No worries. I also got an ISP blackout for half a day during the last round of ACCA. It happens. But you do need a 'keep-alive' anyway, because it is quite possible that an ADSL router with NAT otherwise drops the connection silently. Winboard has such option.Zlaire wrote:I'd like to apologize for Mediocre's two forfeits. Was connected over night both times but for some reason Mediocre couldn't start the games... haven't been able to track down why (something to do with the connection glitching when connected for too long).
I'll make sure to actually be present during the early games next time (not much of a morning person unfortunately, so just murdered my alarm clock instead of getting up).
* I should have caught slightly incorrect ICS settings earlier. (formula, no-noescape etc). Wasn't a major issue though except for the !rated blocked a lot of manual starts.
* No need to play unrated. Esp. on your ICS playing rated gives better seeding for the next event.
* On your ICS, no need to prefer ch 64, since 49 is there anyway. Also some miscommunication by sometimes using shout, sometimes ch 49 and sometimes ch 64. Better standardize on ch 49.
* Most entrants are not regular FICS or ICC users and it shows. People will enter under-tested engines or change setup and get bitten. So allowing a few disconnects is still necessary in 2011.
* Formala did catch a couple of false games, and some false games were started by engines who didn't set the recommended formula. So formula advisory must stay.
* I don't see a reason to be easy on 3rd disconnect anymore. At every occasion this time I could interpret the rules in a way that we could continue the chess. But at some point it is the player's responsibility (and mind that opponent is always affected by forcing a restart. Might be solved by requiring a 'moretime' command afterwards as compensation, but it is doubtful if all engines handle that gracefully.).
* Server needs some bots that are always there. I added blik(C) and mscp(C) for that reason and I intend to keep them there.
* 'rematch' is an important command to get better testing. Because then it can be done without supervision.
* I forgot that blik(C) sometimes shouts things.
* Need some better rules that foresee that more than 2 programs might enter first, or whether or not 2nd place matters or not. Better to think of it upfront than to improvise.
* Many of the rules can be removed or simplified.
* I tried 'mailmoves' of other engine's games but it somehow didn't work. Own games arrived ok. I didn't look deeper into it, just collected the games manually.
* Organizer (me) calculated the gap between GECCO and ACCA wrongly when he was in the USA just recently. He was so smart to take daylight savings change into account that happened afterwards, but forgot that it was applied on both continents so it cancelled out... (Starting 1 hour later would have been too stressful, but 9:00 AM would be my preference for a next) event.
* Running a server and mamer is a specialist skill. I'm glad we didn't go for the option of downloading ICS and deploying is just for the tourney.
