I think this discussions raises some very fundamental questions:
- What is sandbagging?
- At what point is intervention necessary?
Before this discussion, I was under the impression that it would only be considered sandbagging (and require some sort of intervention) if the behavior (of artificially reducing one’s rank) was deliberate. However, from this discussion, it seems apparent that the moderators define this more broadly to include (and act on) cases where such behavior may be unintentional and even if the player might be unaware of what they are doing.
I think this broader categorization raises some difficult questions about where to draw the line.
@stone.defender gave a good example above to illustrate this:
@Gia also made a good point recently above about games ruined by misclicks.
Imagine a relatively weak player who is making their best effort, but still they occasionally misjudge (or even just miscount) the position and resign prematurely (when the game is far from decided, or even when KataGo believes they are winning). Should these cases really be considered a form of sandbagging that requires annulment? Or are they merely performing at their level of strength? One could even view resigning prematurely (or erroneously) as an extreme blunder. It would be difficult to tell such players to avoid making such mistakes, when they are genuinely using their best judgement.
By annulling such games, and discarding these instances of their misjudgment, I believe one might even actually be biasing the rating system to essentially airbag them, since, in future games, they are still liable to repeat such mistakes, which were not properly measured by the rating system due to annulments.