I agree with Kicorse. Don't Penalize players on the internet for activities in real life and vice versa.
Just discourage it by making it clear that if somebody delays an entire season for no good reason, they won't be regarded too well for that.

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Maximum of 2 or 3 vacations per season would seem to solve the problems of chained vacations. Long banked times and longer boot times could prolong the season by themselves. I think a 4 day boot will add a lot more time than banning vacations, that can add a day to each turn if someone wants to take their time. Long banked times can be used for every game and add up to more than 2-3 vacations.

Edited 10/2/2019 18:10:33

Two thoughts. I don't see the reason for increasing the time per turn to 4 days. 3 days is standard and works for most situations. I think 4 day boot might actually slow things down. The banked boot should be plenty (15 days is a long time).

So ban long vacations then. Make a rule that states that a >N day vacation (maybe N=30) equals a loss.

Secondly, people should recognize that while you may think that's a superior solution, it also requires more coding work than simply not allowing vacation which requires none.

In addition, 15 days of banked time (+ 3 days if you had your orders set before you go on "vacation" and use auto-commit to commit them) is essentially the equivalent of taking consecutive vacations. This is very nearly the equivalent of taking a full 20 days of vacation (which most people only do due to the broken nature of vacations in the first place which encourages everyone to take a full 10 day vacation every time they use one). If you are worried about the lack of vacations, just make sure not to unnecessarily eat into your banked time and you will almost certainly be fine.

Edited 10/2/2019 18:16:51

Death to Beren!!!

Also, penalizing an n-day vacation can still be abused; just take one turn when you meet the limit and set another one.

Farah, that's why I proposed max number vacations per season. Banked time can be used every game as well so could potentially be a lot more than vacations.

I will remove the 4 days and reset to 3 days. I thought the 5 day span would make things more easy than 3 as games might pile up.

As far as other concerns, I'll look into them when I get the chance.

I will say one thing. I really wish you would've expressed your opinions in the improvements forum rather than waiting until decisions were made. I took everything that was said into consideration and if you didn't voice your opinion earlier, then I had no information on your opinions to begin with.

Feel free to correct me if i'm wrong anywhere.

Vacations are pretty helpful for people who can lose internet due to travel and whatnot. Losing it really sucks for them. But why on earth should they be holding up the rest of the league?

"Even if this is the case, and it hasn't been in the past, the finishing point of the game is undefined. You join a game in March, and then your vacation in June gets you booted due to your opponent's slow play." (kicorse)

Unfortunately, WL takes a lot longer to play than most games. Isn't this kind of case only possible because people can start chaining their vacations together? I did a cursory look at the 3v3 EU games. The longest I found took 14 turns. I'm aware there could be other games with substitutions, but that isn't important. 14 turns, with 3 days apiece, is already 42 days/1.5 mos. as an expected "maximum" time to completion. If your schedule is variable, that already sounds rough. But if one guy can chain a bunch of vacations together, then that 42 days becomes 92, IF nobody else adds their own vacations into the mix.

Why the hell should anyone/everyone else add 50 internet days into their schedule, if the vacationer isn't even fully available for the original 42?

Doesn't it penalize "faster" (or normal speed) players when others get to play much slower? If we are going to argue about fairness, how do we justify holding up the rest of the competition because someone is afk?

Banked time allows greater control over the timeframes, both for players and organizers. Organizers can set the effective vacation time/game themselves. People who take vacations outside of CL aren't effectively penalized. Players can choose to spend some extra time on specific games rather than hitting a pause button on everything. You lose the autocommit, but I think the flexibility regained helps immensely. You can spend a banked day instead of a vacation while waiting to see your teammate's orders or whatnot. The biggest downside imo, is that you can wait out the banked time on each individual game, separately, but this isn't functionally that different from the vacations. Except instead of holding up everyone at once, you slow the game down vs specific people.

I can't help but think that it's cyclical. The vacations required by slow games are often caused by vacations. I'm all for giving people wiggle room in their schedule, but not if it screws the rest of the competition, or enables an avalanche of scheduling conflicts. If it was anywhere else, we would never wait for the afk guy.

If vacations are required somehow, then I would agree with kicorse. Penalizing the vacation chainers would make things much more fair, and if one of their opponents boots later, it won't matter. This doesn't solve the waiting problems, but at least it fairs up the immediate game results. Theoretically, people in upcoming games could ask to be substituted. I feel like this is a good enough bandaid solution.

