Feature Request: Prevent Deliberate Time-Wasting and Introduce AI-Assisted Adjudication

Support
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Dear OGS Team,

Thank you for providing and maintaining OGS as a free and international platform for Go players.

I would like to suggest an improvement regarding games that end by timeout.

In some games, one player is clearly ahead and a realistic reversal is no longer possible, but the losing player continues to make meaningless moves. For example, they may fill their own territory or play moves that have no effect on the result, apparently hoping that the winning player will eventually run out of time.

This behavior does not reflect the spirit of fair play. Players should not waste time or continue making meaningless moves merely to seek a win by timeout. When a position is clearly hopeless, the appropriate action is to resign. Players who can no longer continue because of an urgent matter should also resign rather than disconnecting or allowing the game to end by timeout.

It would be helpful for OGS to publish clearer etiquette guidelines, including the following principles:

  • Do not make meaningless moves, such as unnecessarily filling your own territory.
  • Do not deliberately waste time.
  • Do not allow a game to end by timeout without either playing or resigning.
  • When the position is clearly lost, resign respectfully.
  • When you cannot continue the game, resign instead of disconnecting.
  • Please resign only when it is your turn to move.

I would also like OGS to consider introducing an AI-assisted adjudication system for extreme cases.

When the AI determines with very high confidence that one player is clearly winning, that meaningful play has effectively ended, and that the other player is only prolonging the game to seek a timeout victory, the system could issue a warning. If the behavior continues, the system could stop the game and award the win to the player who was clearly winning on the board.

Because AI evaluations are not always perfect, such intervention should be limited to situations where the result is overwhelmingly clear. The system could also consider the remaining meaningful moves, territory, captured stones, and repeated meaningless play before intervening.

A system of this kind would discourage deliberate time-wasting and help ensure that the actual result of the game is respected.

Thank you for considering this suggestion.

Sincerely,

An OGS user

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2 Likes
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Hello Kyoko9240,

yes, most of us probably agree about the general etiquette of play, the hard thing (well for me at least), is to find the fine line where to call it a deliberate stalling and when it might be an honest new player’s attempt to discover and understand how invasions (don’t) work.

We already have an AI referee of sorts, and the exact limits are currently also discussed here, which you might want to check out and/or offer your opinion:

3 Likes
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Thank you for your reply and for providing the link. However, I believe the game-record deletion part of my request has been misunderstood.

I am not referring to SGF files that I personally chose to download or save. I understand that I can delete those files myself.

What I am requesting is the ability to remove from my OGS game history the records of games that were played as part of a specific OGS group while I was a member of that group.

I am not asking to delete all of my game records. I only want to delete the records connected with that particular group after leaving it.

Therefore, the existing ability to delete personally saved SGF files does not address my request. I would appreciate it if OGS could consider adding a feature that allows users to select and delete—or at least hide—game records associated with a specific group.

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I don’t think so. In the thread where you introduced it, everyone seems to understand it. Since you repeat the idea here, I will repeat my response from the other thread:

“This is a terrible idea. It would be the greatest gift a troll could ever want. They could hide all their misdeeds by simply deleting the game evidence. Consequently, it would become much more difficult if not impossible to discover and ultimately suspend habitual abusers. It would also eliminate the only means players have of vetting an opponent.”

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Thank you for pointing me to this discussion. However, I would like to clarify that my request concerns a more specific situation.

In my case, this happened in a correspondence game. I remained clearly ahead even after the game had entered the endgame, but I eventually lost on time because my opponent continued playing instead of resigning.

I am not suggesting that AI should routinely interrupt normal games or automatically decide the winner whenever one player appears to be ahead. I am specifically concerned about cases in which the result is already practically decided, yet the losing player continues making moves and benefits from the opponent running out of time.

On Yugen no Ma, an administrator may intervene and stop a game in such circumstances. Pandanet also clearly states in its etiquette guidelines that players should resign when the position is obviously hopeless, rather than continue making meaningless moves or allow the game to end by timeout.

OGS does not appear to have an administrator actively supervising individual games. Therefore, I am requesting a button that would allow a player to ask the system to review the position and, when appropriate, send a neutral prompt encouraging the losing player to resign.

This would not be the same as one player directly telling the opponent, “You should resign.” The message would come from the system only after a review, and it would be intended to prevent deliberate time-wasting and unfair timeout results in clearly decided games.

My request is therefore not simply for AI to interrupt games. It is for a limited mechanism to address deliberate stalling in correspondence games where the outcome is already clear.