[spwdo]

Hi,

being a regular tr player for several years now i would like to thank those TDS that create and host Tr`s for free on a regular basis and donate their time for the enjoyment for others.

Hosting a lot of tr`s myself in the past i know how unrewarding directing can be.
I ended my directing days (regular tourneys) since some of the new language features.
i noticed many people with very poor English got in my tr`s(they changed language to English, got into tr and changed back again i suppose) . i couldn`t bring myself over and over having to solve problems with people i could not communicate with .Not that BBO was a perfect place years ago, where there's people there's conflicts. its a tendency of humans to compete , i remember parties questioning each others mental abilities and witnessed huge fights over really nothing but everywhere there`s people with a dramatrail(must say i almost got involved myself so i aint trowing stones here) .

if any of the regular tds(the calabres, aramesh , pebcats,...) of this world have thought on this i would appreciate hearing those takes on "what are/is the difference between long ago and current directing?" .Second question " Did the level of ethics changed for the better/wurse likewise with bbo`s grow?(open for all lol)

But first and forsemost i would like to thank all those TDS that create TRs and donate their time directing. Playing/non table visting/non adjusting tds is not my cup of tea . A real Tr to me is the non playing td that runs a tight ship.

Marc

[TimG]

What's a "tr"?

[Tola18]

TimG, on Dec 9 2009, 09:25 AM, said:

What's a "tr"?

a tournament, I suppose.

[TimG]

Tola18, on Dec 9 2009, 12:36 PM, said:

TimG, on Dec 9 2009, 09:25 AM, said:

What's a "tr"?

a tournament, I suppose.

Ah, that obvious. I thought maybe it was some sort of club for tournaments.

[spwdo]

TimG, on Dec 9 2009, 03:25 PM, said:

What's a "tr"?

tourney..

[onoway]

When IAC was getting going I used to run a tourney once in a while. When not restricted to members, we would have the odd runner, maybe 2 or so per tourney, it wasn't really a big deal. I ran one the other day for someone who had computer issues and didn't think to restrict it to members. It was total and absolute chaos...people leaving at the drop of a hat if their pard lost connection or they didnt get a good hand or a good result or perhaps because they didnt like the color of socks the opps were wearing. I spent the entire time screaming for subs and subbing people in, probably ending up subbing at least half of the players by the time we were done. This was WAY worse than it used to be.. When tourneys are restricted to members we rarely have problems.

I think ..when people feel part of a defined group they tend to have more manners than if they dont feel any association beyond the actual tourney. Also it reflects how many people move around Main..tables there are often a revolving door for players. Perhaps unfairly, I blame the web format partly for this; it is much less convenient now for people to go to the smaller clubs to play. Unless they have a specific reason to do otherwise, people tend to land in either Main or Relaxed. My impression is that deserved or not, Relaxed has the image of the place for people who don't take bridge very seriously and Main is so big it tends to make everything very transient, so some people tend not to care very much how they behave. This carries over into the tourneys. Not sure what you can do about it beyond restricting the tourneys .

[Old York]

The situation has definitely got a lot worse. A large proportion of online players have absolutely no respect for anyone else.

The analogy with road rage is clear. the type of person who is meek and mild as a pedestrian, can suddenly become a raving monster as soon as they get behind the wheel, shouting, cursing and criticizing every other road user. This is because of perceived annonymity, and a total lack of accountability

Online games players see themselves as bulletproof. So much more needs to be done to stop these people from logging into bbo. Many disruptive players have been banned, and immediately reappear with a new identity. It is hopeless to attempt to exclude enemies, they will always get in through the back door.

Restricting tournaments to friends simply means that many innocent players are excluded, and tourneys become too small for any meaningful result.

At the moment, there is no answer, the game and BBO are brought into disrepute

Tony (Duke of York)

[onoway]

I think saying BBO is brought into disrepute is a bit bizarre frankly. It's not BBO's fault that there are human cockroaches in the world and some of them find their way here.

Also, not sure what you mean by "meaningful results". I suspect the reason that most people don't get into the paid tourneys to the same extent as free ones, is that "meaningful results" are not on the top of their list of priorities.

