Gubbe: Don't worry. If I like it, it does not mean that I want to implement it :-) It is only my first impression. Actually, there is one more drawback - if a strong non-paying player will create a new account because of deleting his old one, his default BKR will be set to 1300 [as for each new user] and it will negatively affect BKR of his opponents who lost a game with him.

Some observations on tony and una's points made (i hasten to add that i play here and virtually nowhere else and will continue to do so)

nobody wants to discourage people from coming to the site, and tony is not suggesting we try to.

the economics of this site appear to be such that fencer is struggling with both time and money resources to keep the site going in a smooth fashion at all times.

we therefore need the site to generate more money to support its operation, and one major way to do this would be to encourage non-paying members to become paying members, and certainly not to discourage them! the incentives to become paying members rather than non-paying need to be looked at, it appears to me that we are giving away an awful lot of bics to sell a very few and as a result the service being provided sometimes suffers.

tony's suggestion is one way to increase the incentives for pawns to upgrade. three months is a long time and pawns would get to play all games for free during that time. as una says, there are plenty of other sites which offer free games, so they are free to play wherever they want. if however the site gets so full of non-paying members that it struggles to provide a correct service to paying members, then that is not right, and that will discourage everybody!

it may be that fencer could consider some of the other facets of the site which could be made available only to members once they have upgraded to paying membership, without excluding non-payers who want to play games. it is already possible to create tournaments for paying members only, fellowships are only available to members. maybe 20 games is too many for non-payers, after all, they are getting to play for nothing - but then as una says, they enhance the site for all users so nobody wants to exclude non-payers at all.

at the end of the day i don't know what causes the problems with the site, fencer must do - is it just a question of money? how much money are we talking about? does the rate of increase in membership mean that fencer will get enough money to achieve his new server aims in 6 months? a year? 10 years?? be nice to know what you think about it fencer, you know what the problems are better than we do.

I'm a relatively new member here, transferred from IYT. I had two reasons to leave IYT:
1. regular down time (propably due to heavy usage)
2. restrictions for us non paying members (20 move limit).

This site isn't much better in aspect one, but I've enjoyed the possibility to really play here, not just hang around for 10 minutes a day. And I know I'm not alone...

I also know that us non paying members dont seem that important, but if we leave... A site like this needs a certain amout of players to work, and I think that brainking is hanging on the edge here already. I mean there are only 95 players online at this very moment.

So I advice you to think very carefully any changes to policy that might lower the amount of users on the site (I work for a company that gives advice on such matters - this one's free :D).

Anyway, good site (not perfect, but good). Keep it going. :)

Worries me that Fencer likes this idea. Does it mean that you dont see a solution to improve the site?

tournaments last longer then 3 months in many cases ...

I dare to remind of my idea to decrease the amount of daily
moves ( to 30 ? ) granted, after 3 months 'extended trial ' for pawns
- even allowing to join ONE fellowship for sniffing at all features ...

after those three months also the amount of discussion-board postings
per day should be restricted (to 20 ?) ... optimizing traffic as goal ... ~*~ ;)

I am totally against the idea of deleting pawns as has been suggested. A site such as this needs a certain amount of players to keep the tournaments and games fresh and exciting. Non paying pawns accomplish this, if you discourage people from coming to your site then the pool of new players disapates.
I am a member of the 65thsquare club. I spend, as do others lots of time promoting chess. Within our club we sponser and organize tournaments and play them out on sites such as BrainKing, ItsYourTurn, GameKnot and others. For every new member we bring from our club to BrainKing we bring a potential paying member. If a structure is established such that has been proposed I will drop my paying membership here. Chessworld for example was a site that offered a certain amount of chess for free to attract paying members. They cut the free stuff down to the point where you could not even play chess, so now I don't spend money nor play at their site anymore.
What it boils down to is a matter of economics. Sometimes you have to give away some free bic pens in order to sell them by the dozen. I feel there are enough benefits to paying members that it is worth it to me to have the membership. Others who may not be quite the chess enthusiast may not consider a value here. Just depends on what you want out of your chess games.

If I can't organize and invite members from my chess club to play at a site, I simply find a site where I can. Though this is a great site, it is of course not the only one in the world of chess.

Regards

Una

I see one obvious drawback. Say a member is in a game with a non-member at the time the non-members 3 months expire, this means the game is terminated. If I was the member playing the game I would feel I'm being denied the opportunity to complete a game based on a policy directed at non-members. I still say limitation on the number of games played as a non-member is the best incentive to become a paying member.

At Gameknot.com, where only chess is played, there are 12400 players, of which I estimate 10% are members. This 10% appears to apply at IYT also.

I like this idea. But it must be discussed though before I'll make such a significant change to the current system.
Anybody knows about possible drawbacks?

As a postscript to the previous message, if Pawns were restricted to 3 months registration, I would make them feel as welcome as possible, play many games with them, make it as hard as possible for them to be leave the site!!

