What if you wanted to go on a two week ski vacation in January but had only accrued 3 days of vacation time?

How can I plan games, someone else might go on vacation.

As for favouring those who have been here longest.. why? We all pay the same (apart from gold rooks)

Well, then you either enjoyed using most of your accrued vacation in December, or just joined and probably don't have that many games going anyway and can plan accordingly in either event.

You can't carry over vacation days from one year to the next. Unless i'm mistaken :)

more to the point......why on earth are there game move time limits now that auto vacation is here?

Stevie, that's not the point of this discussion at all.

Its a point to consider though

I think there shouldn't be any changes to how vactions are given. Just how they are used. If you manually set up your vacations, great! If you are relying on auto-vacation days, like I said, only give as many as the game's Time Per Move settings.

But the way you say, If you've only joined for 3 months you only have 9 days vacation.
I think the current system is fair. Everyone gets the same. Apart from the knight rook differences.

Game time limits help me order my game play Steve :)

Jules, were you talking to me...I think buy a membership, get all the vacation days entitled. Start a game, take 30 days straight vacation and never have to move for over a month...Is OK. My only request is to change how many of your remaining vacation days can be used (sequentially) automatically.

thanks to everyone for the thoughts on the auto vacation, I think it is a great idea, and tend to agree that perhaps only a certain number of auto vacations should be able to be used per game, of course those that abuse the system in the new year will quickly run out of days, and will time out

I like the idea what was said here before , 3 autovacation days for month . It will be fair for everybody . If you go somewhere , you should use your regular holidays what you got in stock :)

What I'd like to know is why rooks are complaining about someone moving slowly against them? I mean seriously - why is it such a big deal if a game (or 50, or 100!) take a year (or 2, or 3) to finish? If you're out of games to play start more. If you're not, play the other games and don't worry about that one.

stupid comment Kevin.
and Why should we take on more games? then struggle to keep up?

Read the last sentence of my previous post again.

read mine again LOL

Kevin : People in tournament , if it is a prize tournament will be really "happy" wait for someone 2 or 3 years .

I read and understand your post very well, Steve.

Maxxina: If they don't want to wait for the time limit, they shouldn't have joined the tournament. Rooks still have and always have had 30 vacation days. The only difference now is nothing is required of the user to actively schedule them. So why did all the complaining start now?

that would be fine if the person who was abusing the system had only 1 or 2 games against you, but when it is alot its annoying, of course they will eventually run out of auto vacation time and time out,

Interesting way of puting it Kevin...

Now, don't get upset, I am just curious. Are you out of vacation days? The last two games I had with you, you lost to timeouts.

If they don't want to wait for the time limit, they shouldn't have joined the tournament


time limits are reasonable, but autovacation makes a mockery of it, a 5day limit is fine as long as auto vacation doesnt add 1 or two days every move

Even if they have 50 games against you...what's the problem? Start 50 more. If this person only moves once a week, then once a week you'll have 50 extra games to play one move on. Or, start 10 more. Or none. Whatever. It doesn't have to be a problem, even if you like to play a move every 2 minutes in every game.

how abaout a compromise (like we can do anything about, anyway). When a game or tournament is created, have an option to allow vacations. I don't care whether manual or automatic.

Summertop : Thas a really good idea . And why dont do that to all games , add one columm allow autovacations

Kevin,

When a player starts taking very long between turns of a game that is at a critical juncture, it can be VERY annoying. In chess, for example, most moves are not individual moves, but part of a sequence of moves. If you have to try and remember what you were planning a week or two ago, it takes all the fun out of game playing, at least for me. Multiply that by a few games and the slow play starts to suck all the fun out of BrainKing.

Thad, thats why we have the ability to make notes, so we can record our thoughts on future moves and not forget what we were planning.

Did the notes feature on games change? It seems to me, that you must add your note before the move now. Whereas, it used to be you could add it after the move. Currently, I don't have any games waiting for me to move, so I can't double check it.

You can go back later and add notes if you like. Look at a game where its your opponentes turn, under the board should be 'add note'.

I see where now...When it is my move, I can add notes After my move. The edit field just looks disabled because it is gray.

True, harley, but usually, in a game delayed by auto-vacation abuse, you don't know that you need to leave yourself a note until long after you made the move.

Oh no, its grey so people don't get mixed up between that and the normal message box. If I remember rightly, it used to be white when the feature was first introduced, but Fencer changed it to grey after a few people got mixed up and gave away their game plan!

that would bite...I wasn't suggesting to change it. I agree, it needs to be a different color.

