I buy that. Not enough people report bad behavior, and they should. I believe that’s a separate issue, but I’ll make a suggestion to address this anyway, let me know what you think.
We don’t need to make “correspondence timeouts” a reportable offense in order to make this issue reportable. IMO the offense is “a sustained pattern of serial correspondence timeout”.
Making (single instances of) correspondence timeouts reportable would be a mistake in my opinion. It would put an unnecessary burden on mods, and unlikely to do much to reduce the issue. Life is going to cause people to time out occasionally. Also, people make mistakes.
To address your concern about people not submitting reports… I think it should be relatively straightforward to automate detection of serial-serial-timeout. The criteria would look something like this:
User has triggered serial timeout X times in Y months
I’m not familiar with serial timeout code, but I imagine it’s not terribly complex to detect and store these numbers. Parameters can be tuned, but I think it would be something like X=3, Y=4.
In combination with your suggestion to use logins or live games to suppress serial timeout annulment, I think we could reach a better outcome in a lot of these cases.
Congratulations. You are the first person to answer a question I posed a while back: does it make sense to prohibit reporting of correspondence timeouts while allowing reporting of abuse of the serial timeout rule? In other words, it’s okay to timeout once or every other game, but don’t timeout twice in a row. I think there is a bit of philosophical inconsistency in that; however, it is probably the best solution to the reporting problem.
I think the idea of automating detection of potential serial-timeout abuse is excellent if it could be implemented. However, even with that, it is unclear whether anything would be done. As I noted, my report of the worst case I ever saw—five times in four months with long strings—was dismissed. Recently I saw a case almost as bad, but didn’t bother to report it.
FTR: I did not suggest logins to automatically break serial timeout strings, although I love the idea. I was told it was @Gia who suggested that.
To get this thread back on track, here is what I think needs to be implemented:
Logins break serial timeout strings, as suggested by Gia.
Probable wins with XX% count as wins by timeout, as suggested by @GreenAsJade.
If possible, automate detection of excessive timeout strings (X strings in Y months), as suggested by @benjito.
If possible, reinstate a flag without bugs for people who timeout from correspondence games, as suggested by me.
So there could be a reputation system to deal with the moral/etiquette side of the equation.
And the rating system could be simplified to focus only on computing the best estimate of the rating.
i know that’s not what you are suggesting, as your #1 would not improve rating estimates. I’d just really like to separate the rating system from other reward/punishment issues.
does it make sense to prohibit reporting of correspondence timeouts
I think it’s worth a clarification.
It’s not “prohibited to report correspondence timeouts”. (*)
What is the case is that the moderation team doesn’t view “a regular uneventful timeout from a correspondence game as something that needs to be corrected”.
So for example, it makes sense to report a mass timeout that appears to be cheating…
… if you get a moderator that sees it the same way, they will take action.
( * ) the quoted sentence didn’t say that it is, but its been said or implied before
This is close to the status quo. There is no rule that says “don’t timeout twice in a row”, but moderators will take action on repeat mass timeouts.
I re-read the article and am glad this mechanic was implemented when I joined OGS.
I think it’s different.
Generally speaking, you will lose to players who are stronger than you and beat players who are weaker than you.
If that’s not the case I suspect you’re sandbagging
That said, this mechanic will only cause you to lose a lot to players who are better than you, assuming you have a lot of correspondence games.
If my understanding is correct, your rank will only drop a few kyu/dan at most and then it will not drop again.
This is completely different from the fact that everything will be considered a loss after timeout, which will cause you to drop directly to 25k.
I just ran into quite a few cases of this myself (timeouts when as White in the beginning of handicap games & being White in all of them due to rank being higher than average players in the handicap tournament) when a serious life event kept me from keeping up with games for a while, and also noticed this in another player’s profile – should something be done to adjust for handicap games ?
(especially as this would affect the stronger players in handicap tournaments disproportionately, basically making it likely to lose a large number of them in the event of a timeout, such as in such circumstances :
I propose that for handicap games, White’s timeout is always canceled if the number of moves is less than 20*n, where n is the handicap number.
For 13x13 and 9x9, it is 9*n and 4*n.
