Let's compare the effect of excluding good data with including bad data -- If you play 10 games and an escaper plays 10 games, one of those is against each other.....Perfectly handicapped you both should go 5-5 (50%). The escaper escapes his game against you and we ignore it, he is now 5-4 (55% wins) and you are 4-5 (45% wins). If you resign your game, he will now be 6-4 (60%) and you will be 4-10 (40%). Also, you have now enabled him to escape one of his next two games meaning he will effectively be 7-4 (64%). It has turned a +-5% difference into a +-10-12% difference. While it may not seem like much, The effect of resigning the escaped game was in fact as large or larger than the effect of escaping the game in the first place. So it would seem strange to think that action should be taken against someone who routinely engages in one of these behaviors, but not someone who routinely engages in the other. (As stated, the aim is to ensure the integrity of the ranking system).

Further, when comparing the two behaviors, the escaper (should he or she continue this behavior) will eventually trigger the escaper system, the impact of their behavior will at worst level off (at 10 escaped games and 100 games total), or at best drop to 0 (if they forfeit more than 10 games every game is an immediate forfeit). The impact of the resigner will only grow until the games themselves expire in six months. There is no system to turn these resignations into wins (in fact the system that is in place to deal with this has effectively been disabled). The only way to reduce the extended impact of this behavior would be to derank the player.

In effect, yes, the person who is resigning escaped games will have a much larger and longer impact on the efficacy of the rating system than someone who is escaping games.

That doesn't answer any part of my question. In reality, 50% of the games I, or anyone else plays, are not escaper games. By deranking me, you remove far more good data than bad, do you not? Doesn't removing the additional amount of good data damage the integrity of the rating system further than the 1 game in the other direction?

Having a hard time figuring out what the smiley is doing there.

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Occupy Babel!

IMO, you are punishing the wrong person by de-ranking someone who has resigned a game to get some closure.

When two people agree to play a match, they have entered an agreement: We will play a game of go under the specified time settings. We alternate turns, and on each turn that you get, you can choose to play a move, or pass. At any time, you may choose to resign (though some may argue that pass and resign options are moves).

When an escaper leaves the game, this agreement is violated. The escaper is the one that reneged on the agreement - they left the game without fulfilling their agreement to play a game within those time settings. The person that did not escape did not violate anything at all. And, still, it is the option of either involved party to resign at any time.

They key point to take away is: Resigning is always a valid option for either player. The same is true in real life games.

Now it may be argued that resigning unnecessarily adds bad data to the system. But there is no way to fairly measure this. It's possible that a person's weakness is that they resign prematurely. I have sometimes resigned prematurely. But that is my weakness. My rank should reflect my weakness.

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be immersed

Actually, this is kind of cool if you want to sandbag... Call an admin, make sure he/she notices that you resign a game somebody escaped, and not only do you lose rating points for that game, you also get deranked. Double-sandbagging combo!

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My name is Gijs, from Utrecht, NL.

When in doubt, play the most aggressive move

If you want to work out the specific special cases for when exactly it becomes mathematically detrimental to the system for you personally, you are free to, however what if the case were - "A player plays 95% of his rated games on the up and up, but every once in a while lets his younger brother play his rated games for him, so he has the chance to play stronger players." As far as the rating system is concerned this works out to be pretty much the same.

I avoided explicitly answering your question because your question has been already answered as far as I'm concerned. I have stated (and stand by the statement):

"At the end of the day, people who are actively engaging in behavior that causes bad data points to be added to the ranking system may be subject to deranking."

or I guess this conversation could have been shortened simply by referring to the KGS Terms of Service:



I guess the question for you to answer would be, do you really feel you derive sufficient additonal value from removing italicized games from your list (additional value that cannot be obtained via other methods previously mentioned of addressing the issue) that it merits going out of your way to introduce incorrectly scored games into the KGS database?

easiest solution:
If a player gets disconnected, a grace period of 5 minutes is given for him to come back.
If he does not come back, he loses the game.

I mean, if you got bad internet connection, no sympathy really..

So which of these steps is illegal?

Escaping a game you are losing.

Playing completely drunk and tired, almost guaranteeing a loss.

Not playing very hard, letting your opponent get away with stuff.

Playing hard, but having bad judgment and resigning a game you were winning.

Resigning a game because you have to leave while not wanting your opponent to be mad at you for escaping.

Throwing a game.

Resigning a game your opponent escaped from.

They all have a negative effect on the ranking system, but it seems only the last one or two are illegal. Escaping a game is actually the rudest item on the list, but it is perfectly fine by the KGS rules as long as you don't do it too often. That's what doesn't make sense to me.


Frankly, I don't give a damn how my actions affect a ranking system. I understand why some do, but I bet most people don't care about some how something small they do affects the overall ranking system.

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We don't know who we are; we don't know where we are.
Each of us woke up one moment and here we were in the darkness.
We're nameless things with no memory; no knowledge of what went before,
No understanding of what is now, no knowledge of what will be.

