So I was reading all your musings about correspondence timeouts, timeout losses in general and so on and so forth. It seems to me that the grievances are plenty and well-founded.
The Needs of the Vociferous
I distilled from all this input a few key ideas that properly represent the voices of the community’s loudest members: More efficient ways to reduce their pool of potential opponents by having the website be judgemental - for you.
The solution
Metric based badges. I will propose a few so you can get the gist of it, then you’re free to add badges and link them to metrics as you like.
Serial Calamity Joe - unranked correspondence game losses due to serial timeout / total correspondence losses > 0.5
The Baby - 0 games played, may not be 13 kyu.
The Count - scored losses > resignations+timeouts
The Dune - ranked winrate >= 85%
Time Mismanager - timeouts > resignations+scored losses
Troll - Losses by mod decision > 0
The “Teacher” - unranked winrate >= 85% (perhaps && average game has rank disparity > 3)
I see that all of the badges proposed would automatically drop off once the criteria are not longer met. However the “Troll” badge, once gained would never drop off. Maybe that one needs to be rethought a little? Maybe something like “> 1 of the last 20 games played were marked a loss by mod decision” or something? That way the person could loose the badge by changing their ways…
Badger - losses of > 30 points exceeds losses of < 30 points. (i.e., (s)he plays on even when it should be obvious that (s)he has lost.) This one might need some adjustment based on board size.
It’s an interesting idea that might have potential, though the actual OP post has some flaws.
For instance, there are some dan players that play a lot of teaching games with kyu players, and you’d expect that they win 90% of them. I wouldn’t want those helpful community members branded as sandbaggers.
Hmm… I don’t consider the “Badger” badge I suggested as shaming. It’s more of a “style of play” issue. It says, “I don’t like to resign” which isn’t shameful at all and some people prefer playing such a person.
I think you make a good point about “player shaming” but if the badges are well thought out, this feature isn’t a shaming feature.
The finisher - don’t time out in >99% of correspondence games
Fledgeling/journeyman/go fanatic - Greater than 5/50/500 rated games
The Underdog - Over 100 games and winrate < 40%
You may not outright want to call these “shaming” but they’re all negative traits that people complain about. I don’t see a purpose to these other than helping players avoid people that do things they don’t like. If certain user behaviors are legal but “bad” in some way, we should prefer system level changes that stop people from doing those things over a system of shaming people for what we perceive as bad manners.