What have you guys been up to ...I go away for a few hours and 73 new posts...lol.. Personally I think you are all taking this way too seriously. Fencer had his reasons for doing this and he offered prizes as an insentive. If someone bothers to refer a friend but needs a prize to get them to do it...so be it. If someone wants to take the time to read boards they would never otherwise read or open up board windows every hour ...that is their business. I think Fencer is probably spending more time dealing with the people who would like this action fine tuned than he is with the action itself. Now thats my 2 cents worth...lol. Have a great day everybody!!

LionsLair: not necessarily, games like Ludo or Backgammon Race will also become popular even though they are longer because people are looking for move points. The games that will be most popular are the "luck games" or ones where you don't have to think for long periods of time.

KotDB: Lol. Cool, O Dust-bunny King. But I have to disagree... Mixing two boards in one url gets my Exotic Trick of the Month vote! ;o))

KotDB: playing is more fun anyway! good luck all.

Hyper backgammon and other quick games over in less than 20 or so moves becoming very popular in the next few weeks!
:o) happy gaming!

gambler104: I guess there's no harm in revealing it now. It's nothing so exotic as some of the guesses I've seen. Just pick one post each hour and read it on every board.

sidpatel: good luck to everyone. I agree. I hope to be in the top five although the top ten will still be nice. Top ten is my goal and then everything else is just icing on the cake.

playBunny: thankyou. good luck to you too. i only hope to be in top 5 people. 1 year membership is great enough :)

KotDB: just curious. what was the secret?

Lol. Good luck Sid. :-))

I'm glad to see that the points for reading have been replaced by points for winning. Now I can stop "reading"! And I agree that it's much better to reward people for playing than for lurking.

Of course I can't make enough moves to stand a chance under this new system, but that's all right. Good luck to all honest competitors.

sidpatel: absolutely... especially considering the one win limit against an opponent.

Matarilevich: -5000 for users who dare to mention the autopass feature here.

the good thing is that a win only gets you 2 points so that shouldnt make much difference anyway and make it worthless to exploit that since its easier to just make 2 moves . this is great. i am energized now

gambler104: Right.

I propose negative points!
For example:
-100 for users who don´t move in position with only one legal move
-500 for users who don´t move in a loss position
-1000 for users who don´t move in a loss position and with only one legal move

still the same number of points as a simple game right?

Fencer: excellent as usual.

sidpatel: Gambler means that we get credited for the wins since the competition started. It's so soon into it that they might not make much difference; I guess it depends how many points Fencer's going to award for a win. :-)

Matarilevich: Of course.

Fencer: I wasn't necessarily expecting it. Simply wondering. Thanks Fencer. And sidpatel, I was asking if wins would be counted from when the action started or just now.

Modify "board points" by "wins points" in the table of details!

gambler104: Haven't a clue, mate. ;-)

Fencer: God bless you and thankyou very very much

gambler104: You cannot expect miracles in such a short development time.

yuppee. what do you mean by retroactive?

The change is active.

playBunny: Are wins retroactive?

The board points have been wiped! :-D

The Badger: it must be early morning in your part of the world.

i believe that a nice person always gets his/her reward in the end ( not talking about this competition ) and i believe that no one is perfect in this world nor is the world itself but if you try to do the right thing , God will reward you. God bless fencer for his kindness.

What about not being allowed to score more board points than move points? This is a game site after all, so maybe that should be emphasised. The way it is at the moment, some people are able to rack up massive scores without actually playing many turns. Just a thought.

sidpatel: I agree. Fencer is a good person and he does a lot for his members (pawns included). And his niceness ironically had stirred up this debate. Regardless of how this situation turns out, I won't be too upset since Fencer had no obligation to offer any of those prizes. I guess that when someone does so well for so long, you expect him to be perfect. Hopefully, this will all turn out ok. Thanks Fencer.

even i am stuck in a tournament where im done with moves but it will take weeks to find out if i advance to next round or not.

i feel sorry for fencer because he went out and offerred free membership prizes and i think that is very very noble of him and instead of being praised for it its become a headache but it cant be helped since there are always people in the world who take advantage of every situation first chance they get.

playBunny: I agree. I am in a tournament where I am waiting for a round to finish so I would probably not get win points. If you want to do that in the future, I think it might be ok, but it would probably need to wait a few months so all or most pawns have a fair shot. It's already a little unfair with the 2-1 point ratio. But I can accept that since I can move more often. But to double that advantage might be too much.

