CryingLoser:
(1) I liked joshi_tm's idea better, that every player can set an individual maximum amount of games (I think I could use it ;)). But that wouldn't fit your idea of avoiding to play too slow players. Therefor your point
(2) would be pointless. So let's assume from here on, that this feature would be applied. Point (2) are actually two points: The settings for tournaments are not necessary, because you could just set up a tournament without vacation days - so noone could "misuse" the autovacation feature. The second point about automatically putting "unrestricted movers" on the individual blocked users list would eventually cause a too high server load, because every time someone chooses (not) to be restricted, the blocklist of more than 20000 accounts had to be updated. And your Blocklist would be unreadable.
(3) I think that is too much for the servers also. People are demanding to only be shown the tournaments they may participate in since a long while, and it doesn't happen - But to realize it, you would only have to compare the tourney settings to your own data. If your wish would be applied, you would have to compare every tournament's player list with your complete Blocklist - everytime you look for tournaments. I think, that would really blow it up.
(4) That would be a gread feature! :)

Lots of times, I will set up some tourney's that are 1 day moves, with no days off. This way, everyone has to move at least every 24 hours and auto-vacation will not extend the time.

Voila! No slow players!

Eriisa: That's exactly what I was trying to say ;)

Mr. Shumway:
(2) Every player can define by creating tournaments if "unrestricted movers" are allowed or not, and every player can choose if he want to put "unrestricted movers" automaticly in his
Blocked-user list

The second point about automatically putting "unrestricted movers" on the individual blocked users list would eventually cause a too high server load

It is possible to put only the flag "unrestricted mover" on the Blocked-user-list, and in every actually situation the server could check in milli-seconds the setting of this flag.
Of course, to put all the names of the "unrestricted users" on the Blocked-user-list would make it unnecessary big.

CryingLoser: I was under the impression this whole idea started because many people were getting frustrated with specialists holding up games. The target seems to have moved away from that directive

SafariGal: Agreed, the problem is that in tournaments that should be over quickly, one slow player can ruin the whole experience.

This could be partially fixed by figuring out the winner of a group prior to every game finishing, and starting round 2 before round 1 is over if all the winners can be determined.

grenv: why not have a simple rating for every player.
Moves / Game
then it doesnt matter quite so much how many games they have started. If they have 100 active games and make 200 moves that day, they score a rating of 2. (2 moves per game per day)
If they have 600 games and make 50 moves, they have a rating of 0.083.

Then set a tournament that only accepts players with ratings over whatever the creator sets.

This would not totally guarantee a specialist from screwing up the tournament but it would help a lot and certainly help identify slow players

SafariGal: I like the idea of having the rating, but I also think the group winner should be decided as eraly as possible.

SafariGal: the problem with a rating like that is it does not take into consideration how long they have to make a move. If a player only plays games with 7day + limits because they know they are busy and can only play once a week they should still have a perfect score as long as they always play atleast once a week.

mctrivia: you missed the point of the rating, which would be "how quickly does this player play". Playing once every 7 days in a 7 day game is not the same as playing 10 times a day in the same game.

grenv: exactly right grenv, the point mctrivia makes on this is irrelevant to the speed rating.

A different rating may be an average of time it takes for a player to actually make a move when it is their turn. This would be more accurate than my first suggestion. If mctrivia modified his post a little, maybe he meant that in a 7 day game your opponent can take all 7 days, you can then move immediately but it is still only one move in 7 days making you look bad.

Something more along the lines of the time taken feature at goldtoken but get an average per move, this way your slow opponents wouldnt affect your speed rating.

So mctrivia, indirectly, thank you very much for pointing out a flaw in my original idea :)

SafariGal: Quite right, for instance I'm not moving now because I have no games where it's my move. So that might look slow ;-)

SafariGal: Wouldn't making a terniment or game with aproprietly short time limits do the exact same thing? There is an entire fellowship of people you can play that like to play quick.

mctrivia: Wouldn't making a terniment or game with aproprietly short time limits do the exact same thing?

No, it wouldn't. The same idea was some messages before written with title "Simple Solution?", but the idea misses an important point:

When someone creates a tournament in a new game (example: Fabrice in his excellent game "Ambiguous
Chess"), then his main motivation is to discover some strategy of the game, opening theory, etc.
Even if he creates a tournament with only 1 day per move, this doesn't prevent slow players to join in and then lose by time. You may think that then all is OK, they lost and are "punished" and the faster players have the winning point. But the intention of the tournament was to learn something about the strategy of the game and not an easy winning point by timeout!
So, to create a tournament with short time limit is not enough to prevent slow players to do harm against the intention of the tournament.
Therefore, i tried to give this species some name, remember "Specialist" or "Unrestricted Mover", hoping that would make it easier to take measures against this phenomenon.
The suggested names were 0-1-variables, only to make difference between "Specialist" and "Not specialist", but now grenv has suggested a rating, which measures even between the 0-1-extremes "how much specialist" a player is!
I think this includes the solution of the problem, and agree 100% with the suggestion of grenv, as always his idea is convincing!

