pgt: Thanks for the note. I am sure you have a valid point, and I figured this might be the case. As grenv says, he made the same suggestion before. Is there anything you can recall from those previous discussions that could be used to motivate players who want only to have reasonable time limits respected to join with us and voice their support?

So far, a handful of us have expressed at least some lack of satisfaction with the current system. If, in fact, there are many more of us who are displeased with the status quo than those who are taking advantage of the system, do we not have a legitimate grievance? Now, I don't wish to engage in an "us versus them" argument--this site is far too magnificent for that--nor do I want to isolate the slower moving players. Just have them get off of their dead butts and make those moves!!! .... However, it is not realistic to suppose this will happen without a healthy bit of, shall we say, "arm-twisting", for there are many people (and please, I hope no one will take this as some kind of personal indictment, it's just human nature) who either cannot or will not properly regulate themselves and their time; and in the absence of their accommodation, I purport that we have no choice other than to band together in as large a group as possible, and then politely ask Filip (in the name of fairness, among perhaps other nouns) for a modification of the auto-vac policy in order to curtail these delays.

Frankly i think it's a bug that auto-vac is activated if a player has made a move already that day. Perhaps we should submit it as such.

If it's a "feature" let's hear a valid argument for it.

grenv: I agree completely. "Vacation" should means that you can't get to your computer for any number of valid reasons, but being signed up for more games than you can possibly play should NOT be one of them.

pgt: I agree.

If you'd like to see other image in amazons as arrows than current, you can try Proxomitron.
You can choose your own image to be shown instead of current arrow and much more (change images for other pieces in other games and so on) :-)

Cheers

Spirou: the word game requires no dice

miuek: Proxomitron! Now that's amazing. I've read the help files and contents. This program had lots of uses. Just from reading it I wouldn'tve guessed you could do what you said about changing the way my board looks while using this site. How'd you make the connection to do so? Is what you say easy to do with the Proxomitron? I'd like to use a different icon for the Janus in Janus Chess than what is used on this site. Is this something I could change with the Proxomitron? How would I do it, if it is something I can change?

Please, don't discuss features of third party applications here.

Fencer: Would the computer discussion board be a good place, or do you mean not on the site at all?

Walter Montego: Computers board is fine.

While perusing a discussion board I wanted to see all the posts by a single person. I thought the search box would give me all mentions of their name plus all their posts, which is fair enough, but it only gave the first set.

Could there be, then, a way to search by poster's name and/or message text? Some forums have a form on the player's profile page which gives all the posts of that person, optionally filtered by board name, date range and subject or body text. This saves cluttering the board itself with a plethora of useful but cumbersome search controls.

It's been asked for loads of times.... I certainly have asked for it.

Auto-Move??? Auto-Play??? Auto-Pass!!

Hi, everyone!

Could someone tell me if I could delete my account and how I have to?

I want to make a new start here, because I don't want to be in any rating lists in game, which I will never play any longer...

Necromancer: What about using the searching engine? You can not delete your account.

515484: Talk to Fencer. He'll let you know what you can do. ;) Deleting an account however, is impossible. But opening a new account and NEVER using the old one is probably permitted. ;)

I have heard that many people quit & start a new account.
many do this because now that they are experienced a bit.they want another shot at making their rating better.
there are 2 ways I just thought of to make this easier.
---
1-make a request text box that players could use to have their ratings reset to zero in their games.
OR
2-bring this all this to the attention of anyone signing up.and then having a elective period for a newbie within which they can play without it affecting their ratings.
---
it would seem this would save on having a lot of abandoned duplicate accounts.

nobleheart: But why should you be able to reset your rating? That doesn't make sense.

You can play non-rated games if you want while you learn, but starting over seems to be cheating.

nobleheart: I'm with grenv on the resetting of ratings. No sandbagging. ;)

grenv: How is it cheating?

playBunny: It's cheating because if you go back to zero, but you're a 2100+ player, you qualify playing in the lower rated tourneys, which you are likely to win. That's cheating. ;)

playBunny: If you had the chance to reset your BKR, it would be relatively easy to get an extremely high rating. All you would have to do is to win over someone with rating over 2000 or similarly high rating, win three more {your opponents' ratings don't matter in these three games) and you'll get a BKR somewhere around 2500 and higher...

AD has a definition of a sandbag closer to what I understand. It is an artificially low rating used to trap a higher rated player. A wolf in sheep's clothing.

Purple amd AD: Amen :)

Pedro Martínez: That is exactly right. The provisional ELO-style rating would be too easy to manipulate.

Isn't it already easy to manipulate? :)

BuilderQ: I suppose, but allowing a player to reset thier rating and going back into the provisional mode would allow abnormally high rating to be created.

BuilderQ: It's not easy when you already have an established rating.

I agree its cheating.

