Is there or can there be any mechanism to avoid opponents who lose correspondence/daily matches due to timeout?
I played 4 games and only one had a normal ending, the other 3 ended before the opening.
Thanks!
Correspondence game ending by time, how to avoid this?
This is more of an issue of lack of playerbase... The situation to me seems to be people learn of shogi, make an account and start up several games, and then either can't find enough games to stay interested, or simply aren't that interested to begin with and don't log back in, forfeiting all their games. I have the same issue, right now about 30% of my correspondence games end with abandonment.
When I make a game, I sometimes put 1550 rating as the lower limit, that way only people who have won at least one game can see the challenge (disadvantage of this is that new players won't see my game at all, possibly discouraging them even further...)
Also, if my opponent accepts the game and doesn't make their move after the first day or so, I'll often abort the game.
Until lishogi gets more popular, and there are more people to play with, there's not much else we can really do. To be fair to lishogi, I have the same 'game abandonment' issue on lichess, but to a lesser extent.
I've been wanting to keep some correspondence games going too, but they've all fizzled out quickly.
It's a shame too, because there doesn't appear to be any other decently popular site for correspondence shogi.
Personally, I just keep putting challenges out there, and if they abandon, they abandon. It's not like I can force them to play. Either way, I've had many a good game with the few who are consistent.
Yeah, I noticed the same thing in Lichess, I prefer to play matches in that mode on Chess dot com.
I also noticed, but in Lichess there is such a thing that the opponent thinks as much as he wants and you think as much as you want Here is such an icon ∞ And the game ends until the opponent checkmate.
"I also noticed, but in Lichess there is such a thing that the opponent thinks as much as he wants and you think as much as you want Here is such an icon ∞ And the game ends until the opponent checkmate."
That works until your opponent doesn't move at all. They have as much time as they need. They could not make a move for a year and there would be nothing you could do. Be careful what you wish for.
Eventually I'd like to improve how correspondence play works, but I am too busy...
I would suggest a time pause option ( Another idea from OGS - An English online Go server) to deal with it.
Both players could unilaterally pause the timer up to 5 times there and you or your opponent could unpause it at anytime reducing the quota of pausing available in case they pause without your agreement. So, if you are being kind or want to actually finish the game, you could actually pause the timer yourself when your opponent's time is about to run out during their turn. And if they still do not come back after a long time, you could simply unpause it and let them time out. That should somewhat fix the problem, I think.
What do you guys think?
Time pause is a bit weird because if the time limit is 5 days and I pause that's practically like getting extra time and doesn't make sense with respect to the time control. Rather than pausing, maybe the ability to add time in correspondence games sounds better, but I feel it's unlikely to be implemented.