CryingLoser: I can't take credit for that, it was SafariGal that thought of it, I just seconded it. :)

grenv: Upps, have overseen that.
SafariGal: Sorry, SafariGal, and i agree 100% with your idea

CryingLoser: But in a tournement with short time limits would get rid of the slow players that you don't care about and give you free points. I know you want to learn but the majority of people are not going to time out. I think the majority of players on here play before the time runs out they just sort there games by how much time is left so a 7 day game will be played last but a 1 day game may get played a lot more often.

Ok.. this board is not meant for debating new features! :-D ... Please let's get back to requesting new features.
Feel free to take it to General Chat or Members Only to continue the conversation about "slow" players. Thanks.

yeah like word games

Sarah1980: and yahtzee ... fun and easy :)
(maybe with a doubling cube ;))

This may have already been requested, but I would like to see a "Watched" list, where you can add and remove other players' games that you want to keep track of as a spectator.

jurek: Paying members have an option to put any page to the context menu, accessible anywhere by a right-click.

Fencer: OK, thanks. I didn't see it in the list of member benefits, so I assumed it didn't exist for anyone.

jurek: Yes, I guess the list of member benefits should be updated. It's much much longer.

Since we have random games now, I would like to warm up the idea of random colors for game invitations - so that one can choose wether to set the color manually as it is now, or to let the system set them randomly after the invite was accepted

Ever thought of having a tourney of 1 vs 5 or 10 players?

Daniel Snyder: In a way, you can't play a simulation in turn-based games. The nature of a simulation is that one very good player plays lots of average or good players at once. Theoretically, this gives the lower players a chance since the very good player has less time to spend focusing on each of his moves. But on a turn-based side, this is impossible.

gambler104: true

but maybe some kind of tournament could be arranged in which a higher ranked player has to win against more opponents to continue than the lower players themselves ?

maybe a higher ranked player has to play against a team of lower ranked players and the higher ranked player has to win at least 66% of the matches to continue to the next round, if the lower ranked team wins more than 33% then they continue ?

Unrated Simulcast turn based tourney....

Any chance of getting a "Scrabble" type game on this site? I think others would be interested in it.

SafariGal: Wouldn't it be more simple to just go to the Discussion Board List, and expand it to all boards & languages? Then you could see all the public boards that are available on this site.

But lets get this board back to feature requests please.

As BBW said, this board needs to get back to Feature Requests!!! Thank you very much!

** Some posts have been removed **

Don't know if this has been asked before
Could it be possible to set up a game/games in waiting games in pairs one each of black starts and one of white starts.

volant: sure. when you set up your games, click the number of games you want and then click the box that says "alternate colors".

gambler104: my bad, I didn't explain very well. What I was thinking was a way to put a game/s in waiting game in pairs. So when someone came in and accepted the two players would automatically wind up with two games one of each color. 

mako887:
scrabble = good
upwords = excellent
but I think there are copyright issues...

volant: I think it is impossible to do now and it would be a nice feature. I see so many times someone posting something like 6 waiting games with each color in some unbalanced game, and some time later there are still 5 black games available but only 1 white game - which mean that the contenders take the white challenges but ignore the black ones.
To get around that, you can offer two-games match, but those are then counted (statistics- and rating-wise) as only one game.

nabla: That was the reason for my request of randomly chosen colors after a waiting game is accepted - you only have one game, and the amount of black/white would be balanced over the long run.

Mr. Shumway: isnt it possible to cancel a game if you havent made too many moves. If so, isnt it possible someone would keep cancelling until they got to play the color they wanted?

Mr. Shumway: This would also be nice !

SafariGal: there may always be mean persons ;)

SafariGal: If they resign a game and no moves have been made then their BKR wont be effected. If they finish a game and more than 2 moves have been made then they BKR would be effected, so abit of a silly thing to do, if thats what they are doing.

WatfordFC: exactly, there is a work around

SafariGal: Also i really didnt think that the colour you are makes any difference to the outcome of the game, but i stand to be corrected on that one.

WatfordFC:It does affect the outcome if you're playing Maharajah Chess, or Hord Chess.

King Reza: ah right, i didnt know that, because i dont play those games.

 WatfordFC:

King Reza:

WatfordFC: Every game rules page has a little table at the beginning with the percentage of wins for White and Black. For instance, PahTum's percentages are:

white 11354 (54.58 %)
black 6559 (31.53 %)
Draws 2886 (13.87 %)

As you can see, apparently it's better to play with white in this game.