New here-- just curious:

Is it cool to have 20+ games in vacation mode, many unmoved for 6+ days, and still be starting new games? (just to put them in vacation mode?). It seems rude to me. But like I said: I'm new here.

As a premium member, it doesn't bother me as much - I can just start more games - but I feel your pain as a standard member.  It does seem inconsiderate.  I try and get my game count down before taking a week vacation, but that's not always possible.  For some 20 open games is light.

I didn't think you could start new games if you were on vacation.  

I am fairly sure there was a discussion around that because that does seem a bit rude to me also.

Meh... Start a game, hope it fills once your back - if your doing that, your probably taking your turns anyways... 

Herderthing, if you really want to get a game going and it's being stalled by vacations, start another one, invite people you know will play at the speed you like - or let the general populace join and hope for the best. 

You can also mark terrible vacation ettiquiters as a enemy (as an option) and they wont be able to join your games. 

I concur with Amidon...don't think you are allowed to start a game when in vacation mode.  In fact, I'm not even sure you can join a game when in vacation mode.

Instead of doing the dozen other things at work I should be doing I searched the forum -

http://www.wargear.net/forum/showthread/3633/Cant_end_vacation_early

This is a meandering conversation, but it does relate that you can start and join games while on vacation.

But I also found the player that I think the OP is referring to.   

http://www.wargear.net/players/info/AfroDaby/Games%20List?viewselector=All&sortfield=games.createstamp&sortorder=desc&filter=d4cfe56774f3f99ea465920d927802da

Who I don't see has started any games while on vacation, and the last two he joined were tourney where we have little control over when they start.

The ability to start and stop games during vacations is almost mute - it's the games that are started before vacations that are the worst culprits because these games are stalled for the duration of the vacation.  I think the issue has a tendency to be more noticeable to the standard member, who finding one or two players on vacations in their games, where perhaps one of those players is in three games, and all of a sudden almost half of your 10 game limit is stalled.

I try to be conscientious when I know I'm going on a 1 or 2 week vacation by cutting down on my games, but for it to have any significant influence on my game count, I usually have to stop joining games 3 or even 4 weeks in advance.   I doubt most people even think to do this, and who can blame them?

There is no good solution that I can think of to this problem.

Personally, I'm about to go on a ten day vacation.  I've already set the dates in the system.  I still intend to take turns while I'm out (I mean---gotta get your fix, right!?) I just don't want to be forced to take the turns within a specific amount of time while i'm out.  It is vacation after all.

Makes sense.

Right - it turns out I'm usually able to take turns when I'm traveling, but I go on vacation just to be sure.

It's when people don't take a turn on a board for a week or two (on a 1-day game clock) that it becomes annoying.  I mean, you should at least be able to find wi-fi in most parts of the world unless you're hiking above the arctic circle or something like that.  I dunno - too bad you can't appoint someone to make a proxy move for you.

Next time you're above the arctic circle, send me your password. I'll handle it.

ratsy wrote:

Meh... Start a game, hope it fills once your back - if your doing that, your probably taking your turns anyways... 

Herderthing, if you really want to get a game going and it's being stalled by vacations, start another one, invite people you know will play at the speed you like - or let the general populace join and hope for the best. 

You can also mark terrible vacation ettiquiters as a enemy (as an option) and they wont be able to join your games. 

The enemy thing doesn't work against premium members I think.  Could be wrong.

FYI - http://blog.dictionary.com/moot-point-vs-mute-point/

Andernut wrote:

ratsy wrote:

Meh... Start a game, hope it fills once your back - if your doing that, your probably taking your turns anyways... 

Herderthing, if you really want to get a game going and it's being stalled by vacations, start another one, invite people you know will play at the speed you like - or let the general populace join and hope for the best. 

You can also mark terrible vacation ettiquiters as a enemy (as an option) and they wont be able to join your games. 

The enemy thing doesn't work against premium members I think.  Could be wrong.

Could be that you are very much right!

I have been on both sides of this.  When as a standard member getting your games caught up in vacation can be mildly annoying and usually it is the same player or players who have stalled your games because usually players orbit around the same games from time to time.  Given that standard is limited to 10 games if enough get caught up this way it can truly be a bummer. 

That said, there are some ways to extend your games list again!  This would be to join your maximum allotment of ten tournaments as well!  There are some tricks to this as well though to keep them flowing.  1) Set your tournament games to unlimited. 2) Always join round robin tournaments so that unlimited actually works. 3) Join as small a game size as you are comfortable with.  If you like 1v1's perfect, your games list will be flooded with fun games to play, if you don't like 1v1's then perhaps 3 player or 4 player but they'll be slower to launch because so few players have set their tournament setting to above the 1 game default.... Tom, please set the default to 3, it just makes more sense to set it in the middle of the spectrum then at one end of it so that players may adjust from there! 4) If you have finished all your games in a tournament and are definitely not in a position to win it but are trapped there by slow-pokes playing out their remaining game(s), surrender it so that you can join a new one!  Tom, if you could adjust it to open up the option to join a new tournament once you as a player have finished your games rather then when the tournament is finished by all players, that would be a nice tweak as well!

The only problem with this recipe is that one is still at the whim of premium members to make the tournaments and they might not be making the ones you're interested in or that fit the ingredients specified above to extend your games list.  I don't know if Tom wants to open up tournament creation to include standard members and I'm not going to even ask for that as it would be a significant change compared to the two tweaks I listed previously, so it is how it is...

Once you have found a number of tournaments to join you should feel much less annoyed because you should have a more continuous supply of games starting even if some are stuck by (a) vacationer(s).

What's that Ozy?  I didn't hear you.

Ozyman wrote:

FYI - http://blog.dictionary.com/moot-point-vs-mute-point/

If you're referring to my post - Yes, I knew the difference, so I don't know why I typed mute. Tested 'moot' to see if spell-check would re-name the word and it didn't.  Yet somehow, I will get over it, and my life will move on.

M57 wrote:

Ozyman wrote:

FYI - http://blog.dictionary.com/moot-point-vs-mute-point/

If you're referring to my post - Yes, I knew the difference, so I don't know why I typed mute. Tested 'moot' to see if spell-check would re-name the word and it didn't.  Yet somehow, I will get over it, and my life will move on.

no worries, I figured if you didn't know the difference you'd probably want to.  A lot of people don't, and even most that do, don't know that moot actually has two kind of contradictory meanings.  I can't think of too many other words that are like that (except increasingly "literally")

Yeah - that one literally makes me sick - Damn, got it wrong again!

;P

But you're right - It's the kind of thing that I would want to know, especially if I was consistently using a word or phrase incorrectly - so I appreciate the heads-up.

As an aside, and going even more OT - there's no doubt in my mind that spell-check has changed my life - I was a horrible speller in school - C's and D's riddled my report cards. But I do a lot of writing in my job - and there are people who actually thing I am a good writer. I'm convinced that never could have happened but for the timely advent of word processing and spell-check.  Remember, I'm an old man.

M57 wrote:

Yeah - that one literally makes me sick - Damn, got it wrong again!

;P

But you're right - It's the kind of thing that I would want to know, especially if I was consistently using a word or phrase incorrectly - so I appreciate the heads-up.

As an aside, and going even more OT - there's no doubt in my mind that spell-check has changed my life - I was a horrible speller in school - C's and D's riddled my report cards. But I do a lot of writing in my job - and there are people who actually thing I am a good writer. I'm convinced that never could have happened but for the timely advent of word processing and spell-check.  Remember, I'm an old man.

Given the content of the post... Nice move!