When your opponent times out of a correspondence game, I propose to not automatically grant a win, but let a button appear that allows you to either claim the win, or to cancel the game. If you don’t claim the win within X days, the game is automatically cancelled.
The same feature is actually implemented on the TimeForChess website. The problem with automatic wins, is that your rating increases. Not so long ago, I experienced this a few times in a short period with stronger opponents. As a result my rating was suddenly several kyu stronger than before, which made it more difficult to find games of players at the same level. The alternative is of course to simply play (and likely loose to) stronger players to normalise your rating again, but this is not exactly fun and a bit of a waste of time for the stronger players.
Just my opinion, but I think this would want to be way down the list of the priorities for new features.
The reason is that the problem it solves is barely a problem at all.
Ratings have an uncertainty associated with them. The OP’s rating is +/- 2.8k.
The chance of timeouts making that much difference - a difference of nearly 3k - seems remote.
And even if such a thing happened, it is only a problem if you are concerned about the instantaneous accuracy of your rating as a goal in itself.
But ratings fluctuate all the time. You don’t “have to” play stronger opponents and loose “just to get your rating right”.
If you are 16k and go up a rank due to a couple of stronger timeouts, all you have to do is keep playing 16k people. If you are 16k, some of them will beat you, and your 15k will get wacked back down to 16k fast enough. If 16k people don’t manage to beat you and achieve this, then surely you are 15k afterall, and the timeouts just placed you correctly more quickly.
The idea in itself has nothing wrong with it, other than the cost of implementation is something more worthwhile not getting done. I’d rather see some of the high-voted requests implemented, such as audible warning on game accepted, or number of games I won/lost against an opponent when I view their profile page.
Just to clarify, I don’t care about my ranking. My ranking will inevitably follow my skill, so my goal is not “to get my rating right”. The problem is finding suitable players for long games. My current rating is 15 kyu, which IMO is on the optimistic side. It has been as “good” as 12 kyu due to timeouts. At that point 15 kyu players simply didn’t select my games from the list anymore.
I just found out that more players did signal this problem. See e.g.
FYI, on the Dragon Go Server there is a settings option to not let your rank be adjusted when you won on timeout. So they seem to face similar problems on other Go (and chess) servers as well. I like the solution proposed above a bit more than the DGS one, though.
