Originally Posted by H4rl3quin

I know there are already 8,434,976,685,012 threads about quitters ans /speccers

Originally Posted by H4rl3quin

but this is partly a question, and partly a suggestion

Originally Posted by H4rl3quin

even though it caounts as a win

Originally Posted by H4rl3quin

And i know this has come up before thousands of times, but there really needs to be a proper blacklist of frequent quitters, and a tag, kinda like the mod/oldschooler tags, which shows up as a symbol next to their name ingame so everyone knows how much they phail.

Originally Posted by H4rl3quin

The other thing that really pisses me off is ppl who open 2-3 toribash windows and wait in multiple servers for their turn. This means that everyone else has to wait longer to play. If everyone did this, the the queues everywhere would be stupidly long. Can this be fixed somehow, so ppl can only connect to one server at a time ?

Originally Posted by McCrea

Hi H4rl3quin. In your spirit, I'd like to rant about the "phailure to spell correctly."

I want to chime in about disconnects, because it's a common issue for all online games. I've been active at FICS for 10 years, which is chess. Nobody (at least <10% certainly) plays long rated chess games there because nobody wants to waste an hour or two creating a masterpiece that will never be satisfactorily completed. At FICS, they have an nice system which has evolved for two decades.

First of all, if you want customers (whether paying or not), an organization will not prevent any but the worst behaved from playing. They tag people as an "abuser" for whatever violation, and will temporarily ban people for more severe breeches. But disconnectors are still allowed to play -- it's up to the opponents to ensure their account variable includes not playing abusers. The fact is, the only reason FICS adminstrates disconnectors at all, in my experience, is because they care about the validity of the rating pool. They do care about the serious players feelings, but that's actually trival. If users can't complain bout disconnecting, then they'll still complain about sandbagging. If they can't complain about sandbagging, They'll complain about the language. Or the kibitzers. Or the team collusion. The list is endless.

Secondly, You need a staff to administrate. I understand that Toribash is still a one man operation. At this stage, I imagine he has higher priorities than administratively hearing online behavior issues. Someone needs to judge each complaint, because many complaints will not be valid. (When we get really upset about all these disconnectors, it common that the next thing we immediately report the next person that does so -- and it's been made clear to me a couple times over the years that I've filed complaints about unpreventable circumstances.) I'm just saying that an automated system that doesn't have to be humanly administrated is a bad idea. Until Toribash has a staff, I would vote for many other features before ever seriously consider disconnection.

Third, as implied, there's nothing that can be done about it yet. Want to ban "McCrea"? I'll be back as RobMcCrea. Oh wait, you banned my variable IP block? You just banned everyone in my town with cable. Want to ban my MAC address, that's no prob, I've got a drawer full of NICs.

I would like to offer my sympathy, but all I can offer is: just be glad you're not playing chess where it takes two hours to get an interesting battle going. I love high level chess, but I haven't played anything but speed chess in maybe 5 years because of the nature of the Internet. We all get furious with wasted time and effort. But that is the online world for every case I know of. Again, FICS has the best implementation I've seen. (Maybe their commercial competitor is better, who based their system directly on FICS', so I guess I should say best free system.)

Originally Posted by McCrea

About the second issue: I agree with queue abuse being a potential problem, although I don't think it's a huge issue -- if it's to their advantage, then the rest of us will just have to do it too. Perhaps I lack the experience, though, I'm sure you've been around longer than I have.

Originally Posted by McCrea

Actually, I would propose a different system than queuing, such as an automated-acceptance match based system with a manual option, used by most two player game servers: Chess, backgammon, whatever, whether FICS, Yahoo, Chessmaster, or whatever. Player posts a seek: perhaps judo mod, 45-60 frame interval, 300-600 frame limit, blue belt or higher, no DQ, and as many other variable as possible.

Originally Posted by McCrea

Anyway, cya online. Try not to let THEM bother you. One of THEM told me to type "/special" when I was next in line. Yep, I'd cripple him if I could, but I can't so I'll just be happy with life anyway. Oh, the spambots too. Log on, ptich your website, logout. Forget about em.

Originally Posted by McCrea

Actually, I would propose a different system than queuing, such as an automated-acceptance match based system with a manual option, used by most two player game servers: Chess, backgammon, whatever, whether FICS, Yahoo, Chessmaster, or whatever. Player posts a seek: perhaps judo mod, 45-60 frame interval, 300-600 frame limit, blue belt or higher, no DQ, and as many other variable as possible.