Zero win-points for me then as Pawns only have one tournament and I'm playing the slowest player on BK! LOL

sidpatel: I don't agree with that since there is no real advantage to only count wins in tournaments. It might be a way to reduce the loopholes, but max number of wins against an opponent a day is pretty effective. You aren't going to find too many people purposely resigning to help others. So you would limit it to a few players, and Fencer could check the top point accounts and make sure that all or most of their wins(since an opponent can resign for no apparent reason) are ligit. If Fencer did that (basically checking to make sure that one opponent did not resign multiple games against the same opponent), you might not even have to have the win restriction.

sidpatel: LOL

playBunny: you assume too much bunny ...lol

gambler104, sidpatel: Indeed. Well, I'm rather relying on what I think Fencer means when he says "New users: 50 for each unique user who registers on BrainKing through your referral link". I'm assuming that "unique" means not originating from the same IP address. (But with shared-IP networks that could be tricky to police.

here are 2 suggestions. if there have to be 4 ways to get points then leave the new account points but put a max of 5 or 10 new users at most and also all those accounts should remain active for a week to be counted. secondly points for wins should be restricted to tournaments only. since pawns and rooks are in defferent categories it wouldnt affect anyone in the competition even if the points for rooks would rise dramatically versus pawns who can only join 1 tour at a time.

pauloaguia: Ah, thank you, that's interesting. I can't try it as I've got no unread posts anywhere. ;o)

But it means that there's a natural limit to the exploitation. One thing that could be done is to level the playing field on the boards points by setting everyone to all-read on every board. No more (4901 new) on any board. It's not as if people will be missing out on boards that they've never read anyway. (For legitimate board readers, those with, say, 10 or fewer new posts on a board, those particular boards wouldn't be flagged as all-read.)

playBunny: that is true playbunny if you go and get 20 new REAL people to join the site. if you open 20 new accounts yourself posing as 20 different people just for the points , how is that beneficial to fencer or the site?>

playBunny: I agree. But people can create dummy accounts themselves and credit their action points account with a referral. I'm not saying to stop it, I am just saying that Fencer would have to be very careful if multiple accounts were created all referred by the same user.

gambler104: I could perhaps go to a couple of other sites where I'm known and liked and get 20 or so new accounts in one go. But the point of Fencer encouraging new users is so that people will come and play - and stay. And who kows how many of that 20 would do just that! That's a win for Fencer and the competition points should be allowed.

sidpatel: Fencer wants four options so he needs a replacement. And I am not too fond of referring pawns since that could open up loopholes. Fencer will just have to be extra careful although it might not matter. It is only 50 points which is almost too small to make a difference in the long run. If a person get 10 new users all of a sudden, I think Fencer would have to be awfully cautious.

well there are always loop holes no matter what we do but i personally think that the best thing to do is remove points for boards and dont add points for winning because then there will be some sort of illegal way to counter the limits and again the same problems ... also i think we should remove points for reffering a new registered user (pawn only) leave the points for referring a paid user. this is only a suuggestion but i think the best one to avoid loopholes (not calling it cheating anymore) but i do like big bad wolfs ideas in general chat but only if they can be done in a way that there are no backdorrs to get points and i dont think that is possible to be honest no matter how strict the rules are .

anyone in the top 50 cannot get points from each other from playing games just for points , two players can easily boost points if they stick together to stay at the top of the list .

BIG BAD WOLF: Yes, it will be counted only once a day with the same opponent.