lidraughts.org

Tournaments with increment

Yes, it would make sense to me to have them separately such that people who prefer an increment can play in both.

The two 1+1 bullet tournaments indeed overlap with the 3+2 blitz. I agree it makes more sense to move them one hour earlier, and instead have the Frisian/1+0 bullet in the 3+2 blitz hour. As a bonus I will also make the 3+0 tournament that replaces the Frisian blitz during the daily Frisian into a 3+2.

The increment tournaments are now separated. So the 1+1 tournaments (two times) are now scheduled during the 3+0 tournament, the increment tournaments are no longer overlapping.

Posting this here so it doesn't get lost in some random tournament chat :)

I wanted to empathize that both the KNDB and FMJD officially recommend tournaments to use an increment whenever possible, and it's just not really clear to me why you have chosen to deviate from this. Maybe you have done user polls that I'm unaware of, but I think my initial post in this thread pretty clearly indicates what the users prefer when given the choice — and that doesn't even include draughts players that have stopped playing here because of this.

It's getting pretty tiring to win or lose on time in a draw position, and often it causes me to stop playing for the day. The opponent's reaction isn't always nice either when you win on time. I'm sure this can't be very encouraging to new visitors, especially experienced draughts players that are used to playing with an increment.

We just don't think it's as clear cut as you make it out to be. Doing some advanced searches on all user initiated human games (lobby + friend), there are in fact more games without increment than there are with increment (21,426 vs 20,706 or 51%). Looking at only the games played in the last 6 months (as a lot changed in the demographics since then, including more international players and the app release), the difference is even bigger in favor of no increment (8,591 vs 6,556 or 57%).

Because these numbers include ultrabullet and hyperbullet (larger numbers of games more quickly), a more sane comparison might be to look at only games with 1-30 minutes of starting time. In this case the lifetime score of games without increment is a bit lower at 46% (16,698 vs 19,926), but looking at only the last 6 months it is still 56% in favor of no increment (8,002 vs 6,274).

So we can only repeat that this is a matter of preference, and as far any conclusions can be drawn from these numbers, things seem reasonably well balanced around 50%. In other words the current hourly tournament schedule is just fine, having about 50/50 increment. Of course we might still add a Blitz/Superblitz Inc cycle of weekly/monthly/yearly tournaments at some point. Life is very busy at the moment, but we will try to take another look at that somewhere in the coming weeks.

I'm not sure why you're leaving out games played against the computer, most of which (when timed) are played with an increment, and those stats also don't include custom tournaments although I don't think there's a way to filter for those. But even if we include official tournaments, almost 40% of all tournament games within the last month were played with an increment.

The finished tournaments list lets me scroll back about 2 weeks, and in those 2 weeks there were 17 custom tournaments with increment with a combined 2341 games played, vs 443 games across 8 custom tournaments without increment. We can't draw too many conclusions from 2 weeks of data, but unfortunately it doesn't let me scroll further.

I appreciate that you're considering it.

I think Human Lobby + Friend games are most representative for the question what people prefer to play among themselves (human vs human and any timecontrol goes). Games against the computer are a different beast altogether, as the timecontrol is largely irrelevant for the computer anyway, and playing in timetrouble is just not an even playing field.

Tournament games are hardest to interpret because most changed there (3 months ago the schedule was changed, amidst a significant ongoing shift in the user demographics). Also these numbers are bound to be more skewed because they are most Pareto-like, in the sense that many games come from a small amount of sources (i.e. the big daily/monthly/yearlies without increment, and more recently the Mongolian user tournaments with increment).

A pretty easy way to settle this would be to just alternate them, similar to what you're already doing with the hourly arenas. Even if it's 50/50, that seems a lot more reasonable than choosing one over the other for all major tournaments.

Alternating the daily superblitz with increment is not a bad idea at all. It is the most frequent of the bigger tournaments and is an odd one out anyway. There's no daily superblitz on thursday and friday because of the weekly blitz and weekly superblitz. Of the other 5 days there could be 3 with a daily superblitz inc, maybe lasting 2h30 instead of the usual 2h.

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