Escapers

[danielm]

If you must go, you do not have the ability to win the game within the time constraints, so you should lose the game. In such a case, I feel that resignation is appropriate.

I think KGS punishes such events rather severely.
I know - I tried. Was not pretty...
Admins were peeved. Brr...

It would be absurd though, if one would get punished for resigning a game one has to leave, but not for quitting, refusing to resume, and letting the system do essentially the same thing just with significant delay. If the former is disallowed, the latter should clearly be equally frowned upon?

[hyperpape]

Excuse me? Are you all mind readers or something? There are many reasons why your opponent may leave that have nothing to do with intention. Kids may be playing and their parents pull them away for dinner. Maybe they are in a library and are getting kicked out. Internet connections do get flaky. People's machines crash. All kinds of stuff happens. And not everyone cares to comment or is capable of writing a message to you in your native language explaining why this is happening beforehand.

Joaz said that his opponent was an escaper. I don't know whether he was or not. But since Joaz wasn't making a public denunciation, I didn't think to lecture him about not assuming people are escapers. If he was wrong about that case, does it change much here on L19?

Perhaps that wasn't perfectly clear in my post. But I meant to be talking about escapers in general, and I do think you can make some guesses about their motives. Is someone more likely to cuss you out and insult your skills before suddenly disappearing or before resigning? I can't say for certain that most escapers do it out of pride and anger, but those are common emotions for them. I think some escapers know they're depriving their opponent of the satisfaction of seeing a win.

As far as people leaving a game, it does seem that many people do so because they don't know that they need to resign, or assume that leaving counts as a resignation. I wouldn't really be inclined to call them escapers, and what I say has no bearing on them.

[hyperpape]

More importantly, can you explain to me the importance of being able to join a different game (or do anything else on the server really), when the opponent you just escaped from is still waiting for you on the board? All the heart-warming stories about computers breaking down or pizzas being delivered simply don't seem to be relevant in this case.

Fixing this would be a very nice change.

The system is also too subtle about indicating to you that your opponents are available for unfinished games. I have certainly finished a number of games after several days have gone by, but it often doesn't happen.

[Joaz Banbeck]

Excuse me? Are you all mind readers or something? ...

Joaz said that his opponent was an escaper. I don't know whether he was or not. But since Joaz wasn't making a public denunciation, I didn't think to lecture him about not assuming people are escapers.

I suppose that it could have been a power failure. But it happened just after I made the move that connected my eyeless group, thereby saving it, and simultaneously surrounding his 1-eyed group, thereby killing it. Net profit on the move was 75+ points. Any reasonable person would have resigned.

It could have been a power failure.

[snorri]

As far as people leaving a game, it does seem that many people do so because they don't know that they need to resign, or assume that leaving counts as a resignation.

Interesting. Could it be that people used to other servers are closing the window thinking it's the same as resigning?

A long time ago there was a program where someone found a bug that when a particular key sequence was typed, the program would silently exit. There was a short, silly debate over whether this should be fixed. "Hey, maybe people think it's a feature. It's a quick, convenient way to exit."

People see what they want to see. If you want to see escapers everywhere, you will. If you want to see communists everywhere, that's easy, too, as history has shown.

[snorri]

It could have been a power failure.

In that case, more like defenestration of laptop. Point taken.

[hyperpape]

Interesting. Could it be that people used to other servers are closing the window thinking it's the same as resigning?

That's the theory--seems like it's definitely part of the issue. It's been discussed on the forums before.

[danielm]

As far as people leaving a game, it does seem that many people do so because they don't know that they need to resign, or assume that leaving counts as a resignation.

Interesting. Could it be that people used to other servers are closing the window thinking it's the same as resigning?

From my experience with similar issues in other games (and user behaviour in general), I can guarantee you that this is the case. The only thing protecting against this is the popup message, so if somebody is in a rush or can't read it for whatever reason, they will happily close the window.

It is also possible that people press the quit button on the main window, expecting the same thing. There is no helpful popup in this case (I recently pressed it by accident, embarrassment followed).

It is not an unreasonable assumption that quitting a game (which is not the same as disconnecting or crashing) is equivalent to resigning.

[lefuet]

If I don't want to listen to somebody, i censor. If I don't wont to play (or cannot win anymore) I resign.

[Bantari]

Even though I don't really care about this one way or another, a thought just occured to me!
And that thought is that PlayOk server has a pretty good way of dealing with escapers.
Here is the system:

During game, when one person disconnects, the server start counting like 3 min or so (can be more, can be less).
During this time, here is what can happen:
1. Missing player returns - game continues with the old timer.
2. Missing player does not return, he loses, period.
3. The waiting player leaves - game gets nullified and does not show in the record for neither player (although this can be easily changed to 'adjoured').

There is no perfect system, and whatever you do there will be fussing and hurt feelings. The above system is no exception.
But this way, at least, the decision lies with the player who did not disconnect.

Taking into account that unpredictable connection problems will become less frequent as time goes by and technology reaches more parts of the world, I would say this is a pretty decent system.

Anyway - maybe this is what most servers use, I never paid much attention. If the system is common, please forgive my ramblings. Just trying to be constructive for a change.

[danielm]

Yes Bantari, that's pretty much the standard system. The downside of it is that it's just not possible to find a perfect value for the timeout. Either it is relatively short and it will be too short in many cases, or it is unreasonably long and thus leaves a lot of room for "grieving" (disconnect in anger rather than resign, two moves before the end... just so your opponent has to sit out the timeout). If we are talking about 5 minute blitz games with 15 minutes time outs or so, things start to become ridiculous. Even more so if you are allowed to disconnect and come back to the game more than once.

It also doesn't help if you just can't return to the game, e.g. because of a power outage, or because mother sent you to bed. I don't know if a system needs to account for such occurrences, but it seems that the KGS system explicitly does, so that would be a big change.

The KGS system is different to most others, and I do like it. I just think it needs refinements to avoid frustration and possible abuse (even on a very small scale... one should never stop the fight to avoid abuse in multiplayer rulesets ).