Paying Members don't lose on Time

When we paying members are about to lose on time, our games are automatically paused and our status is automatically set to Vacation. I originally thought that was a cool idea but I changed my mind afterwards. I am not the complaining type of person, but I want to voice my opinion on this matter. If paying members cannot lose on time, What's the point of setting time limits to move? Also, it is annoying when your opponent is about to lose on time, then he gets automatically put on vacation and you have to wait forever to continue the game. One of my tournament games started on September and is still going on (I have a clear won position and my opponent will not resign, but that's another story). I hope Chess.com eliminate that feature, I miss the old days when everyone lost on time and nobody had an advantage.

Winning on time because your opponent had a busy schedule and couldn't make it for their move isn't particularly satisfying. A paying member loses vacation time every time they overstep the time limits and use their timeout protection. If this is a common occurance, the member will run out of time.

Hi kenytiger. I agree 100% - I used to think this seemed reasonable but now I'm dead against it and would like a poll of chess.com users to see who agrees. Check out the recent thread Please cut down vacation time and contribute your thoughts there.

I guess correspondance chess is not a place where to be impatient.

Live chess allows to have a chess game within 5 minutes.

In correspondance chess a game may take somrething like a month and this is ok.

Some people have a life out of chess and sometime we simply cannot access internet for a whole week, when being in business trip or vacation for exemple.

Furthermore some people do not even have internet at home.

I guess tolerance and understanding is the key to having a good atmosphere here.

I have often been saved by the auto vacation time feature when I don't have time to make a move due to school homework.  Please keep it.

This is a very handy feature and I want to keep it.  It's especially useful to me being a student because sometimes I get crazy busy and I can only log on briefly and irregularly becausee I need to focus on other things.  I know it might be annoying for some people, but sometimes people just need to deal with it.  It's just online chess for goodness sakes. It's a nice privelage for paying members to have.  Paying members help make sure this site continues to exist for those who aren't paying. 

GotGoose, we have a variety of time limits here from one day to 14 days per move to acommodate any type of schedule. I am personally comfortable playing one day per move, I understand everyone is different if someone prefers to play 14 days per move, that's fine and dandy, not me, too long for my taste.

Payet_Alexandre if you join a tournament with a 3-day per move rule, as your opponent I expect you to stick to that time limit. If you cannot access a computer for a week, then do not join the tournament, period. Most likely the whole tournament will get delayed just for one person, I would think that tolerance and understanding goes out the window in that case. 

I don't mind this in and of itself, it's a great feature to entice people into purchasing memberships, but I wish there was a more indicative statistic than timeout percentage (which doesn't reflect these "time-outs") to give an idea how frequently a user falls back on their timout protection.

I think we get too much vacation time and that - because of this - some people abuse it. So I would be happy to have the vactation time reduced.

We get what, 30 days vacation time? On another site that I play chess on, the free members get 40 days vacation, and the paying members get even more time. kenytiger: There are often unavoidable reasons for being unable to access a computer for a week, for example sickness, or sickness in family, or the computer you thought you'd be able to use doesn't work. Yes, I am a paying member, so I probably have a vested interest in this, but I'm not going to have daily computer access like I'm used to this week and it is nice to know that I don't have to worry about timing out of a game.

If you're going to be away on business for a week then use the standard vacation time with a note saying when you'll be back. If you're going to be away on business for 5 or 6 separate weeks then you need to consider whether it is fair on everyone else to enter a tournament - issue a number of individual challenges instead. Very few people mind individual games going on for a while, it's just when tournaments are held up and there are frequent auto-vacations holding it up for maybe 12-96 people. A few people use it as a way to maintain more games than they can handle.

Scrap it!

Its simply not true that paying members cannot lose on time. I recently lost a lot of games on time and I am a paying member.

ugh. this is one of those issues where you just can't make everyone happy :(

I need to no that i have that auto time out. I often randomly with out any plans just crash at a friends house. I don't wanna end up losing on time cuz life just happened. I havn't auto timed out once so far but its still nice to no its there.

Well sometimes I just don't feel like playing(Headache or other stuff) and I go into vacation. It is good for some people who have 1000 game and need to go on vacation. They'll never do all of them.

Why play 1,000 games?  Why?

Whatever reason can be cited for this can also be met in half the number of games.

I still think the solution to many of these issues is to cap the ma number of games a player can have at any time.  This restriction would prevent them from being overloaded with games and encourage somewhat faster play.

The reason I've suggested leaving the functionality as is and augmenting it with some additional statistics is that it doesn't change the timeout protection functionality at all and as a result is unlikely to ruffle any feathers among its users (In fact, I'm sure most users wouldn't even notice).  What it does do, however, is provide a mechanism by which seeks and tournaments can be constrained to users who are under a particular threshold with respect to reliance on timeout protection.  I believe having control over who is allowed to accept your seeks or into your tournaments based on such a statistic would address virtually all of the concerns I've seen raised with respect to this.

I'd floated a straw-man for what such a statistic might look like some time ago in this thread: http://www.chess.com/forum/view/community/singificance-of-timeout--diluted

Thoughts?

Give users a vote on the front page.

What do you think of the automatic timeout protection feature?

It gives me peace of mind. Keep it!

It holds up tournaments. Scrap it!

I didn't know it existed. What is it?

Auto-vacation is a great feature!

True story -- I was playing not long ago with a very good player (2300+) who lost my game and all his other games because he lives on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere and has a lousy internet connection.  No way he could control that.

Auto-vacation is an excellent reason to upgrade your membership and support the site!

The current rules are fine.  It's possible to lose on time if you're a premium member by taking too much vacation. 

Correspondence chess is slow & that's part of its appeal - in the old days of postcards & snail mail it took many months, sometimes years, to complete tournaments.  I just can't see the problem.