Pedro, Rex Nihilo: So someone gets a huge rating with their first few games. That's great. I'd target them as ripe for plucking. A few games with them and I've either found a new opponent to play or I've earned a nice handful of points for myself and sent them on the way down to their natural level. If it's cheating it's certainly a most unsuccessful form. High rated players should welcome such people with open arms, lol.

Pedro: The other three opponent's rating don't matter? My understanding is that it's the average of those four games, so I rather think they'd matter as much as the first.

Purple: Sandbagging sounds like something painful but what about sockbagging, lol? How much damage can an unrated player gain - assuming they can find a high rated player willing to take the risk? (A sensible answer to an invitation is perhaps: "Yes, I'd love to play you .. come back in 4 games time and we'll play a 5-point match"). I played a game against someone rated over 700 below me and she beat me. I lost 16 points which is a sting rather than a knockout blow (I'll get it back with two wins against someone at my own level). Although if she was a peer in disguise and we had a multi-point match and only if we had proper backgammon ratings here, then it would be something painful.

ArtfulDodger: How many people want to throw in a 2100+ rating to play in a low ranking tourney? What do they gain from that maneuver? Pride at winning such a tourney is even more self-deluding that having the highest rating on only a handful of games. As Pedro says, you need to play decently high raters to get your own rating up high. That opportunity wuld be lost to anyone playing the low rated tourney.

BuilderQ: One way is to consistently play opponents who are weaker than you. But that's not necessarily a case of manipulation for it may be that you play more or less with the same bunch of people and happen to be the best within the group.

------------------
Resetting your rating is, I would say, a legitimate thing to do if you ought to be high rated but aren't, perhaps because you didn't understand the BKR rating system (How many newcomers do? How many established players do?!). So, you made poor choices of your first four partners (just 4 dammit!) or had a bad run of luck (just 4 dammit!) and start with a crappy rating. Now it's a long haul to get to where you belong. All that while you have a low rating which is not a reflection of your ability and you're inadvertantly sucker-punching everyone left right and centre - the very accusation that you make towards the guy who has reset his rating! Allowing him to reset and play appropriately to get his rating where it belongs is actually fairer all round in this case.

Another legitimate use that I've seen - at VogClub where you can reset at six month intervals - is a top rated guy who resets himself every now and then to enjoy the challenge of getting back up to the top again. Why shouldn't he? It adds spice for him and while it costs points to those he plays, the ripples settle after a while. I must say, though, that again it depends on the formula. The 4 plays to set the rating is completely ridiculous in my view. It must work for the chess community otherwise it wouldn't their choice after so many decades (or whatever, I don't care), but it's no good for plenty of other games and useless for luck-based games.

playBunny: People will do all sorts of things. Resetting one's rating isn't right no matter the argument IMO. ;)

ArtfulDodger: Won't they just! Even if it's wierd, it'll make sense to someone somewhere.

playBunny: Another way to look at it is that some people have artifically high ratings because they understand how BKR's work. But after playing many games I think the ratings level off. You might be able to get a high rating, but you can't keep it if it's artifical. I think a reset will be abused. OTOH, maybe I'm missing something. having played in the USCF for a long time (for you chess players out there) I can imagine if a player asked the federation if he could start over in his rating. They'd ask what he was on! ;)

ArtfulDodger: Here's a case for rating reset that you might agree with. The guy who started this debate, 515484, has provisional ratings in several games. He wants to concentrate on Atomic Chess and reset all the rest because he doesn't want to those games again. (I know this because I read his profile before he cleared it). That would actually be doing a service to the players in the games that he's leaving because they won't be stuck with a non-playing high rater at the top of those tables. This is more a delete issue rather than a reset one, though.

Ummm can we get on with it? The actual feature requests are being buried again. Thank you :o)

MidnightMcMedic: While the "Features in development" remain as stagnant as they have been, what's the point of discussing ANY feature requests?...

I'm just a moderator, not admin of this site. Please do NOT attempt to 'stir it' here, you can and will be hidden.

playBunny:

Pedro, Rex Nihilo: So someone gets a huge rating with their first few games. That's great. I'd target them as ripe for plucking. [] A few games with them and I've either found a new opponent to play or I've earned a nice handful of points for myself and sent them on the way down to their natural level. If it's cheating it's certainly a most unsuccessful form. High rated players should welcome such people with open arms, lol. []

It's very successful form, as you can see on these examples:
Molatov and his Backgammon rating

TOPGUN and his Extinction Chess and Loop Chess ratings


I don't want to have more people like this on BK. And if you allowed reseting BKRs, I'm sure there would be many of them.

Pedro: The other three opponent's rating don't matter? My understanding is that it's the average of those four games, so I rather think they'd matter as much as the first.

