Mass-timeout-annul fix

[shinuito]

@Conrad_Melville

(You are not the only one who can condescend.)

Not intending to condescend, just replying to what I was reading.

I don’t think the mass timeout rule is really there for a rare incapacitating event, I think it’s just an easy example where it seems harsh to blame someone.

@anoek

There have been several instances where very active (and pretty good) players have, for one reason or another, timed out on dozens of games they had going on, which decimated their rank. Many of these players came back to the site and continued playing with their new ranking, which meant they would naturally drag down everyone else as a result. (While this isn’t a huge number of instances, the players that were drug down far enough for this to matter were prolific enough players that they did actually have an impact on the system as a whole.)

@anoek

Players who timeout of a correspondence game will be flagged. Their ratings will be adjusted normally for the first timeout, however if they timeout of any more correspondence games while the flag is set we will no longer ding their rating, protecting them and the system from mass timeouts. Players with this flag set will not be able to join correspondence tournaments or ladders until they clear the flag by completing a ranked correspondence game over the course of at least two days with some kind player willing to give them another chance.

If you look at the one of the original posts (I assume) of the introduction of such a rule, there’s no mention of why they timed out in order to qualify, they just did. It was more for the players who play a lot, than for a lot of players also.

Anyway the point is people stop playing for any number of reasons as mentioned

@jlt

Serial timeouts can be caused by

1. Extraordinary events (accidents, illness, loss of internet connection…)
2. Having other priorities in life (work or personal problems) and forgetting about OGS.
3. Timing out on purpose games which were in a losing position.

My guess is that reason #2 is more frequent that #1 (especially for people who have hundreds of ongoing correspondence games) but of course there is no way to check.

and I personally think that in the above 1 and 2 are fine, but when there’s evidence of 3 AND all the games are being annulled then there’s likely an exploit happening.

I mean if it’s particularly annoying people that a certain person times out of losing games when they’re not being annulled we could say something to them, or somebody that dislikes them can block them etc. You could introduce some small punishment like the flag on their profile that used to exist, only that too was removed, I think maybe it was buggy.