Fencer - please would you consider this request.

Brainking.com seems to have reached a paying membership plateau of around 250 paying members. All of us payers need more members so that we may be sure that your excellent site will continue forever! I beieve that will happen so long as you get a decnt income from your site.

Therefore, you need to turn many more Pawns into Knights and Rooks.

Would you consider deleting Pawns after 3 months registration, with all their games and statistics. Even if they sign back on under a new name, they will have lost any ratings, etc. This loss may well be important to them and cause them to take out a paying membership.

I do hope that other paying members will support this request.

Ooops didnt work, just very happy:)

What does that say, TT?

How long are you going away for, Massimo? Don't forget weekend days are already holidays so you only have to put in week days. That will give you 7 days where you will not time out.

ok I think I will lose many games on time:-(.anyway thanks to whom replied and for the wishes.

But as Brain Pawn you can set only 5 days per year.

Yep, just double checked for you, its 'Settings, Calendar, Vacation and Weekend days'.
Just tick the days you will not be here and have a great holiday :o)

Go to settings, and there you will find a holiday page, where you can tick the days you want as holidays. On these days you will not time out.

hi everyone!may I postpone my games?I am going on holiday for 15 days and else I will lose all of my games on time.I am leaving tomorrow so please let me know.thanks

I had about a dozen games to be played and here i am 25 minutes later and I have played them all :)
Thank you so much and you deserve a round of applause....
"CLAP, CLAP, CLAP"

Observations: There were two deadlocks last night, probably caused by infinite loops due to non-synchronized threads in one internal Java function. It's gonna be the subject of the third test for today.
Average CPU load was about 15-20% which is very good [until a deadlock has occured]. It only confirms my theory that BrainKing application is very fast but it occasionally gets jammed because of multithreading and related issues. Good news are that it is not hard to fix, once I know where the problem exactly lies.

It looks good; thank you.

Thanks Fencer.. today no problems in resolving the page; it has been a smooth day.. Wonderful :-) Keep the good work going; we´ll enjoy each day more!

In g:):)d fellowship, ~*Radiant*~

For all your hard work!!

All I know is ... I'm impressed with all that Fencer has done here. I know that sometimes I'll get the 'server is full' screen, but usually if I hit the back button and then submit again, it'll go through.

thanks fencer for doing what you can, I sure appreciate it as I know a lot of us do.

I've just started the second test. Let's see the performance tonight [when the load is usually the biggest].

Good luck with your work Fencer, but we all know, or should know, that anything worth having, is worth waiting for. Thanks for all your hard work and a wonderful site.

Yes, according to my CPU and network meters, there was no big downtime tonight. But the work is not finished yet, I will continue today and tomorrow.

Well Fencer....I dont know if you have started to fix the bits you thought you knew were sorta broke LOL, but access has improved 85%:)

Nothing unusual :-)

i mean, waht side effects will that have to the site during the weekend? :-) If so, could you give us an estimate?

Does that mean, the site will be down the whole weekend?

Bastille Day should not be forgotten though ... :) ~*~

Fencer, if you're planning on making the independence days of all nations public holidays here at BK there won't be many regular days left in a year.

Maybe I've found out what's wrong at last. I'm gonna spend this whole weekend experimenting with my new ideas.

I logged into this site at 3pm my time approx...I had 7 games waiting...it is now 6.08pm and I have just played the 7th game....I know Fencer is sick of hearing these SLOW game complaints but yesterday I had REAl trouble and had to leave some game :(
You do a good job mate and we really appreciate it....this is just for your information....not a complaint :)

Thank You, and you have a nice weekend Fencer.

Ellie: Done.

CET says it's Independence Day since 4 hours ... :D

Best Oldish European Wishes to the
Brain-kings of a Young and Strong Nation ...

May soon a visionary president declare, she is the only one
capable of acchieving, the goal to get all industries too dangerous
for a biosphere, into orbital stations, yet before this century is over,
- not because it is easy but, because it is difficult ...
... - and, because she cAn ...

God Bless America ... ~*~

'

tomorrow is the 4th. of july, that is a holiday here in the states, is it going to be a site holiday. Happy 4th. to all.
thx.

I think a good suggestion would be to examine the rating system Dweebo uses at Dweebo's Stone games. The formula is similar, but would not have some of the odd results obtained with the current brain King formula.

Exceeds the ransom, has to raise the bar...Blaze sit still!

So, what would be a suggestion (or plurality thereof) to improve upon the rating system we have? There is no such thing as a perfect one, but if there are flaws, they could be thrashed over, perhaps even rectified.

I just don't think that a lot of time should be spent on it by the players. I mean, I am much more concerned with won-loss records than any rating, which is at best only a rough guide as to how good (or not) a player is. In contrast, numbers of games won and lost are factual, and although they do not necessarily address the strength (or weakness) of opposition, they are still unequivocal.

