I am getting fed up with some players seemingly just letting the clock run down rather than resigning, passing or playing a move when they are in a losing position.
I can only think that there is some motivation that losing by timeout does not impact their rating as much - is that the case?
Even if not it’s annoying and not very considerate since I have to wait around just in case they sneak in at the last minute and okay a move and my clock then runs down.
Is there any through to the impact on ratings and is there anything that can be done to change this behaviour, apart from appealing to everyone’s sense of consideration?
Send a report to a mod and leave the game.
A mod can annul the game, so you won’t be affected by that loss.
Mods can evaluate users behaviour and do what’s necessary.
That’s not the case. A loss is a loss whatever the reason, and cost the same.¹
If you think your opponent is misusing his allocated time you can call a moderator as they are competent to solve these situations.
Another thing to consider is your own choices of time setting you want to propose or accept.
There is some hope to meet less this behavior by playing stronger opponents (thanks to your progress), who will have more culture and consideration to the game itself, and their opponents
Note ¹ :there is an exception for correspondance games in the case of mass timeout (the game results are then annuled) but that is not the situation you are describing here.
There could be more as the ranking motivation. They are rude and shouldn’t be part of OGS and come with how someone cope with losing a game.
For example you may feel better to leave the final message “i couldn’t take a decision, but with more time…” as “you played better”.
Or you may lack of interest of your opponent time and care only on your own.
Or… Well there could be a lot more other (stupid) reason to behave like this as some wrong idea on the rating system.
We are working on a more stable way to deal with this problem (or at least that’s what I believe is one of the more urgent problems to work on). As a moderator, I also am quite fed up with people letting the clock run down, since that is easily 60% if not more of the total reports we receive.
The current idea I proposed (and which seems to have gained traction) is to automatically check whenever a player times out / disconnect, whether they do that often and have some automatic warning in place when it happens “too often” (whichever metric is used to judge that still has to be decided, of course), to have this warning in such a way that it blocks use of the site until the user has acknowledged that they’ve read it and agree, and automatically flag people for moderator attention when timing out continues (significantly) after the warning has been acknowledged.
I believe that as soon as such a warning system in place, the following three things will happen in order:
Many people will stop timing out, because they did not realise it was rude
We’ll get overwhelmed for a short period with dealing with the automatic reports
After most repeat offenders have been either talked into stopping or banned from the site, the problem will largely disappear altogether.
In any case, please do report such people. Although we get a lot of reports and it may sometimes take some time for them to be handled, it is still often the case that escapers go under the radar for dozens of games before brought to our attention.
Also, escaping reports are quite quick to deal with (usually takes me about 30 seconds to 1 minute to finish one).
I know it’s not usually done, but maybe it would be a good idea to use site banners from time to time, and link to issues like that in a proper mod forum post.
“please refrain from letting your clock run out, it’s rude because your opponent doesn’t know if you intend to come back or if you abandoned the game, and they have to wait for you”.
I think some things are just not communicated enough.
I have accidentally timed out in two of my recent games, therefore it’s important to make sure that we know how many are on purpose. I think there should be a tracker that shows how many times a person has timed out on Live games, although obviously this shouldn’t be for correspondence or blitz.
We can never know how many timeouts are on purpose. If somebody has a lot of time for their move, but doesn’t act, that should be reported (by users or automatically). Then the moderators will be able to recognize a pattern, if there is one, and act accordingly.
Sure. Timing out can happen, and more as one time, and still stay as a right.
But in some cases it should be very clear that there is abuse, like when the loss becomes very clear or when the player just leave and is already playing another game… I trust the experience and carefulness of our moderators to distinguish between cases.
The site could provide a “ping” feature, where if someone is taking a long time a player can send a game-ping that asks are you still there?? If no reply then the site can provide an “auto-report” button that creates a request to a moderator, it could even come back and say player X is playing another game while your game is timing out!!
The idea is to let the players “referee” their own games until one of them is an obvious bad actor.
