Life In 19x19

First of all, there seems to be a lot of people advocating for Dwyrin to tell the opponent that they are a lot stronger than their sandbag rank. This would ruin the whole point of the video! If you tell your opponent truthfully that you are a lot stronger than they are, they will not play as if they are playing a similarly-ranked player! Shame on people who lack this awareness!

Second of all, I applaud Dwyrin for his courage to continue his sandbag series rather than keeling over due to people whining on the internet. No harm is legitimately caused to anyone by Dwyrin's choice to occasionally sandbag. Go is played for fun and as long as the opponent believes he has a fighting chance, it does not take away that player's fun or enjoyment!

Lastly, I'll admit losing sucks. To spend 45 minutes or an hour fighting a game you don't have an actual chance of winning is indeed both stressful and frustrating. There's no way around this though because servers can't really bend over backwards to prevent sandbagging and AI-cheating.

Jowels wrote:First of all, there seems to be a lot of people advocating for Dwyrin to tell the opponent that they are a lot stronger than their sandbag rank. This would ruin the whole point of the video! If you tell your opponent truthfully that you are a lot stronger than they are, they will not play as if they are playing a similarly-ranked player! Shame on people who lack this awareness!

I assume this is some sort of irony, since most of the same commenters have the awareness, just doubt this is true. Even if it were true, it doesn't justify the deceit.

Jowels wrote: Second of all, I applaud Dwyrin for his courage to continue his sandbag series rather than keeling over due to people whining on the internet.

I'm not telling him to stop, I'm just saying why I quit watching it. You can whine about that, I'm still quitting.

Jowels wrote: No harm is legitimately caused to anyone by Dwyrin's choice to occasionally sandbag. Go is played for fun and as long as the opponent believes he has a fighting chance, it does not take away that player's fun or enjoyment!

There's effectively no difference in cheating or sandbagging on the opponet: they believe they have a chance and they don't. It's not the end of the world but it's unfair.

Jowels wrote: Lastly, I'll admit losing sucks. To spend 45 minutes or an hour fighting a game you don't have an actual chance of winning is indeed both stressful and frustrating. There's no way around this though because servers can't really bend over backwards to prevent sandbagging and AI-cheating.

You seem to put individual responsibility behind policy. I like to strive for a world where people behave without the threat of punishment. And I certainly don't encourage bad behavior in absence of enforced policies.

Sandbagging for views is, in my view, reprehensible. There is no way around the lying and poor sportsmanship. When one builds a viewership on that it is bad for the game.

It is not necessary to sandbag to help others improve. It is not necessary to sandbag to improve.

The common streamers who do this do not get my attention. Why would I support someone who cheats for views. They are only strong amateurs. Instead, we can all learn from and support the real pros who are online. They have devoted their life to Go and still find a way to teach without sandbagging.

Is sandbagging really lying? It's even a necessity to get a rank on some servers...

Kirby wrote:Is sandbagging really lying? It's even a necessity to get a rank on some servers...

That's not a problem. Of course we're not talking about that. Being 6 dan on a server and deliberately creating and maintaining a 1k rank for educational/sensational purposes is.

Knotwilg wrote:

Kirby wrote:Is sandbagging really lying? It's even a necessity to get a rank on some servers...

That's not a problem. Of course we're not talking about that. Being 6 dan on a server and deliberately creating and maintaining a 1k rank for educational/sensational purposes is.

I agree some may have moral qualms with this - I just don't really consider the behavior to be "lying", per say, unless you've explicitly told your opponent that you're a given rank (when you're not). I bring up server ranking because it is an example that shows that simply playing a game at a given rank is not a lie.

Anyway, maybe it's not important to belabor the terminology - I just don't happen to consider sandbagging to be a lie in itself (I am making no statement about the morality of sandbagging here).

Kirby wrote:Is sandbagging really lying? It's even a necessity to get a rank on some servers...

If someone is deliberately maintaining a weaker rating then they are misrepresenting their strength to opponents at minimum. It's related to but different to starting a climb from the highest declarable rank on Tygem. On Tygem you *know* people in the dan ranks could be any strength because that "way too strong for 7d" that just crushed you might be a new player ranking up their first account like they have to but say 5 kyu on OGS? Nah, if you're playing at 5kyu on KGS you expect someone marked as 5kyu to be, eh, +/- 2 stones from that. Encountering an opponent who feels like a 5d ranking up from SDK would be not even close to normal. It's fairly easy on some servers to handwave away the sandbagging and extremely difficult to do it for others.

Boidhre wrote:
If someone is deliberately maintaining a weaker rating then they are misrepresenting their strength to opponents at minimum.

The server assigns rank estimate. The player is not stating anything about their rank, and is therefore not lying. Perhaps they are aware that the result of their actions may lead some people to misunderstand their rank, but it's not a lie - again, the server is providing the rank estimate, not the player.

Perhaps opponents would be surprised to encounter a 5d player playing on a 5k account. Maybe it's unkind to those opponents. Maybe the sandbagger is doing something wrong. I agree with all of that.

But simply having a server-assigned rank is not a lie in itself, even if you have lost on purpose.

Kirby wrote:But simply having a server-assigned rank is not a lie in itself, even if you have lost on purpose.

Yeah I just would see a distinction between someone manipulating their server assigned rank to keep it weak and someone ranking up. Is the former lying? Eh, depends how literal one wants to be but they are certainly actively maintaining a rank that is a lie which feels quite different to someone registering and playing up from a rank. Maybe that's just me though.

Boidhre wrote:

Kirby wrote:But simply having a server-assigned rank is not a lie in itself, even if you have lost on purpose.

Yeah I just would see a distinction between someone manipulating their server assigned rank to keep it weak and someone ranking up. Is the former lying? Eh, depends how literal one wants to be but they are certainly actively maintaining a rank that is a lie which feels quite different to someone registering and playing up from a rank. Maybe that's just me though.

I agree with your sentiment completely here.