Cheating

Wouldn’t say it’s a need. Having 1 wouldn’t hurt but it wouldn’t really help either. If I were the devs I’d just type a simple sentence in a few seconds and be done with it. Etiquette is not much different from any other games. Unless the person is an underdeveloped kid, they know very well what they are doing. No point in putting that much effort into something generally understood and won’t affect anything anyway.

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Etiquette is something taught by the community, not enforced by authority.

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I agree that one cannot enforce etiquette, but there are some standards which apply to Go community globally. People who have played a lot are generally aware of those standards, but for newcomers who may have never played in real life and were dropped into internet abyss some behaviours might not be obvious.

For example it might feel natural to not give up until every possible point is taken. Afterall game is not lost until it’s decided and since it’s extremely confusing to tell wether the game is done or not, playing inside my own or opponents territory might seem to make sense. Such behaviour is not against the rules, but it’s pointless waste of everybody’s time. There is a broad agreement in Go community, that such behaviour is strictly impolite.

So why not try to teach the ‘go manners’? Simple statement of those general principles might influence some players. Especially if those rules were briefly introduced to new-joiners, I can imagine some impact.

Another idea would require detecting certain behaviour based on certain move patterns. That shouldn’t be too difficult to implement. Under specific circumstances application could display a visible warning like ‘According to Go etiquette behaviour XYZ may be seen as impolite.’. Simple enough? :slight_smile:

Well, no, actually. I am fairly confident that it would be very difficult to do. Disclosure: I’ve been a software engineer for 30 years.

In gaming communities the player base is fairly self-selecting. Those who fail to grasp the concepts either quit immediately or in some cases try being a pain until that no longer is fun for them. Eventually, either they quit voluntarily or do something which leads to banning. A very select few will change course and actually learn the game.

There is one other type - the immature player. Whether they are young or just misguided for whatever reason they choose to try to continue but always look for ways to game the system or even cheat outright. These are the types of players that can poison a community if they arent dealt with as their behavior is upsetting to those who are more earnest. That is why there will always be a need for moderators and a system for penalizing bad behavior.

When this topic started I felt for ggg. I could feel his anguish. Although things went south I saw that people here were trying to be helpful. In the end he felt like he wasn’t being supported so he left. I hope he finds a group he likes as he obviously has a passion for the game. I fear the scenario he encountered here is likely to be found on any server, however.

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The bigger issue, I think, is that the “Getting Started” documentation is obscurely located, poorly identified (under “readme”), and inadequate in its explanations (as I pointed out in the first topic I created here, concerning the stone removal phase). ggg was understandably confused about many aspects of OGS, as revealed in other forum threads, because, I think, she had never seen the Getting Started page. Indeed, questions that keep occurring in the Chat and Forum indicate that many newcomers have never seen the page, or have questions not addressed on the page. I would suggest making Getting Started a major tab renamed, perhaps, FAQs. It could incorporate a beefed up discussion of etiquette.

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FWIW, I think that the IGS ettiquette pages is pretty spot on, and all we’d need to do (with their permission?) is copy it into our Terms page.

Or heck, we could even point at theirs :slight_smile:

It doesn’t hurt to have those things spelled out.

Displaying it after one register an account then? New players might even appreciate it… Otherwise I am not sure many people will click on it… Even if it is more conveniently displayed. And it seems sad to clutter the interface with a button one is going to use only once, not on some regular basis.

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Okay, but at least it could have its own header under “About,” two clicks away rather than three.

Sure, yeah I expressed myself poorly, I am not in any way against that suggestion.

If the auto scoring is wrong, that’s when you report the game to a mod and have your game adjusted. OGS needs to fix the scoring algorithm to be as robust as those in the asian servers, the results are actually quite reliable that way.

How is this not a better alternative to reporting every problematic game to the mod when some can be resolved in this automated way? The chances of a good scoring algorithm giving wrong results is far less than the chances of bumping into a silly opponent. In that sense, it helps OGS scale well for larger player bases.

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Yes of course the best solution would be a better scoring algorithm, but that is probably hard to do (if not it would already be finished).

Maybe you could do something like ban passing after the game has been resumed three times and force the players to fill every point in extra-short byoyomi or something.

I don’t think that is needed since I actually don’t think I’ve played one of theese trolls even once.

Well, you are speaking from your own experience, and statistically speaking that isn’t representative of the entire community – which is why this thread was started in the first place.

As a fellow programmer I don’t think a better scoring algorithm is hard to do. There are a lot of “if not it would be already finished” things on OGS, such as the misaligned ‘Rematch’ button :wink:

Good point. Proper auto-scoring algorithm should solve a lot of the issues discussed here.

Do other sites have the “accept stones” phase?

Go Quest does not; it is strictly auto-scoring. However, all games are by Chinese rules, so the system does not have to deal with multiple rule sets.

I ask because despite a previous poster’s claim that it ought to be easy, the last time this came up it was asserted that it simply wasn’t possible to come up with the correct score fo Japanese automatically in a short amount of time.

Sounds plausible to me.

The algorithm does not need to be ideal. First of all - under any ruleset it has to correctly assess the L&D status of all groups - that’s the difficult part and it doesn’t differ between rulesets.

Given statuses of the groups are settled (if possible), I don’t see how Japanese scoring is more difficult than scoring Chinese.

If there is no human intervention, then how do we manage if it isn’t “perfect”?

If it gets it wrong, then you will have people complaining…

Maybe I’m misunderstanding what do we mean by auto-scoring. I thought it would be a baseline scoring that would work fine 99% of the time - in those cases it would be authoritative. In the remaining 1% it would simple give up and ask players to settle the score.

Agree, but I still think it would be hard to make such an algorithm. If not then great.