My new hex13 opponent in the infinity tournament is someone who has never made a move in a hex game, who registered for this site in April and who last logged in in April, and has been consistently timing out in the infinity tournament ever since. 7 completed hex games, no moves, two in progress, no moves.
I thought I read something here recently of the form "if players keep timing out then after a while we remove them". Note that this guy has won 50% of their games because their opponents are timing out too! Am I mistaken about this "the system should unsubscribe inactive players from tournaments" idea? I can't remember where I saw it...
But it seems to me like all players that time out all games are removed eventually. So I think either there is some reluctant or broken system, or Richard is removing players manually
Another old bug that still has not been fixed is that while one is supposed to have 20 vacation days, the actual number is 21 (the counter goes down to -1).
I think I posted the 'remove from tournament when time out (with possibility to re- sign-in)' already five times during the 14 years I play here.
It is needed in championships (bottom groups are filled with long time left players), and infinity. I have now 111 games of which some 30 no opponent moved. (SYSTEM is one of them)
once you are entered into a tournament your name is cleared from entering the next one
another safe guard is players (at the lowest membership level) are prevented from entering tournaments if they have 15 messages (I assume only system produced one's) undeleted
It would appear to me that many of these players might be just preoccupied with other games at the moment, or perhaps forgot to un-register from the championship and are not sure about whether to play or not. Or maybe they left the site and the site has no magical way of knowing whether they are returning or not.
Either way, my advice is this: if you don't like that, then advance to the next championship level and get more serious opponents who will more than gladly play against you. ;)
To me the easiest way is to remove from the tournaments any player who has not logged-in for more than 1 month after his last vacation day.
No need to remove the account or anything, similar. I left the site from 2003 to 2012 and from 2014 to 2017, but I'm happy that my account has still all the information. Indeed if the player actually decides to come back, he will be happy that his elo rating was not squandered in his absence.
Presently waiting for the last 2 hours before time-out in tournament LOA game against Eurogomoku
S/he has timed out in hundreds of games in multiple tournaments.
There should be a limit to the number of TOs (5 perhaps), after which that user should be ousted from all tournament games for a "cooling off" period, a month or two perhaps.
Little Golem