Feature request: "annul game" button

that would be completely different investigation and there is no reason to tell to those who called about meth

I would report ddk that plays like dan. But when opponent only few ranks lower that me and I clearly played weak - I wouldn’t consider such game as sandbag game just because opponent resigned when ahead. Maybe mod noticed other fresh games but then I’m not part of it, why tell me?

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There are principles, though I don’t know how strictly followed in practice, that you should be able to call for emergency medical help and the ambulance people not tell the police if you were doing something illegal. Otherwise druggies who overdosed will not call for help and die because they fear their illegal drug use will be reported to the police. Same with fire service, you don’t want a fire to spread and kill loads of people because the fire starter was doing something illegal like growing cannabis in their loft (but they did in case near me to my disappointment).

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That’s why, @stone.defender, when I am handed over a win, I always comfortably take it, for the greater humanity. :smiley:

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if most players (with strength identical to mine) don’t annul incorrectly won games and I annul,
then my rank will be lower than their rank. I will be sandbagger then…

whoops

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Not true. A person can play tens of thousands of games and not have a single sandbagging violation simply by not sandbagging. The mistake you make here is in thinking that a violation is equivalent to a single game that looks like sandbagging. People are cited for rank manipulation sandbagging based on a large pattern of behavior. (Alt sandbagging is a little different but also judged based on a pattern of behavior.)

Ridiculous. A game either is or it isn’t a sandbagging (read rank manipulation) game. How it comes to the attention of the mods is irrelevant. For example, a mod might independently notice that a game ended suspiciously, decide to investigate, and discover the sandbagging pattern. The triggering game was no less a sandbag game just because it wasn’t reported. As I already discussed in my previous post, it can be very difficult to tell at times, so great care must be exercised, but that is why a large pattern of behavior is used and not just a few games.

Correct. The rank-manipulating sandbagger isn’t being banned for the one you reported. He is being banned for a bunch of recent rank manipulation games that came after a previous warning also based on a bunch of rank manipulation games. Your report merely called attention to the situation, albeit inadvertently. Most people I hope (and expect) would be delighted to know that their report led to the banning of a sandbagger. Certainly I would be.

All the sentences in this paragraph are incorrect, except the first. Perhaps language is the barrier (I am a stunted English-only speaker, and do admire anyone who speaks another language), so let’s see if I can rephrase the example to make it more explicit. A 9k player (real strength) is a rank manipulation sandbagger. He has driven his account down to 14k by deliberately resigning (or timing out of) won games. He is on the road to winning because he is playing normally (at a 9k level), but his opponent surprises him by resigning sooner than expected, spoiling his (the sandbagger’s) plan to resign just before the scoring phase. This is normally a set-back for the sandbagger. But your button comes to the rescue. KataGo says that there was a way for his opponent to win, even though neither player saw it because it would require the skill of a 1d player. Nevertheless, the button is now available, and the sandbagger uses it to annul and thereby eliminate the set-back to his plan. He has lost a little time, but he is pleased that he didn’t rank up.

Sandbaggers rarely play badly to rank down in my opinion. In the suspicious instances I have seen, it would take the discernment of a high dan to tell with any confidence. That is a poor basis for an accusation, and why bother when innumerable sandbaggers use less ambiguous techniques. Playing badly goes entirely against the psychology of sandbagging. Sandbaggers are insecure people who want an easy win to feel good about themselves and/or they are incipient sadists who find ecstasy in humiliating others. Consequently, they take a rank manipulation game to a winning stage or to a won stage (where they resign instead of pass), because in that way they demonstrate their “superiority.” If they don’t have time to do that, and just want to rank down, they resign from a non-game (2 or 3 moves).

Now that sounds like an excellent idea. There may be some danger that it would swamp the mods, but perhaps it could be refined.

All of the categories of annulment that I mentioned involve cheating. The characteristic that makes rank manipulation different is that an innocent party has a bogus win annulled. As I mentioned, bogus wins are universally condemned as illegitimate in sports and games.

Except for, perhaps, the recent annulment mistake already mentioned, I know of no case in which a game was annulled because KataGo said it was the wrong result. As far as I know, KataGo only draws attention to suspicious results that need investigation (if, for example, one looks though a game history), or it confirms the conclusion already reached based on other evidence (which includes the large pattern of behavior mentioned above).