Disregard means nothing. Game results and bans are what people care about.

edit: about the 3 to 4 days thing. 3 days is normally fine, people only need the extra day for specific turns.
2nd edit: Yah, sorry Cowboy. :(

Edited 10/2/2019 18:57:07

@cowboy

that is the nature of public debates and decision making

Edited 10/2/2019 18:56:30

Of course it's the nature, but how am I supposed to read everyone's mind.

It's damned if you do, damned if you don't

Edited 10/2/2019 19:11:33

"how am I supposed to read everyone's mind."

you could always have a hard time limit for suggestions. Maybe a 3 day boot timer on thread replies, with vacations honored. :D

in all seriousness, i empathize with your frustration, even as I contribute to it. Sry .-.

edit - It seems like there are people who are slow to join CL games? That's probably a related but separate problem

Edited 10/2/2019 19:26:25

If you do not permit vacations, you have to permit Clans to share accounts.
My 2 cents

Wouldn't this both alleviate time constraints and enable more cheating?

@Cowboy, you do the best you can with the information you're given so I think you're doing just fine running things. I didn't speak my thoughts earlier, and that's on me. For the record 3 day boot + 15 banked = 21 days to take 2 turns which is not terrible. It prevents the whole 50 days to take a turn while letting people do RL things.

Sticky points I can think of with that system:

1) If the goal is to speed things up, adding 15 days per game may not actually do that if people use their full time whether they would vacation or not. Could actually slow CL down.

2) In team games if multiple players have RL things going on at different times it is only enough time for one of them to vacation.

If the goal is to speed things up, adding 15 days per game may not actually do that if people use their full time whether they would vacation or not. Could actually slow CL down.

Let's try to maximize our stalling. With the system of our last season, we can have three players in a 3v3 take 70 days of vacation, giving 210 days of vacation. With no vacations honoured, but 15 days of boot time per player, we could stall for a maximum of 45 days.
It might not speed up the league a ton (although i think it will speed it up significantly), but it will get rid of the excessive game-durations that we've seen over the past few seasons.

For the record 3 day boot + 15 banked = 21 days to take 2 turns which is not terrible.

It's also:
24 days to take 3 turns
27 days to take 4 turns
30 days to take 5 turns
etc.
See what's happening to the average? :p

Edited 10/2/2019 19:58:18

I will say one thing. I really wish you would've expressed your opinions in the improvements forum rather than waiting until decisions were made. I took everything that was said into consideration and if you didn't voice your opinion earlier, then I had no information on your opinions to begin with.

Sorry Cowboy. You are right, and you're a star for organising it. I was unaware of the other thread until today, because I only occasionally visit the forums.

The various criticisms of Glass's improvement on my suggestion would be easily dealt with. E.g. it's no coding issue at all if, on the very rare occasion that someone breaks the rule, you manually change the result to a loss for that team.

That being said, I am persuaded that the banking of time is almost as good if you start with a 15 day bank. Complaints about opponent-play-speed will probably get louder, because at least you had to take vacations in all games or none. But hey... there'll always be something to whine about.

So provided you start with 15 days banked, I withdraw my objection, your honour.

Edited 10/2/2019 20:26:34

You would start with the banked time. Im just worried about 15+ days on team games as 45 days of total banked time in a 3v3 is a bad idea. I could increase 2v2s though. My main fear is 3v3, because I know how much people end up stalling them.

It's also:
24 days to take 3 turns
27 days to take 4 turns
30 days to take 5 turns
etc.
See what's happening to the average? :p

Yeah, and if we're playing one game you're correct. However, say I'm playing 3 1v1 games. I can delay each game by 15 days, and (if I take my turns once every 3 days this would be 5 turns and 10 turns respectively). I can make 3 1v1 games take a minimum of 45 days. Say the game generation is such so that even playing 6 opponents on a 1v1 slot I can delay 15 days per game staggered. I now across 6 games have delayed 120 days. If you take the idea of capping vacations used at 3, then I can delay 30 total days which is 4x less.

Say I'm on a 3v3 team and we have 3 vacations each. We can delay the game a total of 90 days or less than my super-stally 1v1 player.

Long story short, I think long bank times is equivalent to granting vacations but has its own drawbacks. It's not a bad solution per se, just capping vacation number seems better. Just one player's opinion and a relatively new one at that.