Both players can’t be ahead on time, so one of them will be open to being a victim of douchebag behaviour.
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I think their point is more that using this as a rage tactic right at the end before they timeout is more common than deploying this strategy from the first move… So by that point OP is normally ahead on time.
I’ve seen lots of players successfully using time cheating (I won’t dignify it by calling it a tesuji or strategy) in absolute games, and one had won many games by playing virtually random moves instantly from the beginning. Of course, these successes were generally at the DDK level.
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Interesting. As I said, I’ve been playing absolute games forever, and I have never seen that. I’m skeptical that it would be a successful strategy against me? But now I’m hoping someone tries it so I can find out. Very interesting.
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Well, the thing is these kinds of people end up getting banned very quickly once they’re finally reported (our community is insanely tolerant, you wouldn’t believe the things that go unreported) so that’s probably why you haven’t run into any yet (which is very good to hear) 
I think this is the main point.
My only advice is to create some sort of gathering for people who share your love for absolute blitz.
My experience is that people don’t read carefully game settings before accepting a challenge.
I had the same issue with completely different settings: I was looking for quick correspondence. Something like 5 moves per day.
I collected many timeouts from my opponents.
I asked in the forum - just like you’re doing - and eventually the only effective solution was: find a bunch of players who want the same!
Now there’s a group on OGS about quick correspondence and also a thread on the forum to advertise for new tournaments.
Also you may add people to your friends list and challenge them directly.
When you have a niche interest, you must take care of your niche. 
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I still think this is a good thing to add, in general for all time settings even. There are occasional reports about people who resume a game when an opponent doesn’t expect it, and have them time out because of it. This would solve that problem as well.
I have to confirm the things stated by other mods here, that absolute time is abused a lot by people who like to stall games, or resume games from scoring (or make ridiculous games, like 10s absolute time, and then just spam the board). As it is currently implemented, I don’t think absolutely timed games should be ranked.
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I strongly disagree there. I play absolute more than anyone on the thread, perhaps more than anyone on the server currently, and I have never had a problem with this. Maybe it has impacted game play in .5% of the games? I would not take away the ranking based on a theoretical abuse that is not happening. And yes, improve the system, but don’t shut it down until it’s perfect.
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Absolute blitz is popular and even has official tournaments IRL. OGS should be able to propose a similar format under control.
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There could maybe be a lower limit to ranked games (or rather any absolute games) which would deal with this issue somewhat.
Absolute is s perfectly normal game timing and @Bunburyist has set out the advantages already. The problems are less about the time seeing and more about understanding the implications and should be dealt with accordingly (explanations, warnings etc)
My question would be what is the shortest reasonable time for a complete game to scoring. 10 mins is fine. 5 is maybe pushing it, 6, 7? 4? I’ve not played enough to know. Clearly permitting games with 10s absolute time is daft!
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IRL I’d say 8mn (almost no place to think). So online a little bit shorter, 6-7mn?
Note: 3s x 200 =600s (10mn)
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I’m not talking about theoretical abuse, I’m talking about practical abuse that we witness as moderators: it is happening.
To reiterate, we get frequent reports of people abusing the absolute timer (especially considering how little games are played with absolute timing), either by playing nonsense, by starting game with impossibly fast timesettings, or by resuming games from scoring to catch their opponent off-guard. It’s not theoretical.
My guess for the reason why you’re not experiencing these problems, is because you play your games fast enough not to be abused, and you create your own challenges with 10m time.
Secondly, I didn’t say I am against absolute timing being ranked, I’m against absolute timing being ranked as it is currently implemented. In particular, the game resumption abuse and the way it can be abused to win a game by stalling make this time setting unnecessarily easy to force a win.
A player should be able to get some grace period after passing or after resuming.
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yes…
frequent? really? I feel like that is some pretty strong hyperbole from my observations… how many of these cases do you deal with? honestly I’d be surprised if it were more than 1 a month… compared to score cheating, AI accusations, and foul language which we get multiple of every day, I honestly can’t even say the last time I saw a ticket for absolute time abuse… maybe you just happen to see them first and close them out quickly, but I personally would say I only see a few of these accusations every year.
Compare this to the number of games with absolute timing. 99% of games are not with absolute timing.
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OP alone plays every day and has over 1100 games from the last 6 months… obviously the pool is even bigger than that since they claim to have not encountered this behaviour… so at max I would say that lends itself to once every 200 games, and I feel that’s being pretty generous… so while 99% of games are not absolute, still 99% of absolute games are not being abused 
Where do you read me claim this?!
I’m saying that relatively speaking, absolute timing leads often to forms of cheating that could be easily prevented by just adding a small buffer to a player who passes continuously, or after resuming a game from scoring. Currently, those players have no choice but to time out in a game they should win, and this gets reported relatively frequently compared to the number of games with absolute time settings.
It reads as if you think that I’m claiming that most games with absolute timing are problematic, and that we’re flooded with reports. I’m not claiming either of those things.
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I didn’t read you claim this, else I would have quoted it. I was comparing and contrasting directly to your statement of
Suggesting that even though a small percentage of games using this timing, it doesn’t change the fact it’s still a small percentage of that small inital pool that is being abused.
Sorry if I worded it poorly.
Most is certainly not the case, I was simply pushing back against your assetion that these reports are
FWIW, I too am in favour of this elegant solution. These would need to be hard-capped though, you should not be able to bank time with this method.
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I guess we’d have to back this discussion up with some statistics to get anywhere.
My current hypothesis is that the percentage of absolutely timed games being reported for an opponent abusing the system to cheat is at least an order of magnitude higher than the percentage of, say, byo-yomi timed games being reported for an opponent abusing the system to cheat.
It should be said that I’m also in favour of cheating protection in other timing systems, such as protecting players in general from timing out after a game is resumed from scoring, or automatically flagging problematic behaviour like repeated passing, multiple scoring stages with disagreeing opponents or opponents who frequently extend games far beyond what one would reasonably expect (e.g. a player who frequently plays games lasting over 350 moves).
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I may be willing to concede this point stats unseen… I was internally comparing reports of time abuse in absolute time games with the total pool of reports for my objection to “frequent” however comparing it to the pool of all time-abuse reports is a much different matter.
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