Tourneys mean that for at least x many hands you can count on a full table usually without long/constant delays waiting for yet another opp.The free tourneys often have a degree of socializing involved, and sometimes music is offered. It's fun to see how the results stack up but really not anything you can count on to mean anything, no matter how big the free tourney is.

As I see it, the answer for players is to join clubs and simply play in the club or club tournaments. When they are looking for a game and no suitable free tourney is scheduled they have two options..play in a "real" (paid for) tourney and give BBO some support for all they get for free, or take their chances playing at a table somewhere. If that makes them appreciate the club tourneys more it can only be a good thing as then they will be inclined not only to behave themselves but tend to be protective of the club as well.

Sometimes cockroaches even start to behave themselves when taken to task at the TIME for misbehaving. Sometimes instant feedback from the other players will do an amazing job of socializing the brute. Others are going to remain a problem until they find themselves bored with having to think up new names just to come into BBO to get kicked off yet once again.

[golfacer]

Quote

I ran one the other day for someone who had computer issues and didn't think to restrict it to members. It was total and absolute chaos...people leaving at the drop of a hat if their pard lost connection or they didnt get a good hand or a good result or perhaps because they didnt like the color of socks the opps were wearing.

That is the main reason that I rarely direct tournaments anymore. I would need to replace at least 1/4 of the players in an 8-board or 10-board tournament. I think two possible ways to improve the problem would be to:

1. Allow directors to restrict tournaments to players who finish at least 85-90% of the time.

2. Include, in each player's profile (or make it optional), the player's finished tournament percentage.

[spwdo]

golfacer, on Dec 14 2009, 12:38 AM, said:

1. Allow directors to restrict tournaments to players who finish at least 85-90% of the time.

2. Include, in each player's profile (or make it optional), the player's finished tournament percentage.

That would make me run the occasional tournament myself. The current situation evolved from the mere fact that people do this because they can .

Why stay when i can sign up for a tourney starting in one minute with a partner that sounds promising, this partner obviously is not the perfection himself so i must search on. People don't respond for two minutes and are subbed out and repeat this patron over and over .Al they need is one bad score and since its all so easy they gambble more then they wuld normally do. poor subs inherit them ugly scores anyways so why not gambble?

Imo we cant blaim them for doing something that is allowed more or less. i remember when there was a % implemented for finisching Tr`s. back then people came and beg to get in and i personally witnessed people changing behaviuor over this. its such a nice feauture , only lacks the ablilty to have the director decide the % he feels must be a minimun.

Gonna play and finish a tournament now, cya later

[Old York]

This problem will get a lot worse before it improves, BBO sentry robots need to be more vigilant and automatic bbo short-term bans need to be much more frequent

One answer is to create more Survivor Tournaments, simply set the rate to zero and all red players will be removed at the end of the round. This cuts down on the number of tournaments that are delayed because of a shortage of subs

Unfortunately, the option to set as Survivor is not supported in all formats (Swiss etc)

Quote:
"poor subs inherit them ugly scores anyways so why not gamble?"
Not if TD adjusts the board before subbing

Tony

[Chas_P]

Quote

the game and BBO are brought into disrepute

I have heard it estimated that BBO currently has over 2 million registered usernames. It's probably reasonable to assume that everyone has at least 10 aliases; some hard-core troublemakers/cheaters/bad guys (take your pick) probably have over 100. But let's assume that it's only 10. That leaves 200,000 real people. I think it's safe to assume that out of 200,000 people you're bound to have some jerks. To say that BBO is "brought into disrepute" because some lunatics slip through the cracks is both insulting and undeserved imo. I can't speak for BBO management; I'm only a volunteer. But I can tell you that we all work very hard trying to keep bad guys away.

I just looked at the next 50 free tournaments scheduled on BBO and 49 of them are restricted in some way...either friends, no enemies, include custom list, exclude custom list, etc. You might consider trying that. As long as free tournaments are open to the world at large you can count on some undesirables showing up.

[fred]

From the point of view of BBO management, member behavior does seem to be getting worse. There is a good chance we will make a serious effort to address these problems before too long.

Note that there is a relatively new option, "exclude new members", that is useful in terms of preventing unwanted players (who can be kept out with "exclude enemies" or "exclude customer list") from resurfacing with a new ID.

