I’m not sure what category this belongs in, but I’ve had some recent frustrations with my opponent playing a handful of moves, then timing out. Sometimes, this annuls that game, even if they’ve played. What’s the threshold? Thanks ahead of time.
i think someone mentioned 19 moves recently?
please correct me if i’m wrong : )
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that’s true for 19×19 boards, it’s 13 for 13×13 and 9 for 9×9.
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ah ok, thank you : )
Those are all annoyingly high, especially 9x9. I’ve had people resign in less than that.
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Yeah. I also feel they are way too high. If you play more than 1 stone on the board then it usually means that it was not a misclick. So Anything over 4 moves could be considered a game.
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This is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. So now I win the opening, they resign, and the game is annulled. How does that make sense?
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I agree. Something around 4-5 moves (for all board sizes) seems much more reasonable.
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One recommendation is to restrict rank to players closer to your rank range. New players tend to resign too early against stronger players if they feel like they are behind in the opening.
Also, it was way too early to claim victory in the opening. 
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I think we should revisit this. Right now, the threshold is two moves. Black plays, White plays, and then we assume that both players chose to play a rank-worthy game.
The problem I’m seeing most often is between players of greatly mismatched ranks. Just the other day, I saw a 3 kyu playing like a beginner. As it turns out, they had a string of opponents who resigned very early, not because they were losing, but because they didn’t want to spend half an hour against a player who didn’t challenge them at all.
In my view, the cut-off should give each player the chance to asses skill, without going too far into the weeds on that. I propose cutting off after move 6. This gives each player two corner plays plus one. If there’s a great big mismatch in skill, it should be clear by then.
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Hello, I would like to report an identity theft, bugcat has just signed in as mark5000.
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I would expect a new thread and a link to the earlier discussion by the legitimate owner of the mark5000 account 
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I think this is a separate problem that should also be addressed, because technically it belongs to the “escapers” category, no?
It should be clear to who, though? Because probably only to the really stronger opponent. Is this only so that the stronger opponent can leave an unchallenging game without a score? It seems a bit one-sided, to be honest.
My personal opinion would be 4 moves. Once you play a second move, you should know if you want to play this particular game or not. If it doesn’t go as expected, it happens, better luck next time; predicting if a game will be enjoyable is a bit far-fetched.
And if some are afraid of mismatches, they can always:
-restrict rank in challenges
-play unranked if the opponent is [?]
-report soon enough so a string of games doesn’t follow.
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Suppose, I start an even game and I get black. If I play at 4-4 and my opponent immediately responds with a 3-3 invasion underneath, which I don’t like, then is it acceptable for me to quit that game without rating penalty?
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Yes and no. The problem has the form of a positive feedback loop: absolute beginners win one of their first games against a strong opponent not wanting to play against somebody with zero experience, this ranks them up to play against stronger and stronger opponents, who become less and less likely to play out the game to the finish.
It’s a form of escaping, yes, but the opponent is severely airbagging, and likely neither player wants to be in the situation to begin with.
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I am very doubtful that anybody can asses another persons go skill after only 6 moves (really 3 moves by opponent). Even professionals sometimes play experimental openings.
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Here’s a suggestion:
The first 10 games are used to decide approximate rank, rank cannot be deduced in a game with few moves (for example, say, less than 40 moves in 19x19), thus for new accounts games with few moves or with the player who is ahead resigning the game are annulled automatically with the reason that they’re bad for quickly establishing a rank for the new account. Nothing changes for accounts with established rank.
Except, now that we’re at this topic anyways, I’d like to see that players who regularly resign a lot of games while being far ahead according to the analysis get automatically flagged for moderator attention (since these are sandbaggers) and perhaps automatically annulled as well.
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This is where I see a problem, though. Either players should be required to finish up their games or not. Saying that “the stronger player not wanting to play a pleab must have an x-move window to get up and leave” sounds somewhat weird (yes I know this is not the sentiment, but it does sound a bit like it).
When black box beginners enter the system, there’s going to be some form of adjustment. Imagine if the newcomer is a 9 Dan IRL trying to get into the online scene and they abandon all their first games with the SDKs because they are not “challenging” enough. They would probably get banned, no?
Trying to skew the adjustment so that the strong players can “escape” a game they don’t want to play out seems a bit superficial.
Oh no, not this again… What would be an acceptable “ahead” here and at what move?.. I’ll just put this down on the floor where I found it, step over it and move on.
I suggest more than 5 games, in a row, resigned by the same person, with less than 10 moves, to get automatically flagged.
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its impossible to asses skill in 6 moves, it will just lead to escapers that don’t like your opening.
My 5-5 in each corner opening is actually strong, with 3-4 point I get worse results for some reason - possibly because they know how to deal with 3-4 and have no idea how to deal with 5-5. And everyone will start to escape that 5-5.
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To give a frame of reference, this is the kind of game I had in mind that the system should annul by default: Spinachbooh vs. newbury.ndewedo
I like the four-move proposal. It would cover this case and improve on the current situation. It also helps mitigate the most obvious counter-argument to change: that players will resign to avoid certain openings they dislike. On the other hand, move 3 “3-3” invasions aren’t unheard of these days. And this was why we have the two-move condition in the first place.
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Say Black resigns a game while KataGo thinks Black has been ahead with 20+ points for the last 50 moves and the estimated win percentage for Black is 99.9%. Then Black resigns. And then it turns out that Black did this not just once, but 10 times in the last few days.
I call that sandbagging and would annul those games as a moderator anyways. Why not have an automatic system do that? All the tools are already there, after all, and such players would receive a warning anyways when they would get reported.