The other three games will affect your rating, of course, but are not relevant for the fact whether you will get such an extremely high BKR. That's only the first game. If you have no BKR and play four games with the same opponent with a BKR of, say, 2300, and you win the first game and lose the following three, your prov. rating would be 2500+. But if you lose the first and win the other three games, your BKR will not be that high. I bet it would even be under 2000.

not to mention this moron, who not only used this tactic, but cheated by playing himself to guarantee winning.

http://brainking.com/en/Profile?u=10983&p=1

What about a standard beginning rating? This means a player starts with e.g. 1600 and a * (symbol for new player?

Pedro: If you think that molotov has achieved anything significant with that (6/0/0) #1 rating of 2696 then you are fooling yourself as much as molotov is (if he thinks it means anything; he may just not care for backgammon). All he has "achieved" so far is to clutter up the top of the provisional board with his starting rating. He did the same in hypergammon but there he has played further games and is heading to his natural level. This will be something high and it will be an achievement. Being top with a handful of games means nothing except that you've got points to share with others when you play further games (if you care/dare to). This is not a reset issue; it is a formula issue. Ditto with TopGun.

515484 was in the same category but he had the decency to want to reset his ratings. The lack of choice about resetting prevents him from doing so. He thus stops playing the games because he doesn't like them and is forced to leave clutter at the top of the board which he doesn't want to do.

(MidnightMcMedic) The feature request to allow resets is thus a good one, especially if resetting is made an outcome for provisional raters who fail to complete their 25 games within a reasonable time span.

Grenv: Yes, I remember him. . I believe that he's no longer an active player(s). It's a shame that his rating can't be reset, isn't it?

Pedro: I'm pretty sure that the first four figures are averaged. (See Chess Ratings, the Provisional ratings section). If not, what contribution do they make? Can you provide an example so that I can understand? The one given makes no sense to me as I see no effect of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th games in the first 92500+) case and an "I bet" effect in the second (<2000). That's both contradictory and vague.

But perhaps I'm considering the wrong formula and have an irrelevant web page. Have you the correct one?

chessmec: As far as I know, that's what all backgammon sites do (some use 1500 and others 1600, but the same formula otherwise) and it works very well. And the biggest single jump you can make is to win about 135 points - but you have to do it by beating a top player in a 64-point match! Winning a single game will only gain about 12 points.

playBunny: Here is the formula:
http://math.bu.edu/people/mg/ratings/approx/approx.html

I am strictly against any resetting of the BKRs.

playBunny: I believe that on this site the rating is calculated after the first game. Since it is only one game it is prone to move violently up or down depending on the result.

If they were calculated on the average of the first 4 it would be a slight improvement, but still too few to really mean anything.

In the real world of chess your first 4 games are probably against very established ratings so the results are probably much more accurate than here, particularly in games where luck plays a role (such as backgammon), I believe that is why the call for using a different (standard) system for bg.

I should add that althogh the ratings are calculated after each game, they are not displayed until 4 games are played, hence the confusion.

Pedro Martínez:

I am strictly against any resetting of the BKRs.

ACK.

And it would be better to use a more fair rating system.

Pedro Martínez: I'm with you on this. Why reset them? The ratings system itself needs to be improved. The one we have now doesn't work well for games with a measure of luck in them. playBunny told me about a different way of having ratings for Backgammon, and I think it'd be a lot better for this site to us a system like the one he talked about. The rating does seem to work good for games that have no luck in them like Chess or Checkers.

Can we have different rating systems set up for each game type? Something that reflects upon the actual playing of the game and the skill level of the various players?

I remember a lot of posts having a debate about numerous ways to diminsh a non curently playing player's rating or ranking from the rankings list. Whatever became of that those ideas?

Walter Montego: Agreed! I propose subtracting 50 points for every month of inactivity in a particular game type.

Inactivity defined as neither starting nor finishing nor making a move in any game of that type.

playBunny: Some of the high rated provisionals will play. Bilko came in high and played, as did alanback (who stayed high) and el diabolique (who probably will remain).

That said, I am in a game with molotov right now (and rolled 6-6 from the bar in the opening , but there's still lots of play left), but she doesn't respond to invites very often.

I would love to reset my rating and go back to the provisional.

Rex Nihilo: That's because she ha sthe top ranking I think. I think any one of us is free to play or not. Right now, I have an amazon chess game with Umbro. He's unrated and I am the top rated player and my BKR is 2336. If I win, I'll not get even one singl epoint, but if I lose, I'll 44 points and he'll most probably get his BKR up to 2700. I hadn't noticed that before the 5th move or I'd have deleted the game. There's no joy in a game that way. What's more, his BKR in chess is almost 2400 while mine is 2245 I think. So it's very likely that he'll win. It was my mistake to asign the invitations for unrated players too. I think I used to suggest that in games related to chess, we can have this option to choose our opponents' ability in playing regular chess too.

For example, if I play screen chess with Mely whose BKR in chess is 2700, I'll lose even if my position is up to 2 points better than his. I think I should be able to decide my opponents like this:

With a BKR range of 1500 - 2100 in screen chess and 1700 - 2200 in regular chess for example.