We will likely be adding more filters like this one that are designed to keep out players who have either a history of bad behavior or who lack a history of good behavior. Not clear when you should expect to see this happen, but I can promise you we are concerned about these issues and that we are working on trying to come up with some solutions.

Thanks for your patience.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[golfacer]

Quote

One answer is to create more Survivor Tournaments, simply set the rate to zero and all red players will be removed at the end of the round. This cuts down on the number of tournaments that are delayed because of a shortage of subs

Yuck, please, don't encourage more Survivor tournaments than there already are.

1. The Survivor format tells people that it's fine to quit if you don't have a good score.
2. If partner or I get disconnected at the wrong time, we are thrown out and can't finish.
3. If I register for a tournament, I want to play all of the boards, regardless of whether the score is good.
4. If the opponents are slow, either time must be added to the round or we might get thrown out of the tournament before the board is adjusted (albeit no so much if the rate is set to zero). Adding time creates bad feelings for the other players who are already waiting much too long.

Quote

I have heard it estimated that BBO currently has over 2 million registered usernames.

Quote

You might consider trying that. As long as free tournaments are open to the world at large you can count on some undesirables showing up.

Let's (conservatively) say that 2% of all of the BBO names belong to undesirable people. That would be 40,000 names that a director would need to exclude from a tournament.

[onoway]

Excluding new members will keep the jerks from rejoining but it ALSO keeps perfectly well behaved and decent people from joining.

I am wondering what the rationale is for allowing unlimited user names? Esp. since in at least the Windows version people can log on invisible and the program won't "blow their cover". Why in the world would anyone need even TEN names, much less more?

If people were limited to 2 or 3 names, with exceptions made for special circumstances by arrangement directly with BBO management, I believe that after a brief flurry of activity you would find the misbehaviour would diminish and what there was would be easier to deal with. If the computer program was set to allow only 2 or 3 names and to reject as "bad user name" any other names from that computer, it should be easy then to flag and redirect to the junk file anything which came from the computer of a "3 strikes and you are out" habitual offender.

I don't know how BBO deals with these people now but it must be a dreary chore to be dealing with the same antisocial idiots over and over again.

If it is a marketting thing..BBO wants to be able to say it has 2 million members when it really has only 200 000 (which in itself is amazing for a site concerned only with bridge) I would think in the long term that would be self defeating. Advertisers will not be getting the returns they would reasonably expect from a population of 2 million, if that 2 million is indeed a smoke and mirrors number and the membership is really only 10% of that.

I really would be astonished if most people really had 10 user names, though. It may be easier to let people simply make up a new name and password than deal with people who have forgotton their password (but the automatic login works very well) but I think it has ricocheted and caused many more problems than it solved.

[Chas_P]

Quote

Excluding new members will keep the jerks from rejoining but it ALSO keeps perfectly well behaved and decent people from joining.

Not true. Here is the function of "exclude new members": Let's say a TD develops over time a list of members who are unwelcome in his games and chooses "exclude players from a file on your PC" when he creates his tournament. Badguy1 is on the list, tries to register, sees that he cant, so creates Badguy2 and tries again. Exclude new members will bar Badguy2.

Quote

Let's (conservatively) say that 2% of all of the BBO names belong to undesirable people. That would be 40,000 names that a director would need to exclude from a tournament.

That would be true if you have previously encountered all 40,000 and added them to your exclude list.

[fred]

onoway, on Dec 15 2009, 06:36 AM, said:

Excluding new members will keep the jerks from rejoining but it ALSO keeps perfectly well behaved and decent people from joining.

To some extent that is true and that is the reason why this problem is harder to solve than one might think. What I think we need to achieve is to add some value to the notion of a BBO user ID. In this way people will have something to lose if their ID is taken away or stripped of its priviledges.

If a person has to invest some time and good behavior before being able to do things like play in certain tournaments, he/she will be less likely to behave badly in the future - to do so would risk having to start from scratch.

The problem with this notion is that it also "punishes" nice people who are new members. However, not only might this be the lesser of evils, but there is probably something to be said for new members spending some time becoming familiar with our site and software before jumping into a tournament environment.

Quote

I am wondering what the rationale is for allowing unlimited user names? Esp. since in at least the Windows version people can log on invisible and the program won't "blow their  cover". Why in the world would anyone need even TEN names, much less more?

