opponent said he needed to leave for dinner. I said ok and he paused game with him to move.
today I log on and see he played a move. Game is still paused.
I play move. Think “huh, I can play in paused games”.
Game is still paused with both clocks flashing.
I close game, open chat.
Several minutes later I get notification I lost the game by resignation.
open game and see opponent had played another move. He wasn’t there when I was and no green light.
So what happened? Was there a bug or is this behaviour expected? I suspect what happened is because I closed the tab the 2 minute escaper auto resign system kicked in, but this seems really dumb and aggressively ending a game the players want to play that was paused for days. Or did my opponent unscrupulously resume the game? The pause system is poorly designed if it can be abused like that (should require both players presence if not consent to resume) but if so why did I lose by resign rather than time? Also I think for the sake of accuracy/clarity/honesty these 2 minute escape forfeits should be recorded as forfeits rather than resignation.
Yes, you can play while the game is paused. This is intentional and good when two players run low on time but both agree they want to finish the game without time pressure. Also, when paused the escaper prevention is disabled.
Any player can unpause the game. Otherwise it would be abused massively by sore losers and pausing should in no way be mandatory to accept, since both players agreed to certain time-settings.
Your opponent must have unpaused and you lost by not being present. He might not have been aware of the consequences. It’s a shame.
Regarding the marking as forfeit I agree that it would be more clear, but I have read in another thread that it might not be possible due to .sgf format limitations where forfeit is not possible. Not sure about that one though, so do not quote me on that…
I second Adam3141’s comments, but I do have a comment about the terminology. This came up in another thread recently. I watch a lot of games, so I can say that the vast majority of lightning bolt timeouts are escapers. As such, they are people of no character who have chosen a dishonorable form of resignation. If a new term is desired to identify them as escapers, then simply “loss by escaping” would be more clear. “Forfeit” does not really carry a greater weight of ignominy, as it typically applies to technical losses, such as not having enough team members present on a bowling team, or arriving late at a competition because your bus broke down.
Your particular case is, of course, a most unfortunate exception.
