It's already slow enough finishing some of these tournaments. Any rule that prevented players moving would be a bad rule in my opinion.

I too have used vacation, but actually been able to make some moves. However with no vacation I would have been forced to timeout some games.

it would have to be pretty darn serious to kick someone off a pay site. Also how do you prevent them just resigning up with a different name?

How about we just play games and ignore people who are annoying? It's not possible to actually cause a real problem is it?

Maybe I'm missing something.

Not at all, just start a new game! That's what I do.

I think resigning should be encouraged. In fact if the game engine was smart enough to know that a win is guaranteed just finish it (as in backgammon for instance - most games this wouldn't apply).

After clicking "resign" and typing a long message, the page refreshed and I lost the message.

It doesn't seem like this page should be auto-refreshed.

I agree, in games where a draw is possible a points match is much much better. For games where a draw is impossible (like Backgammon) it makes no difference. Therefore I would prefer if tournaments were points instead of games.

Also, I would expect the matches to count as more than one game for the rankings, and the match score to be counted (e.g if I win 2-1 against a low rated player my rating probably goes down etc). Is this the case?

i'm confused. How exactly can people use the information against you? Who cares if someone can see what action you are doing on the site?

oh well, i think that the bigger problem is that some players play so many games that they only move every 3-4 days and sometimes not at all for a long time. I have played some games that drag on forever and I lose the context.

Yes, performance and reliability are more important than features. Having said that this feature is obviously worth doing as an optional flag for the user. People who don't like it can choose not to activate it, thus pleasing all the people. :)

that is why it should be a user choice. Beginners can choose not too turn it on.

i agree, the site is very good. I pay here and no longer pay at iyt. I am just saying that I would prefer that feature, especially in games that take a long time as it is (e.g backgammon).

I agree, auto-pass should be an option at the user level. If I could make my turns automatically pass, or make the only move available then I would choose to do so.

Whisperz, nice try but you can already go back and view the game. The pgn file just makes it a little easier.

Also, part of the skill may be to learn an opponents style, which is why I like to change up a little from time to time.

I think we're all getting a little confused.

10pm Eastern would be 3am GMT.

I also notice it a little slow in the evenings, but c'est la vie.

If that's the answer, that's fine. When can we expect version 2.0? The offer of help with the code still stands.

Just wondering when the backgammon bug that allows a player to move one piece when it is possible to move both will be fixed?

Also, the doubling cube?

I could probably help with the coding if you like! :)

good idea, doesn't sound like a big deal to change the graphics for checkers. Am I wrong about that?

Of course you need a bigger grid!

I have an electronic version that allows a special shot per ship that you still have, for instance the battleship hits 9 squares at once and the Sub shoots a torpedo along a row or column until it hits something. Some special shots can be used once per game as long as the ship is still alive, some can be used more than once. Also there are planes on the aircraft carrier that can be used for surveillance. I find it a much more interesting game than the standard one. :)

Philosopher's football is a Monty Python sketch where famous philosopers try to figure out what to do for a long time before one of them gets the brilliant idea of kicking the ball into the goal.

Just for those that don't frequently watch british comedies.

Unless castling in Anti-Chess is a feature request. What is the rule elsewhere? What about en-passent?
:)

Given that about 1 in 5 people are Chinese I would be surprised if every town didn't have at least one.

@alesh
After looking at the browser (slimbrowser) i'd have to say the grouping of pages in tabs is a good feature, this is not reproducable using IE. I'll have to try it for a while.
What I had missed, or what wasn't made clear, is that the group of pages can be saved as a single group enabling the user to come back to the same group later.
Does anybody know if the browser has any known bugs or problems?

relax, i mentioned the taskbar, not you. I would like to know the difference between one window with 10 tabs, and 10 windows, which are navigable on the taskbar. I guess it is a little neater but the functionality is no different. Perhaps the memory footprint is less?

alesh, that is effectively the same as opening 10 windows. The taskbar behaves the same as if there were tabs. Or did i miss something?

Something like

Rpost = (NRpre + mRavg + (W-L)400) / N+m
= (5x2031 + 2x1390 + 2x400) / 5+2
= (10155 + 2780 + 800) / 7
= 13735 / 7
= 1962

Apparently the system corrects for ratings going down when winning though.
You can't expect to gain anything playing against players rated 700 points lower than you.

yes, and not only that i'm about to lose a game against an unrated but obviously good player. I may be hitting that floor soon! (see formula page if you don't understand that)

My rating did indeed drop to 2133. :(

I must be going crazy, I could have sworn that didn't happen in the past. Sorry for wasting everyones time looking at numbers and formulas. At least we all understand how the numbers are applied now :)

So according to the formulas, my rating should go down to about 2133, based on

Rpost = Rpre + K (S - We) + B

Rpost = 2141 + 16.2212 ( 0.5 - 0.992 ) + 0

So, now we'll see!

Well I can't for the life of me work out why none of my drawn games does anything to my rating. I guess it's possible there's something wrong with some people's and not others?

Anyway as a paying member I'd like to be convinced. Is it possible to do a query of the database for historical ratings to see how individual games affected the rating.

If not I am about to conduct a test. I am rated 2141 at Atomic chess. I will challenge a friend of mine who has never played before and we will agree to a draw after several moves.

