In response to feedback I've made some improvements to the vacation complaint. The main complaint that I've been responding to is that when you renew your annual membership, you're not immediately granted another 30 days vacation but instead have to wait till your vacation days expire after 365 days.

The new approach is as follows:

• Purchasing 3 month's premium membership gives you 10 days of vacation.
• Purchasing 1 year's premium membership gives you 30 days of vacation.
• Vacation days don't expire
• Vacation days are added immediately to your account when you purchase a membership.

Hopefully this will give everyone more flexibility in managing their vacations. In converting to the new system I've made sure that noone has lost any vacation days - i.e. if you had x days before, you will have at least x days now (and possibly more).

Nice.  I think this is less confusing for people. 

It's a good thing to be immediately granted another 30 days vacation when you renew your annual membership.

But there need to be a limit (not an insane one like the 100 points cap when calculating the GR, I mean).

Here, if I am a member for 12 years, and take no holidays, I would be allowed to take a year off !

Who would accept to wait that long ?

A 60 days limit would be fine to me. 

Yes, that probably makes more sense!

If you're like me and you like to take week-ends off fairly frequently, throw in a few 4-day week-ends in the summer and maybe a couple of 7+1 day recuperation vacations and you can burn through things fairly quickly. 3-month membership purchasers will end up with 40 days, what if we make it 40 days for annual memberships too?

I can easily burn through my vacation, and for the most part it shouldn't inconvenience others.  I take my turns multiple times daily but do like to take frequent week-ends off.

I wouldn't have an issue with someone who say, took every sunday off (52 days in a year) but someone taking 52 consecutive days off near the end of a game would be annoying (especially in a tournament setting).  Consecutive days is more of an issue than volume of days for me.

Andernut wrote:

3-month membership purchasers will end up with 40 days, what if we make it 40 days for annual memberships too?

that's a good point!

and then I'd be ok with a 2 year cap, hell most places these days are in a 2 years worth of vaca 'use it or lose it' mantra so they can cook the books better.

I'm not a fan of accruing days -- with 2 years accruing someone could put a tournament on hold for 2 months.

What if Premium members could take 1-day vacations for free? They could select one day when their clock 'stops.'  This would make a huge difference for players who don't move over weekends, but want to play in standard 2-day move games.

They would only be able to change that day once per billing cycle - or 4 times for a 1 year contract.  The standard system would be additional to that - and days wouldn't accrue.

That's a total of 52 + 30 = 82 per year (quite reasonable), but no one would be able to vacation for more than 35 days (1 month + 1 free day per week) at a time.

I actually wouldn't have a problem with extending the 1-day free vacations to Standard members (letting them change the day once per year). Personally, I don't get as much satisfaction from winning games because people miss their turns - I'll bet Standard members lose turns a lot more frequently on weekends.

the one day a week thing isn't useful to me.  If we are worried about extended vacation length, why not just limit that directly.  Limit players to two weeks per month.

Accruing some extra days is fine imo.  I like the changes very much.

It's not likely someone is going to save up 45+ days and then use them all in a row.

How many people have used all their 30 at once in the current set-up? 

Ha! You thought this was simple right tom?! We'll make it complicated for you and force you to try and solve for the 1% use case! 

Keep it simple.  It works as is IMO.

ditto both the last two posts...only one i've ever seen over a week or two was due to a wedding overseas. 

I think what we really need is for a bunch of the mathematicians to make this more complicated 

Yertle wrote:

Ha! You thought this was simple right tom?! We'll make it complicated for you and force you to try and solve for the 1% use case! 

Keep it simple.  It works as is IMO.

+1

Ozyman wrote:

Yertle wrote:

Ha! You thought this was simple right tom?! We'll make it complicated for you and force you to try and solve for the 1% use case! 

Keep it simple.  It works as is IMO.

+1

I don't think so. I truly believe it's an improvment to get your 30 days as soon as you renew. As I said above, as long as there is a reasonable limit, it would be better than the way it worked till now.  

I think the current solution is what works and is good and completes the request.  My comment was more around that we sometimes have a way of taking a recent improvement and being ready to balloon it back up to a significant "issue" that solves a very specific (and sometimes pretty unrealistic) use case.

As a different solution: Tom could limit how many days the actual vacation could last.

As in: even if you have 50 days accrued, you can only ever use X days in a row, and then you'd need to come back and play your turns?
If someone wants to take 2 months off, they're still allowed to, but they'd have to do it in X day chunks, and come back to play their turns at the end of each of those X days.

To be honest, though, I don't actually have a problem with people accruing the time or with using it all at once, even if it is just to piss people off.
There's plenty of ways to do it already, and people don't seem to be abusing it, so I'm one to lean towards making the rules the most beneficial to the masses, and let the pricks be pricks if they want to be.

I've gone for a 60 day accruement limit - I think that's a pretty good compromise.

I just noticed that if you end your Vacation for the current day then the day is not refunded however the log for the day is also removed/not shown.  Previously the current day would not count until the day actually passed, so I'm not sure if the issue is with the count or the log list or anything...so possibly just an fyi for if/when the question gets asked.

60 days would be good! That's long enough. And if you aren't going to be on the site for more than 3 months you probably won't join any games the weeks before you go!

BorisTheFrugal wrote:

As a different solution: Tom could limit how many days the actual vacation could last.

As in: even if you have 50 days accrued, you can only ever use X days in a row, and then you'd need to come back and play your turns?
If someone wants to take 2 months off, they're still allowed to, but they'd have to do it in X day chunks, and come back to play their turns at the end of each of those X days.

To be honest, though, I don't actually have a problem with people accruing the time or with using it all at once, even if it is just to piss people off.
There's plenty of ways to do it already, and people don't seem to be abusing it, so I'm one to lean towards making the rules the most beneficial to the masses, and let the pricks be pricks if they want to be.

+1

Also, consider this:

1 month is 30 days long (let's not argue semantics)

3 month is 12 weeks long

1 year is 12 months long

So, if you receive vacation equal to one-twelfth of a year (a month) for premium membership, then for 3 month membership shouldn't you received the same?  If there are 12 weeks in a 3 month period (again, semantics) shouldn't you receive 7 days?