I do too.
I meant it as business as usual will go on, the site keeps running.
And I think in this case they should reconsider having to add so many if and buts and imagined (as in let’s imagine this and that, probably there’s a better word for this that eludes me atm) reasons for annulling games. A simpler and clearer solution is obviously requested by people and it warranties consideration.
Maybe the issue here is that it is too prominent that annulment “undoes” a win. I thought that would be a good idea because I had a situation where I lost a game that didn’t really make sense to me, and mods basically said “doesn’t matter it was annulled anyway”, so I sent a PR to make it clear that win/loss is irrelevant after annulment (Loss by disconnection when opponent hasn't played - #11 by jonesbe). But I didn’t realize it goes the other way as well. Maybe annulment should act more silently again. However, if that happens, I’d ask that disconnection losses don’t happen unless it is the disconnecter’s turn!
I appreciate all the posts here. I like to think that discussing hard cases openly like this can help us improve our policies and be better moderators.
As @AdamR and others have mentioned, annulling this game involved many competing concerns. I don’t want to reward leaving an ongoing game, and I don’t want to discourage reporting these issues. On the other hand, the rating is intended to provide equally matched and exciting games, as mentioned in the site documentation. This latter policy sometimes requires mod action. For example, we annul games when a player intentionally throws a game (sandbagging). We also annul games when a player who, while winning, times out of a game through no fault of their own and asks for an annulment. The annulment is a compromise: we don’t allocate the rating points properly; we just count it as if the game was never played. Neither side can be satisfied completely, but not counting the game reflects the uncertainty involved in these situations.
This game involved similar concerns. Although the opponent here stopped playing moves, it wasn’t clear why they stopped playing. They were apparently winning, and it was equally apparent that nothing on the board led them to rage quit (for example, they lost no stones or groups) as sometimes happens with escapers. Since this was the case, I was facing an inequitable rank decrease to the player more likely to win, an inequitable rank increase to the player more likely to lose, and a penalty to a player whose inability to continue may not have been their fault. Annulment seemed the right thing to do under the circumstances, and it was in line with our policy in similar situations.
To be clear about the timeline, I first offered to judge the game a draw. When the timer elapsed, it was then a separate decision whether to annul it.
There was a post just now about a player saying they got a win by resignation but the game was annulled, but it was deleted before I got to read the whole thing.
Since we can’t get a clear picture from a post we can’t see, theoretically why would a mod annul a game won by resignation? We can’t even resign now?
Thank you for your calm and insightful comments as always @mark5000
This changes things significantly for me frankly.
The initial issue was “I had to wait a long time” and given the alternative is to resign and take a loss, the offer of a draw seems like a great compromise. Take half the points and no more waiting, why not.
After that, if the thought was “I can wait a bit longer and claim a win” my sympathy is running out!
I think this is covered above isn’t it? If a game is resigned from a winning position it’s probably sandbagging. I can see why that would be annulled.
Because that player was a sandbagger.
Does… this mean the system supports draws? 
There’s a long-standing jigo bug that made me believe otherwise!
Since we’re so far OT…
I had understood that moderator decision draws are actual draws and displayed as such. Only jigo situations on the board are buggy.
Yes, sort of. A moderator can declare a tie by moderator decision during the scoring phase (or earlier). You’d need to report it and get a moderator there without exiting the scoring phase.
Once the game exits scoring phase with a declared result, it can’t be turned into a tie; it can only be annulled (which I’m sure you know is not the same for ranking purposes).
The bug is that games with integer komi can’t end in ties on their own. The tie result is only accessible through mod action.
Considering everything that has been said up to this point, I see this as moderators meddling with game results by annulling based on what they personally think “would probably happen” to maintain some idealized “rank system” that can never be perfect. Unless the game had ended, it can go absolutely any way and not even the best pro player can say with 100% what the result will be.
I understand the principle but this is wrong and shouldn’t happen.
Unless it’s sandbagging, and unless you can verify that absolutely zero games go unattended (thus actually providing that coveted rank accuracy), this is just meddling to give some imagined “benefit of doubt” to someone who timed out.
Technical issues are part of life and we are making it seem like it’s some disaster. It’s just a lost game because the power went out, big deal.
I take it there is an explanation put in the game chat that that what’s happened?
“Game annulled because resigned opponent is sandbagging”.
And then the other player wouldn’t need to post a thread to find out.
Sorry for the OT comment, but that is good to know! It gives me hope because I thought it wasn’t supported at all, so there’d be all sorts of plumbing involved to get the Jigo bug. Makes more sense why Ties are supported on the front end as well.
Cheers
This seems like a good idea.
Yes, the game was about to expire and had few seconds when i asked the mod to speak to the opponent. He offered to cancel it. I declined and stated the reason why to which he agreed. But then he goes and cancels it.
When we annul a sandbagger’s games, it’s not uncommon for us to have tens and in some cases even hundreds of games to go through. It’s not reasonable to expect us to post an explanation in the game chat of each game. Also, a forum post is not necessary since there’s a happy little “call moderator” button in the game where they could ask anything they want.
I unlisted that post since it was basically naming and shaming. There was no need for the community to be able to read it.
I didn’t get to the whole thing, but I support this in any case.
I understand that, but maybe it’s not unreasonable for people to expect some explanation for what happened with their games? Not everyone knows about the “call moderator” thing (and imagine if those hundreds of opponents created “mod signals” for all those games), people come to ask here in the forums sometimes even.
I don’t know if it’s technically easy to have a different text option for sandbagging annulments, or a checkmark or sth, that will mark that game as “annulled because of sandbagging”.
Eh… I don’t like the “its not reasonable to expect us to post an explanation” statement… a lot of this argument is about how it doesn’t feel reasonable from the players perspective that there game was anulled.
From your perspective it is not reasonable to have to post an explanation. It just seems like everyone has to go with what the moderator feels is reasonable like a “my way or the highway” kind of situation and that the players thought didn’t actually matter.
So the idea is that if its reasonable for the moderator to annul the game it can be done but if the player does not feel there game should not be annulled in an opinionated situation it should still be annulled.
At least it feels that way from how most of this discussion has gone…
This falls in the same category as naming & shaming, though, having several of your games marked as sandbagging games. We already occasionally have problems with people being rather aggressive towards perceived sandbaggers, this would only incentivise more of that sort of problems.
In this case, I’m not even sure if the sandbagging player was doing it on purpose: some players resign games early since they get bored or because they don’t like endgame, not aware that it’s a form of sandbagging.
In this case, I’m not even sure if the sandbagging player was doing it on purpose: some players resign games early since they get bored or because they don’t like endgame, not aware that it’s a form of sandbagging.
I see this quite a bit actually even in the upper ranks there is a player who leaves a few games because he is bored or has to go eat so they just resign.
We do usually give an explanation for most actions. It’s just the sandbagging annulment of games that is problematic, since these are literally tens or hundreds of games, usually with countless different opponents.
By the reason in my post above, putting the explanation in the public game chat is not very kind to the supposed sandbagger (who might be unaware of their mistake). Unfortunately the messaging system on OGS doesn’t allow us to bulk-message users either, so it would just mean that we would have to spend a lot more time dealing with sandbaggers.
If it were easier, or if we would not receive so many sandbagging reports, or be with more moderators, that would be another story, but sadly we don’t really have enough capacity to give an explanation to every annulled game.