However, ratings are always fallible, no matter how good the system used. I purport that in most rating systems, about one-third of the players are overrated, about one-third underrated, and about one-third rated fairly close to where they should be. The variance in rating systems won't change that. The only thing which will make rating systems better is longevity; that is, a lot of the players in a certain game type playing a lot of games against the others in that group.

I know how it works.

If you are rated high and you win - you go up a couple of points. If you are rated high and lose - you go down A LOT of points! :-)

Possible a good rating system for skill type games like chess, but when you start adding more "luck" into games (like a little for Backgammon, and a lot more luck for Battleboats) - it may not bs the best rating system.

-- Which I'm not complaining about the current rating system, but it never hurts to look at different options.

Well, I would just like to point out that I am in the top 20 of three games and the top 30 of another. DmitriKing is the top rated player in four games. It's not that I haven't been able to do well here but I think it is a difficult system to sustain competition if no one can figure out its consequences.

Pioneer54, I partially agree with what you said, mostly in regard to the high number of games. But, just because people can improve their ratings by studying does NOT mean that a possibly flawed ratings system should not be changed. I am not saying that the rating system is definitely flawed, because maybe it isn't, but I think it could and should be improved. The fact that people can study and improve their ratings is no reason to have a weak rating system.

ALso, although it is hardly relevant, I dare say that my ratings in the 4 games I play (in which I am the top rated player) have not suffered any as a result of my spending 5 minutes complaining about the ratings system.

From time to time on here, I've noticed that people complain about their rating(s), the rating system, or one thing or another having to do with ratings. What a waste of time and energy! Ratings are cuious and interesting by nature; they are also a very inexact science no matter what formula is used. It has always been this way, and probably always will be. If those yammering about ratings would spend half that time studying and improving their play, their ratings would improve dramatically! So, why worry? Look up your rating if it makes you feel good, acknowledge it, then resolve to do something about it, or just forget it!

As for extremely high numbers of games per member, I suppose that is Fencer's province alone. Some of my opponents (even friends) fit this category, and I don't especially like waiting days for a response in a game, but as long as they make their time control, I cannot complain, although I have a tough time understanding how anybody can handle several hundred games simultaneously. There has to be a certain comfortable level of peak performance beyond which play diminishes.

There will always be a small number of people (in proportion) who are impatient with what the site offers, and when and how it offers it, and even if they could be placated at present they would find something else to get anxious about, so let them be on their merry way and concentrate on the resolute majority.

I agree with these opints. Players having 300 and 400 or even 700 games going is too much.

ALso, the rating systme is suspect. I took a look at the formula used, and it seems to base the rating on the number of games the opponents have played. But, the way I interpreted the website, it was not intended to work this way--the number of games played was used in determining ratings within a tournament, as I understood it, not over the lifetime of players. I could be wrong on this. But, Once a player is established, I think it ashould not mattewr hoew many games he has played. Dweebo's stone games uses this formula, and everyone knows how it works and knows how their rating will change after a game.

I have been playing on this site for about a couple of months or so now and I really do honestly appreciate the opportunity to play at somewhere other than IYT mainly due to the obvious attention to customer service that is exhibited among all the people on this site not just the official CS reps. Why have I not gotten a membership? Three interrelated reasons. 1) The unbelievable number of games that people can get involved with means that often the games with the top level people in a game's rankings take forever because they have so many games that are often difficult for them to work through in a day. I agree that part of it is my fault because I accepted games from them with 45 day move windows (which I have stopped doing) but I have seen some people with over 400 games. I think allowing that is detrimental to the site and 2) its performance. It is my uninformed opinion that the sit's performance is negatively affected by probably 5% of players due to these high number of games. Now, I am not a Java programmer but I am a web developer and I knwo that with hobby sites that is always the case, a core few usually use the majority of the resources on a site. In this case, I think it is extremely lopsided and does more for frustrating the rest of us than any server hardware. 3) The ranking system is so esoteric as to be indiscernable from magical incantation. ;-) I have no idea from game to game where I am going to come out in the rankings. sometimes playing peoepl higher than me does not affect my rating at all, sometimes I beat people lower than me and I gain huge advances in my ranking. If I don't understand how the ranking qworks thn I dont' knwo what I need to do to get ahead. It makes it very frustrating to compete when I dont' knwo hwo I get ranked, I can;t play fast enough to get ranked higher and I can't get on to get ranked at all. I will keep playing here because I like the people and I hate IYT just that much. I coudl suffer the performance issues and get amembership if I could be assured that the other two issues were resolved to everyone's benefit, not just mine. Thanks for letting me speak my peace. And, of course, I would love to help anyway I can. Have you considered offloading some of the more static or non-game stuff to another less server intensive language liek PHP or Perl?