Vacation system update

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
Note to all non-subs:

Do NOT play against subscribers. 😠

Go and give yourself fellatio...

Originally posted by DoctorDara
Sounds awesome, thanks. Non-subscribers stop whining. All us subscribers and the advertisers ultimately pay for your free games anyways. This is an awesome site and I hope Russ is making a profit on it. He throughly deserves to.

Here here

Originally posted by adramforall
The two tier system has always been here 🙂

Subscribe and get unlimited games

Dont subscribe and limited to 6.

True, true, although that kinda has an understandable explanation that RHP want to keep a reasonable limit on site traffic and keep the advertising-buck-to-non-sub ratio at a workable level.
Not allowing subs a holiday flag is a liiiittle more random.
Gotta run, there's a temp here claiming they're entitled to use the office sugar.

Originally posted by Leonard Leader
Go and give yourself fellatio...

I can't hear you - you're a subscriber.



edit; btw, post alerted.

If I happen to get back sooner than I had originally expected to, can I take back the vacation days that I did not use?

Originally posted by dundee24
Question:
If I post a vacation say March 20th thru the 23rd that's my say 3 day's per month Then RUSS will on the 24th day will my time start to tick?
dundee24

That's 4 days.

I think it would be good if the non-subs could still use the flag but in the same way it works at the moment (IE for the non sub it would not affect the timeout). That way at least a non-sub could have some way of notifying their opponents that they are away for a while.

I agree with mrmist(moo). That's the reason I came to the forums now. It would be good for non-subs to be able to put up a flag too, but maybe one that looks different. I mean, we go on vacation too. Some people want to be subs, but either can't afford it, or like me, not allowed (politics...lol joking, my parents wont let me...). We also need a way to notifiy people that we may be on vacation. It doesn't need to actually stop timebank/timeout, just notifiy people. A lot of non-subs would abuse the feature otherwise.

Other than that, great update. I love how you can actually talk to RHP staff, or the RHP "Creator" as someone called you, Russ, before.

Originally posted by Leonard Leader
Here here

That should of course be 'Hear! hear!'....

(Pedantry Ed.)

Tactical Timeout Protection
------------------------------

I have spotted a loophole. Considering that the vacation settings would only protect from a timeout, but still cause your regular time settings to still diminish. It wouldn't be economical to set the vacation time to be literally the entire time you are on vacation. Just set them for when you would be at risk of timeout.

For example, you are about to go on 14 days vacation. You could set the vacation time to 15 days (to give an extra day to make your moves). Doing it this way would be a waste though.

What would be better is that just before your vacation, you check how much time you have left on all of your games. If you find that a game that is likely to timeout 10 days after the start of your vacation, you set your actual vacation settings to start when that game is likely to timeout. Set the end to be the day after you come back. This will mean that you effectively only have set 5 days vacation and saved yourself 10 days.

You can then stretch your vacation times to be far longer than 36 days per year then. 😉

This will obviously mean that if you have a game that will time out in 10 days, and you go on a very short vacation within this time. It would be a complete waste to set any vacation time at all.

Some chess-hellnaught timed me out whilst I was on vacation and I had him right up the alley facing in a non-useful direction, chess speaking that is. Good new thing.

Originally posted by Russ
This is one of these features that some dislike (and are very vocal about it), but the majority want. We receive plenty of feedback asking about it. Also, we did a consultation [voteid]13[/voteid] at the tail end of last summer.

I can't believe you are going ahead with this idiocy.

There were a number of excellent suggestions posted in the Site Ideas forum to enhance the vacation/timeout system which were totally ignored and never put up for consultation.

Vote 13 was not a vote at all. It was a loaded question straight out of the Marketing 101 Manual on how not to conduct a survey. There could only have been one outcome of that so-called "vote".

What now is the point of the timeout/timebank system? Overkill.

RHP will grind to an excruciating crawl.

It will not be long before the complaints become a flood and the clamouring and acrimony rise to levels that force you to remove this superfluous appendage

Originally posted by Gatecrasher
I can't believe you are going ahead with this idiocy.

There were a number of excellent suggestions posted in the Site Ideas forum to enhance the vacation/timeout system which were totally ignored and never put up for consultation.

Vote 13 was not a vote at all. It was a loaded question straight out of the Marketing 101 Manual on how not to conduct ...[text shortened]... e clamouring and acrimony rise to levels that force you to remove this superfluous appendage

Slowed down even further by exploiting the loophole I mentioned above. 😲

I therefore think that 36 days is way too long.

Abuse.

This might cause some dragged out, cheap, games if it is abused. It is a GREAT idea, if members use it honestly. But I'm sure people are definitly going to abuse it at some point.

Unless every person on this site is a dear angel, then I say drop it to around 14 days. That would cover a summer vacation and would compromise with the unhappy.

Plus, if you know you're going on a vacation in a few months, then plan games w/ longer time and notify your clan leader. That's what I do. Just play safe timed games, be smart.

Thanks for this good idea, but it needs tweaked to modify some to obvious abuse.

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
If this terrible idea has to be introduced and non subs can't use it , subscribers should not be able to use it against non-subs as that would be giving them an unfair advantage. A non sub is not in a position to wait 36 days for 1 game [or more probably] hence they will resign them giving false results.

To he who said to subscribe: that would onl ...[text shortened]... a 36 day walkabout and coming back to 450 of them resigned - oh look another 2000 rated player.

lol, now I know how to get that 2000+ rating 😉

You could be even sneakier and get 5 friends (all subscribers of course) together and start loads of 1/0 games against the same non subs and then all stick up your flags saying on holiday for 18 days. You then notice that all the people you are playing stop visiting site as they cannot move, you then make a move and the following day time the dirty non subs out 😉

Wow, any subs want to be my friend?

People should manage their game load better by using longer time control options.

Vacation time is just a joke 🙄😲🙄