ScarletRose: I have noticed an inverse relationship to the stridency of someone proclaiming they only play for fun and the level of their rating.

"The object of a game is to win, but the reason to play a game is to have fun."

It should go without saying that you play a game for fun. Why else?

The last thing I want to hear my opponent say is that he doesn't care who wins, and I feel sorry for someone elses game if their opponent says that to them.

This is why the people that care about their rating want the ratings to reflect some value that's easy to understand and is readily comparible to someone elses. This way when I look at your profile I can tell which games I might want to invite you to play me in. At least as a rough guide. As others have posted here if someone plays in a small pool of opponents and loses most of the games they might actually be a better player than is reflected by their rating because the people they have been losing to might be really good players. Is this the case for you?

I'm sure my Janus Chess rating is lower than people would expect from my play, but ol' Sumerian's Smirf beats me almost every game. Consequently I have a lower rating. Now that I've been playing a wider pool of players in Janus Chess, my rating has leveled to my ability. For awhile I was dragging along around 1400. I still don't have a high rating in the game, but this is probably because I'm not that strong of a player of it consistantly enough to get a higher rating. I still play the game win or lose because I find it a fun game, but I try to win every game and am disappointed when I lose. It doesn't mean that I didn't have fun playing the game, it just means I'm disappointed in losing. If my opponent makes a good move and it's something to remember, it makes the loss feel better than if I made a bad move and gave the game away, but I can still have fun even if I lose. I never play a game to lose. I find winning a game more rewarding then losing a game. This is what the rating is supposed to show, not if you are having fun playing.

Vikings: I have never seen a ladder system i liked. Too often rewards people who play a lot, rather than the best players.

AbigailII: some people were creating multiple id's (pawns) for the purpose of causing trouble on the boards, and then editing or deleting them before they would get caught, by eliminating the edit button for pawns, this has decresed

grenv: it stops people from getting a high rating and then sitting on it,and avoiding good players, how can you expect to go up if you don't play?

Vikings: Yes but I play 20-30 games at a time and not all of the same type. This is because I have other things to do. Some people seem to play 24 hours a day and have 1000 games going. These people have an advantage.

I would prefer that ratings degrade with little or no activity, that would solve the problem you correctly identified.

grenv: yes but a true ladder can only be played one game at a time, so there is no advantage in playing 1000's of games. Ladder rating is just that, BKR is just that, I believe that there will be both

Vikings: You're right, they both will be here. I still would like to fix the ratings so they degrade over time without play.

Even something simple like subtracting 5% for each month without a game of that type finished or something.

grenv: I believe that that is in the works also

Vikings: So, it's more important to catch a throw-away account then have the post containing the trouble be removed? Sounds odd to me.

maybe they will watch what they are saying a little more, it's worked more than not

When I accept an invitation the game is sometimes added to my list of games where I have a move, but when I go to the game it's not actually my turn so I'm invited to click the game away. The game record subsequently shows a pass for my move.

Would it be possible for the game to be sent to my opponent immediately rather than requiring me to look at the starting position and acknowldege that it's not my move?

playBunny: white always moves first, then it just depends on the roll of the dice as to whether or not you have to pass or play

Vikings: That's true but it's not central to the issue - it's the fact that I have to go to the page and then click it in order to do nothing. It would be useful if that could happen automatically.

playBunny: The dice won't roll until you load the game page. And without a dice roll, there's no way to know if it will be your turn or not.

pauloaguia: thats worded better

and we don't want to say the "a***p***" word

pauloaguia: Ah, that's interesting. Then I must change my request so that the dice are rolled when an invitation is accepted rather than requiring white to go to the page.

playBunny: You're relativelly new to the site, so you probably don't know how many people would be upset if the dice rolled whitout them triggering it (hey, don't ask me why, but there are really quite a few).

pauloaguia: Lolol. Okay, I won't ask why. ;-) Now my request must ask that there be a new option in settings that will do automatic dice rolling (in the contxt already described, and only in ...) for the players that don't like pointless clickery. ;-)

Lol. Step by step we're getting to the right formulation ....

All: you guys really do get caught in the minutia. I think the request was clear and made sense:

Don't have a pass as a first move, go straight to the player whose move it really is.

The only excuse for not implementing it is a technical reason (takes too long to alter the code). Nobody in their right mind is going to complain about not getting to click the stupid button.

Sorry but Im sure all of this has been discussed before......therefore my feature request would be 'an archive of feature request questions & answers'.
Any new people to the site could then click on that category to read the outcome instead of it being requested over & over :o)

Lamby: Boldly spoken, but I'm sure this hasn't been requested, could you point us to the request, perhaps who requested it etc.