Before we do that could you let me know what you think my expected rating would be after the game.

I contend that it will still be 2141, but am prepared to be proved wrong.

here is the game

I believe that I have enough data to prove to myself that draws have no effect on ratings.

Fencer, could you please share with us the formula used to calculate ratings? Also is there a way I could perhaps play a test game with you or anyone else to prove there is a bug in the ratings system?

Just trying to help by the way.

Well, you're assuming that people have their pictures already posted on some web page. If I just had a picture on my desktop that wouldn't help.

Well I'm referring to chess variations, but it would surprise me if some games worked and others didn't. Anyway a test would work, I have a high rating in some games and am willing to deliberately draw one game against a lower rated player at the risk of losing rating points while the ratings are monitored in order to test.

Fencer,
I would have to agree with the comment that drawn matches do not count. I have had quite a few drawn games. In many cases the difference in ratings was quite a lot (e.g 2000 vs 1300), in which case I would expect to increase the lower rating and decrease the higher rating. NEVER has this occurred. I suspect that there is a defect in the code somewhere causing this.

In addition I would suggest that winning a series 3-2 (which should score 0.6-0.4 where a draw is 0.5-0.5) should score less than winning 5-0. I haven't enough data to tell whether this is the case, but can you confirm that it should be? I suspect that the same piece of code would be used in this case and therefore it may not work either.

If necessary I volunteer to play someone in a game of something where our ratings are dissimilar and engineer a draw to test this hypothesis. Just invite me to a game and alert fencer so he can monitor the ratings.

Just trying to make sure it works!

you could put the messageboard inside a different DIV or FRAME than where you're typing. Then you would need to keep that DIV up to date by either refreshing or timed database lookups and innerHTML writes.

I hope that clears it up! :)

Combined ratings doesn't make much sense to me, since the games are different. Kind of like comparing Tiger Woods with Andre Agassi by combining the tennis and golf ratings?

I do like the idea of a multigame tournament though. It seems to me that you would need to play each rival in each game to make it fair.

i wish i had time to play 50 games, let alone 500, lol. I guess I'll retire one day and then try for triple figures. :)

So to be clear I don't support restricting moves unless it is helpful in keeping the site from going down. I would only support it as a temporary measure. I notice you have only 20 games running, whereas I've seen some players with 400+ concurrent games, which basically means they must have moves to make no matter when they log in. While this is fine in theory, if it puts a strain on the server I would be in favor of limiting the number of moves.

iyt limits non-paying players to 25. This is miniscule and an attempt to get those players to pay, not to help performance.

Don't want to answer for Fencer, but these would not put any strain on the server, or take up much space. Disk space is cheap anyway.

What we probably need to do is reduce the number of database requests, which is why the discussion on reducing total number of games per player allowed etc. I propose a move limit per player per day might work, which could be slowly raised until capacity is reached.

I also agree to limitting the number of games. It seems to me 100 concurrent games is plenty, at least until the server is improved.

This may not help, since 100 games is probably perpetual moving anyway, but if it would I would support it.

I second Caissus' suggestion as an alternative for a few reasons:
1. It is more like real chess.
2. Taking more time over a particular move forces you to be quicker later in the game.
3. Less likely to time out accidentally.
4. Tournaments will have known time limits per round. A 40 moves/30 days + finish in 10 days, for instance, would be guaranteed to complete the round in 80 days.

Just my 3c

Actually I believe that draws "Should" affect the bkr, but they don't. For some reason bkrs are "not" affected by drawn matches.

I believe that this is an error in the system since a low rated player should have his rating rise after a draw and vice versa.

To back my statements up: I was rated about 2000, playing against a 1300. Both of us had played many games. After the draw (doh!) neither rating was affected, much to my amazement (of course i shouldn't complain in this case ;)

I have had a great number of draws, and watched the rating closely each time. Never has it been affected.

Stratego! That's what I was referring to as well.

But sabotage is a board game. Does iyt have some special licensing agreement with the manufacturer?

This is usually solved by mirrored hard drives. But like everything else that costs money. Somehow we need to find investors, anyone got oodles of cash? Fencer, how about selling a 49% share in the business (and future revenue)?

Some questions about this variant:
1. If you can make this switch in check, then I would think it could be used to escape checkmate as well, thus changing the definition of checkmate.

2. If the king is on the second rank can he move 2 squares forward if an enemy pawn has been captured?

3. If the kings are a knights move away from each other and both players have lost a knoght, does that mean that check is impossible, since the checked king could move like a knight and capture the enemy king?

Not bad, but I'd rather have the engineer work on fixing the rules rather than give the users a manual fix.
Fencer, what's the scope of work for fixing backgammon? All you need to do is test all the possible moves to see if a 2 move option is available, and if not if a move involving the larger of the two dice.

Just make sure it isn't implemented for Dark Chess!

It makes sense that anti-backgammon is different since you are playing differently than you would in normal backgammon. However the other variants (Nackgammon, Race etc) simply have different starting positions so it isn't necessary to distinguish one from the other during the play. In fact it might be distracting.

Just my 2c

I suggest you try again, sounds like an isolated incident to me. I assume NTL is an ISP?