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Is an example of a game which was initially correctly scored (for the final board position, which was preceded by poor play of a premature pass resulting in an open boundary), but some moderator annulled it. How much weight that moderator gave to KataGo’s view White was winning (which is a score estimate based on continued play, NOT a count of that terminal position) versus thinking for themselves I don’t know. But it’s another example of the overly interventionist annul-happy style I don’t like (beside the overturned ‘heartbreak’ case I believe @Conrad_Melville is referring to).

Yes, I was mistaken in my comment on that case, but not because of KataGo’s judgment about who would have won. You are mistaken if that is your assumption. I saw the great swath of unmarked territory and jumped to the conclusion that it was the old autoscore bug that was present most of the past year. As for the “heartbreak” case, that was a mod mistake, not an example of properly followed policy. So is this a discussion about mistakes or about policy? To not annul in the categories I have already listed is to abet cheating. It should go without saying that implementing a policy correctly is difficult and takes a great deal of care. Mistakes will be made from time to time. That does not invalidate the correctness of the policy.

Nobody here called you a sandbagger except yourself

Is it truly the proposal that

“players should be able to annul a game where they agreed the result, and then discover that Kata predicts that if it were playing the result would be different” ?

How is that not

  1. Obviously nonsense… how is Kata’s prediction of what it would achieve relevant to these players’ result?

  2. Changing the rules, which say that during scoring the result is what the players agree that it is, whatever they agreed, during scoring

?

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Couldn’t have put it better myself - this feels like an absurd suggestion.

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I feel the urge to re-emphasise an important point about “The AI result”:

the AI “result” is a prediction of what it would achieve given this position.

Just because it says “99% white” doesn’t mean you have a hope in hades of winning from that position even if you are white. That depends entirely on your skill. If you agreed black wins on this board at that position that just goes to show that you are not as skilled as Kata. Which is clearly the case for everyone reading this. So “Oh, Kata says white wins” doesn’t mean either player should annul, it only means that Kata thinks it would have won if it were white.

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If it says 100 points white though, I have good chances of winning in most cases.

Op talks about resignations mostly. When you were losing but opponent got bored or something and resigned. So you have opportunity to refuse a win. This is generally what you want to do anyway if opponent gave up a won game for some reason.

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Right - and you are unlikely to have resigned then?

Or is it right to understand that this proposal is really saying “I want a way to end the game when I am clearly (IMO) ahead but it’s too early for scoring, so my only option currently is to resign” ?

And then having resigned and Kata shows that it would have won from my position… I pester my opponent to annull?

Resign-then-annull doesn’t feel like the right answer here.

Proposal as I understand is the following:

Player A is behind in the game. Player B however resigns (presumably for outside reasons). Player A doesn’t feel it’s right to keep this win where they were losing.

Current solution: A calls moderator for annulment.

Proposed solution: If Kata agrees that A was losing and thus got underserved win. A has an option to annul the game with a button thus refusing undeserved win.

Thus we could rephrase it as “ability to refuse undeserved win”.

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I see. In that case I agree with the argument that says “this is what call moderator is for”, so that we don’t provide tools to sandbaggers.

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Well, yes. It was completely separate joke. Did it sound like an accusation in English? Sorry.
But that’s true after all that users of my button will have lower rank than others. Same as users of analysis have higher rank.

3rd attempt:

player with SDK power plays against 14k. And SanDbaggerKyu still behind when 14k resigns. Sounds like a rare situation. So existence of that button will not make any significant difference.

You deleted your second attempt. I read it before your deletion. So I think that makes this your second attempt, at least in public view.

The sandbagger is behind only in the sense that a 1d player could beat him in a variation neither actual player is strong enough to discover. Not rare, I think, but let’s move on. I posited a wide difference in strength so the sandbagging would be clear. However, it is also possible that a 14k is playing an even game but is planning to lose because he wants to start sandbagging, so he can get the “pleasure” of clobbering TPKs. His opponent resigns unexpectedly and the previous scenario continues from there. DDKs do in fact sandbag, although less often than SDKs and dans, I think. Another scenario would be sandbagger versus sandbagger, in which one or the other sandbagger would get to use the button. This is a more common occurrence than one might imagine, and it is always hilarious because one sandbagger typically goes into high dudgeon accusing the other of sandbagging.

even more rare, not just behind. behind only in sense only Kata able to see.

If the game result is disputed, the game should continue until the result can not be disputed. Regards, Ed