Here the counterquestion for you to answer is, do you really feel that if the answer to the above is yes, the solution is still to invalidate all games by that player to introduce many more incorrectly scored games into the database instead of providing a way to produce that additional value via another method that rewards the escaper less than a resignation?

Now here we agree in principle, but not in practice. In fact, I would say it is more a disagreement in definition. The principle is "You should not be required to continue a game you have no desire to finish." In real life, you walk away, it is effectively a resignation, sure. KGS provides that option -- you can just leave the game. If you were to regularly attend tournaments, and resign half your games even though you were crushing your opponents, I would imagine at some point the tournament directors might have a word with you.

No one is talking about deranking someone who mistakenly resigns in a position they think they have lost in. The issue here is intentionally resigning a game whereyou feel you are in a winning position, even though you could otherwise leave that game unfinished.

The non-escaper did not do anything wrong. Resigning is a valid option in the game of go. People resign all the time when they could have won, and sometimes they don't even know it.

Do you have a playing account on KGS? What if I were to find a game record that you had where you resigned, but I thought you could have won? Can we derank you because you resigned too soon? Have you ever resigned a game after losing a big group near the early mid-game? Couldn't you have come back? If it were a possibility, then let's derank you for intentionally losing that game.

There is no way to systematically quantify how much someone "intended" to lose a rated game. For example, I could say that I am actually a 9d player, but I have been playing poorly on purpose to have a lower rank.

The person that has committed fault in this scenario is the escaper. But we give them a what - grace period that says it's OK to escape once in awhile when you don't feel like losing?

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be immersed

Did you ask every player that you have deranked if they felt that they were in a winning position?

Furthermore, let's get to the real point:

Why not simply disallow escaping altogether, and provide an option for users to resume games later upon mutual request (with losses after a set amount of time due to connection issues)? Is this type of system inferior in any way?

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be immersed

Exactly. I might add an option for a mutually agreed upon postponement of a game. That way there are no benefits that I can see that the current system has.

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be immersed

if escaped games are eventually forfeited, then no it doesn't exclude a valid data point

No, escapers aren't trying to avoid loses.

In every other server, closing the game window is the same as accepting a loss -- and its fewer button presses.

In my experience, most escapers are either new players, kids, or non-english speakers who don't know there's an extra button to push to resign a game.

They did not do anything wrong...until they resigned. Once again the KGS Terms of Service explicitly states:



Now, you have also brought up the point "How can you be sure they think they are in a winning position." On its own this is a valid argument, however, if you are assuming the other person has escaped that would imply the escaper is in a losing position. If they are not in a losing position, why are you considering them an escaper? In that case, the person who has left the game has done nothing wrong, perhaps they have a network issue, or an emergency.




For the record my account is deranked (=

However...

Not all escaped games are eventually forfeited. You don't get a loss if you only forfeit once in awhile. Your rank is also calculated based on time. Games that happen further back in your game history affect your current rank less.

So getting an immediate win for an escaped game would provide more weight toward your rank, because if the win is delayed by a couple of months, for example, the win holds less weight.

In an extreme case, let's say that all of my "should-be" wins were games against different escapers. If those escapers don't play often, my rank goes down because I only have losses recorded, when really my "real" rank may be stable at the current rank.

If escapes were counted as immediate losses, then this situation would not occur.

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be immersed

Yes, that's what the KGS policy currently is. I think the discussion here is what it should be.

So, again, can you answer this question:






Maybe they are an escaper because they are "intentionally losing games". This is what you guys don't like, right? It appears that the policy is more harsh toward resignations than it is toward escaping, so if I want to sandbag, escaping is a good way to do it.

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be immersed

That should probably be reworded. According to that, resigning is never allowed under any circumstances



I derive a lot of pleasure from finishing my games on the day I play them. I can promise you I don't feel like I'm going out of my way at all. I believe any impact the occasional occurrence of it may have is inconsequential with regards of its impact on the system as a whole, and I know with some degree of certainty that deranking me will have a greater negative impact on the ranking system as a whole. As a result, the short answer to your question is "yes, I do", as I perceive the impact small and the benefit reasonably high, and with the way the current system works, I don't feel that value can be gained in other ways. As it stands, I find myself checking each game under the "Resume->" tab just in case they've come back on and sneakily moved every time I log on, and I don't like feeling like I have to do that very much at all. I would rather be able to just void the game, but that's not an option, so I'm left with resigning if I want it finished.

This is partly true...it is true that the loss holds less weight over time, however once the forfeit is awarded it is used in calculating your rank no differently than if it had always been a loss. The only difference would be if there was a transient effect in how you selected the opponents you played during the period where the forfeit was not yet recorded. If you played identical opponents and got identical results in the meantime your rank would be identical whether the loss was immediate or the forfeit was delayed.