Not to be confused with automatically passing subsequent moves, this was only in reference to the first move.

grenv: Well if there was an archive on such a subject I would be able to point you straight to it Im sure :oD
Fencer may be able to answer if this has definately been discussed.....Im pretty sure it has (or I could of dreamt it lol)

Also nobody's going to read an archive when they can just post a question.

And if it's asked for over and over perhaps it could be implemented?

I would read an archive before asking, and maybe others who dont like to ask questions on public boards would also?

Lamby: Some would, some would not. It wouldn't hurt to have a FAQ that covers the repeated questions as long as no one gets upset if people still ask. Many like to answer the same questions even if over and over.

We could have a "Questions and Answers" DB that people could post questions to.....and even the same question is welcomed over and over.. :) People like to help.

ArtfulDodger: just some way of archiving popular categories I think would be much easier to use.
(just to be clear aswell, Im not upset by repeated question asking I was just mearly making a feature request to the very subject of it)

Lamby: It's work to put together but it is a good idea.

<We have the 'Search in Posts' feature ------>

so what difference would an archive make?

Lamby I: Grenv has some good points. Some people can't even be bothered to read the last ten messages; few will go back to a previous page and precious few will be bothered to do an archive search. Others might like to look up a feature but be unsure of how to specify the search; perhaps they have different words for something, eg. I would never have used autopass or auto pass if I were looking up my request. And then there's view that bringing an old request back might give it new life.

I'd love it if we had a fully searchable feature request archive/tracker with priorities and projected dates and all that, but I expect it ... never. The work that would be required from Fencer to classify and organise the feature requests, filter out the chat (such as this conversation) from the actual requests, etc - that's a hell of a lot of work for little return.

Lamby II: My arrival at the site was at a time when autopass was being discussed. If I recall correctly there were two classes of autopass being put forward: 1) when a player is stuck on the bar and 2) when a player can't move because the destination points are blocked.

This request of mine isn't like the above because the situation occurs before the game has started and the "pass" isn't a real one, it's an artefact produced by the game startup procedure. I don't think it should be classified as an auto-pass request.

Eriisa: An archive with some organized system of QandA makes more sense than random searches.

django asyl: BK member....

grenv: he keeps getting banned...so he has to create a new one in order to remain obnoxious.

django asyl: lol

Ok, I'm cleaning up this board a little. It's time to get back to feature requests please. Thanks.

I'm just a pawn. sniff sniff

NOT a floosie: Okey Dokey

you are wasting everyones time by leaving your little ghostie posties..

It has been taken care of. (At least for now)
Let's get back to requesting features, please.

I find it unbelievable that herman1 has won only 1 game of checkers over a guy with rating in 2100s but has a higher BKR than Goldarrows, i.e. 2318. I would like to see the BKR formula changed in this respect.

For anyone who doesn't understand what Pedro is saying (which was me until about a minute ago, when it clicked) ... Herman is shown at the top of Section 1 in the tourney which means that he's been valued as the highest rated player in the whole lot - higher, in fact, than Goldarrows whose rating is 2318.

As I understand the formula, a game (May last year, not in this tourney) that Herman played against Moon Knight (rated over 2100) gave him 2100 + 400 = 2500+ points towards his provisional rating. That rating will be the average of the points from his first 4 games (so he's only earned 625+ so far) but, in the absence of any further information about his playing level, the highly tentative value of 2500+ is used for the purposes of distributing the players amongst the tourney sections - and hence Herman gets top billing.

Pedro: What specifically is the objection? Herman being given top billing from just one game (perhaps none should be used until there's at least a real provisional rating)? Or perhaps the value of 2500 that the game gave him? Or do you want more games to be included before the rating is calculated? .. Or .. ?

playBunny: Specifically, my objection is exactly what I wrote in my previous post.

My feature request is to either get rid of or alter the special rating formula (based on first 8 games).

Pedro Martínez: If his skill level is way less than his rating then doesn't that just make him a point-rich goose reading for the plucking? LOL.

Purple: LOLOL. Great idea. I'm off to invite some gooses to my table.
:-DD

I was creating an invitation to a game so I copied and pasted a name from the rankings page into the opponent search box. The name was exactly correct, of course, but the pasted text had a space at the end. The space wasn't trimmed by the search and it came up empty handed.

When under Action it says "null" what does that signify? I see it on very rare occasions.

Purple: It signifies I forgot to add a description to that action.

Fencer: Maybe none is needed. It provides an aura of mystery..the indescribable.

Purple: I've seen it when the player never even logged in the first time. Don't know if there are other situations...

A similar thing happened to me. In the N-Gammon team tournament I was placed on the top board because I had a 2363 rating based on one game. I did poorly in the tournament because I was very over-rated (but our team won. Yea Untouchables! :)

I suggest that the provisional ratings of unrated players be ignored. I think that they should be treated the same way as players who have not completed any games. "Unrated" should mean unrated.