thad: So you think that in order to make a good business, it is necessary to make everyone happy? That's funny. The world is fully of small companies which bankrupted only because of following this kind of business plan.
Read KnightFighter's response once more. He is right in every word.

I may get a move before my Membership runs out in 2010 ....... you never know

Fitzmertz: Ask him, not me. I just wanted to point out the ridiculousness of your argument.

Pedro Martínez:
yes of course it is but why enter a tournament if you are not going to move?

Fitzmertz:
mad monkey is a paying member until 2010 is that not commitment to your site?

Bobes is a paying member until the day he dies. Is that not commitment to Fencer's site?

Fencer: And making some people upset is a part of the strategy.

What book on how to run a good business did you read?