I see your point Thad. All I can say there is, get to know the abusers of auto vacation, and make notes accordingly. I know it isn't practical to make notes on every game, but in time we'll get to know the games where we need to make notes.
Since auto vacation is quite a new thing here, we should probably give ourselves chance to get used to it before slamming it or asking for changes.

It's not so new that we can't see that there are problems with it. And why should we wait before we discuss possible changes/improvements? Espionage is newer here than auto-vacation, but we CLEARLY need a captured pieces section. Should we wait before we suggest that too? ;-)

Point taken :oD

or a tourney to choose the option of not allowing auto vacation??

Seeing how there are prize tourneys and some tourneys where you get a huge responce to play.. isn't there a way to not allow *auto vacation*..

I could understand if the game were given a one day time limit. or even up to 3 days.. But, when the game is set up to allow a week or more to make a move, I find it ridiculous to allow auto vacation. And if so.. It should only be allowed to use with one day intervals..

For explaining this a bit more.. the one I am upset with has well over 600 games going. He did come on the site today.. and played around 100 moves.. now obviously to me he has taken and committed to at least 5 times the amount he can actually handle. He is holding up I don't know how many tourneys in the process. But the move limit on this tourny is already set at 10 days. He has shown over the months that he has played here that he consistantly plays in this manner. where you don't see him for days.. (cause he is in his other account).. yet pops over and catches the tourneys that are just about to time.

I realize this is a turned based site. But, I also realize that someone shouldn't come on this site and purposely take advantage of the liency given to begin with. And it is rather obvious that he is doing this.

All I can say about this auto vacation is that the BIG BOSS of this site must have wanted it on there for a reason. Not knowing that some people would over use it just to get people upset over it. And the person or people using it may also think if I wait long time on taking a move the person I'm playing may get mad a quite the game, and I can get a free win. Now that I have said my $2 worth back to my corner I go.
:o{P

Great Idea Summertop!

It would be nice to be able to create/join a tournament where vacations arent allowed.

But now that I think about it more, many tournaments take a year or more to finish, and it wouldnt be right to go a whole year or more, only to lose to a time out because they are going on vacation.

I can see if someone does have an emergency, that it probably wouldnt be a big deal if they were to lose by a time out, cause they would probably not care too much about losing a game as they would be busy tending to what ever the emergency was...

But not a big worry anyway, as someone with 600 games who purposly/ unable to move before time out, will run out of their vacation time pretty quickly anyway.

mid Feb.

maybe you could make them use one day vacation per time out, instead of per day?

When you renew your membership and want to send a money order or personal check, is it made payable to Brainking or the service rep handling the transaction?

Service rep.

Thanks Chuckaroo!!

Making it just for 5 days in a row could be the solution. And special cases [when someone is in a hospital, etc.] can be solved individually, as usually.

the 'problem' right now is that people can use their last vacation days towards the end of the year as they will be gone anyway when the new year starts (i guess?)

personally i have no problems with people using autovacation on me .. the time out just takes longer *shrug*

i can see pawns having problems with it though
(and knights if it happens in a team tournament)

Fencer modified holidays and gave 30 days a year as they wish as they paid for as for myself my computer was hacked and shut down for 5 days.I was lucky enough to click on fencers new auto holidays which im running a team tournament were as one of my members that play on the same computer did not click on to the auto system where as he could not final moves on games he had won in a tournament.Now if it was not fencers auto holidays we would have lost alot more games thanks to kevins thought i agree with them 100% if im not mistaken brainking had to suspend time also.So why was holidays taken away when one of my members didnt go on auto holidays lose a team tournament game due to time outs.Harley who is running this site THE BIG BOSS not you.Everyones holidays are theres and not yours so i thought fencer gave the people the options to take there holidays when they wish or in case of a emergency.

take it easy mastermind ... everyone is just giving their thoughts about the auto vacation .. not reason to get personal

i like the auto vacation days as well .. it saved me when i couldnt get online because my gfs grandmother died .. although my opponent was nice enough to lift the game over the weekend .. the auto vacation days could have saved me

i honestly dont see any problems which rooks can have with it .. but as i said before pawns and knights might get limited in their game play when an opponent drags a game on for too long

so for me i love the feature .. but when i think about what it can do for others .. it might need some tuning :)

So you agree with me.Thank you Hrqls.

Mastermind, are you suggesting I took away someones holidays? I wouldn't be able to do that if I wanted to - which I wouldn't!