My question was (obviously I hope) rhetorical, but the point I was making was that taking a strict stance against passing early being sandbagging and therefore prohibited and leading to bans, contrasts with server bugs and culture leading to people effectively sandbagging not through choice but circumstance. The fact timeouts in even games between widely different ranked players distorts the ranking system so much more than in appropriately handicapped games is one reason I have long lobbied for handicap on by default, and lamented the anti-handicap OGS culture.
Obviously if there are mitigating circumstances, such as “I timed out there due to a server issue” then that’s not assessed as sandbagging.
We’re not even talking about sandbagging by abandonment. We’re talking about deliberate sandbagging by passing. Which I personally take a hard line on (*), as explained. I haven’t yet heard a reason why we should be soft on people making the outcome of ranked games not reflect their skill by doing early passing…
And I totally disagree with the sentiment that “server bugs lead to sandbagging”. The bug you are referring to is extremely rare - the main cause of sandbagging here is people deliberately throwing games. Creating second accounts with a low rank is another source. And the culture, as reflected by the stream of reports that complain about it, is that we all hate that.
(*) Note: “hard line” really only ever boils down to a “please don’t do that” message. Early-passing isn’t even a persistent kind of problem that we face. Generally people who’ve done it just didn’t realise that it’s not the right thing to do!
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Not true. Alt sandbagging is vastly more common than rank-manipulation sandbagging. I have pointed that out many times in the Forums.
Maybe. Let’s bundle those two into “the main causes of sandbagging” - in stark contrast to the idea that “server bugs is a cause of sandbagging”, which frankly is a laughable proposition. That was the point that I was making, rather than trying to compare the scale of the two actual causes.
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I would not like that very much at all.
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