When BBO was first launched I thought it was smart to make the barrier for entry as low as possible in order to encourage as many people as possible to become BBO members. For that reason the software made no demands on people to supply their real names or e-mail addresses and we made no effort to stop people from signing up with more than one ID.

Of course at the time I had no idea that BBO would eventually grow into the monster that it is today. In fact, BBO was originally nothing more than an experiment that I was pretty much making up as I went along. I had no real plan and made no real effort to guess at what the future might hold.

That being said, even if we were able to see the future, there is not much we really could have done about this problem. The reason is that there is no reliable way to identify specific people on the Internet and even the notion of trying to identify specific computers is highly problematic. So, since we don't know with any confidence which computer a person is logging in from or (especially) who a given person actually is, there is not much point in trying to restrict that computer or person to a given number of IDs.

Of course we could have solved this problem early by charging a fee for a BBO user ID. That would naturally satisfy the goal that I mentioned at the start of this point - it would create value for BBO user IDs thereby giving people incentive not to have their IDs taken away. But since the basic premise of BBO was to be a free site that would welcome all bridge players, this concept would have been a non-starter even if I had been able to foresee the problems that we are experiencing now.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[onoway]

In that case, is it possibly time to take a page out of the internet marketers' bag of tricks and ask people to "opt in"? Opting in doesn't mean you have to charge them anything, it just means that their email address is on file. Since you don't require people to have even the country they are from on their profile this doesn't seem to be too much to ask. Perhaps if people didn't opt in they could still come into BBO but would be unable to join tourneys or teams or participate fully in what BBO offers. That should help somewhat in the problems with those events, perhaps?

Certainly some of these marketers speak of having several hundred thousand people on their various "lists" and they have programs to snag people from being repeat "opt-inners". It seems as though it might be easier to set the stage when people come into BBO then try to deal with them after..you are always playing catch up. After all, you don't invite strangers from the street to come into your house and enjoy your hospitality without even asking their name, generally.

[fred]

onoway, on Dec 15 2009, 05:30 PM, said:

In that case, is it possibly time to take a page out of the internet marketers' bag of tricks and ask people to "opt in"? Opting in doesn't mean you have to charge them anything, it just means that their email address is on file. Since you don't require people to have even the country they are from on their profile this doesn't seem to be too much to ask. Perhaps if people didn't opt in they could still come into BBO but would be unable to join tourneys or teams or participate fully in what BBO offers. That should help somewhat in the problems with those events, perhaps?

Certainly some of these marketers speak of having several hundred thousand people on their various "lists" and they have programs to snag people from being repeat "opt-inners". It seems as though it might be easier to set the stage when people come into BBO then try to deal with them after..you are always playing catch up. After all, you don't invite strangers from the street to come into your house and enjoy your hospitality without even asking their name, generally.

If I understand you correctly, this would just be pushing the problem to some other site that provides free e-mail addresses.

It is easy to obtain as many free e-mail addresses as one wants. This means that an e-mail address is not a reliable way to identify a person.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com

[Old York]

golfacer, on Dec 15 2009, 07:08 AM, said:

Quote

One answer is to create more Survivor Tournaments, simply set the rate to zero and all red players will be removed at the end of the round. This cuts down on the number of tournaments that are delayed because of a shortage of subs

Yuck, please, don't encourage more Survivor tournaments than there already are.

1......
2......
3. If I register for a tournament, I want to play all of the boards, regardless of whether the score is good.
4. If the opponents are slow, either time must be added to the round or we might get thrown out of the tournament before the board is adjusted (albeit no so much if the rate is set to zero). Adding time creates bad feelings for the other players who are already waiting much too long

That is exactly why I suggested setting the rate to Zero

With the rate at zero, low scoring pairs continue to play, np
Only disconnected players are removed..... subs are therefore not expected to complete the hands of insane overbidders and sabotage bidders

Edit: added...
I would love to be able to create unclocked, survivor tournaments.... it would solve a lot of problems

At no time did I intend to suggest that BBO was bringing itself into disrepute
It is the action of certain undesirables that is bringing the game and BBO into disrepute, I fail to see how that could be misinterpretted.... but then, some forum users just love to take 8 words out of context, and start an argument

Tony