He is simply trying to protect himself against antisocial behavior and gave the specific example of disconnects. If that isn’t understood, then the whole conversation is at cross-purposes.
To be clear, I do understand this is the reason. And I still consider that OP’s behavior, while probably not against OGS’ rules, is kind of rude. I don’t think this is a lack of understanding, just a different opinion than yours.
Yes, they are free not to chat, but to deny recognition of an equal preference to be greeted is pure prejudice when it lacks a rationale for favoring one over the other.
Also this is really mixing two different things. The opposite of “being free not to chat” is “being free to chat”, and one is not favored over the other.
Similarly “Cancelling every game where the other doesn’t reply” should be paired with “Cancelling every game where the other sends a chat”, and I think both would gather negative reactions.
As I’ve pointed out before, the whole OGS game creation workflow with cancellation issues of:
Player 1 makes challenge
Player 2 accepts without 1 having choice
Game starts
Player 1 is then expected to poke around player 2’s user profile to vet them now if they wish (whilst the clock is ticking, uh oh blitz)
Player 1 may then cancel if they don’t like them
Player 2 may also cancel if they feel like it (but they probably should have done this vetting before accepting, but maybe they don’t like player 1’s choice of opening e.g. tengen or unusual corners or something). Maybe player 1 is now away-from-keyboard because they don’t need to take any action for step 3 to happen so step 1 could have been 10 minutes ago.
would be avoided by following the more classic game creation workflow of places like KGS:
Player 1 makes a challenge
Player 2 accepts challenge
Player 1 sees player 2 in game challenge dialog
Player 1 accepts or declines player 2 based on vetting them from challenge window
Game starts
No cancellations possible
This means your vetting procedure can only be based on the history of that user looking in their profile etc, and cannot include such factors as whether they say “Hi” or open at tengen, both good things IMO. You also get games starting when both players are ready (unless player 1 takes ages to vet), which reduces the need for that blue game start timer which causes problems of its own.
I think we should be careful with making jokes, or being sarcastic, as reaction to a non-joke thread. Being put on the spot in a public forum, with multiple users arguing “against” you, can be very disheartening on its own, especially for people who are new in a community. I’ve been there, thinking about having my account anonymised, for a more ridiculous reason than this. Luckily somebody gave me courage to stay, but not all are so fortunate.
I agree with this - ridicule would not be appropriate. Nor was it intended.
The memes that I posted were not intended to ridicule the OP, they were intended to illustrate the different ways of looking at the issue compared to the first meme - which seemed to imply “of course it is natural to expect these people to respond to my ‘hi’”.
We actually have something akin to this in place for “Online Leagues” (a rather niche use-case accessible only via APi at the moment).
There’s a landing page where both players have to press “OK I’m ready” before the game starts.
Since we have some of the building blocks I wonder if we can explore: how does this help?
How long does Player 2 have to wait around while they are being vetted? What if Player 1 is AFK at that point? Can Player 2 now leave? Can the players talk to each other during this process?
These are genuine questions … maybe this discussion becomes the trigger for that change…
Maybe one can also consider that it’s just a game, and you don’t need to vet every opponent you play? If they misbehave, in chat, in scoring, timing out and so on, then you report them, block them if you want, and move on.
I am a friendly player and try to compliment nice play. It never occurred to me to “hi” back at the start of a game. So yes, cultural shift to include people who just thought it was a nice thing that some people do. Henceforth I will try & say hi.
What you ridicule as “legalistically” and “rat holes” is simply deconstruction of bad writing that has produced specious argumentation consisting of a straw-man argument, misdirection, and a truckload of irrelevancies.
Your clarification is no help. I don’t understand why it is so hard to explicitly answer a simple question: If someone cancels a game they created, is that treated the same as their cancellation of a game created by someone else? So far, it seems like you are implying that those situations are treated the same, based simply on the number of reports generated. If so, that is a huge change in OGS policy since just a couple years ago. Moreover, it gives no guidance whatsoever to the player, who has no idea how many reports will be generated. It also appears to be an arbitrary standard based on how many reports a particular mod considers too many.
At the very least, such gigantic changes in OGS moderating policy should be announced in the Forums. That would be truly helpful, not only to players, but to mods who might not have to deal with as many reports after the announcement.
I do sympathize, because it can be fun to socialize a bit during games. But most people just want to play, so I only reply if they enter a message, rather than initiate a “have a good game” greeting myself. Nobody seems to leave the game just because I’m silent, so all is well.
As a related issue, I have a Go game on my mobile device (BadukPop) that gives you a choice of some fixed things to say to your opponent, translated into their language. So you can say “Hi! Have a great game” or “Oops, my move was wrong” or “Thanks, you played well” and, as a plus, know that they will understand you in their own language.
OGS could do exactly the same thing with an hour or two of programming work to get it going for a first release with just three or so human languages, translated once only by DeepL or ChatGPT.
You can very simply support either translations or customisation. In this case OGS opted for customisation as you can see the edit button in the top right. All static text on OGS is (should be) translatable. Having both customization AND translation is trickier, but becoming easier with things like chatgpt. Improvements like this are making their way into certain corners of OGS and could forseeably make it to this specific corner in the not too distant future but AFAIK it’s not yet planned.
BHydden, I did not mean to ask for real translation, only for selecting one of six or so phrases that were manually translated at OGS build time. Certainly not at run time!
I would certainly say that if this feature clearly exists. I don’t see a user manual for OGS anywhere, nor do I see in a game screen a clearly labeled way to send pre-translated messages to the opponent. I can only honestly reflect the experience of OGS that I actually have as a user.
