I have a couple related proposals for dealing with timeouts. Not coincidentally, I’ve been having a lot of opponents timeout in games recently!
Here are my two ideas:
Show percentage of games that a person has timed out of in their profile. Maybe break this down by correspondence vs live games.
Allow me to automatically block people with more than X% timeouts from accepting the games I post.
2.a. Don’t allow me to accept the games they post either.
What shoudl X% be? I have no idea. Ideally, the system would just automatically set this to something like 2x the median percentage.
I’m really sick of people timing out to end lost games. Just hit the damn resign button!
Please, let’s keep in mind the distinction between legitimate timeouts (when people run out of time while thinking, most often in blitz games) and people who timeout as a highly dishonorable form of resignation—such people are “escapers.” There were (are?) a couple players on OGS who play 5 s. per move. Almost all their games end in legitimate timeout. Even Haylee legitimately timed out once in her Live Go series, when she got distracted by her own streaming and lost track of whose turn it was.
If you check that before you play a move, you can cancel if the result isn’t to your liking. Unless you’re white and the bug still exists that causes cancelling to not annul the game automatically. In that case, contact a mod and ask for annulment.
and also much more information about any user. Unfortunately it doesn’t distinguish between blitz timeouts and correspondence timeouts.
ps. I quite like your ideas but in fairness to the discussion and the devs time, I have to point out that only 4% of your wins are by timeout(see above).
I think if you looked at the last 30 days it’d be a fair bit higher. It seems to have been worse recently, but maybe that’s because I’ve been playing quite a bit more since the US Go Congress.
Hmm, looking more closely at my own record I’m not sure this would show the info I need. A game I played last night ended when my opponent escaped, but it shows up in my record as a win by resignation.
Of course the easiest solution of all is “deal with it”, shrugs. The percentage of people who close the tab or whatever is extremely low so if you just block them you can further minimize the % of meeting these people.
I think that may be the difference between an actual timeout versus escaping. And that makes me wonder if the OGS system is recording the escaping at all.
Escapes decided by the thunderbolt are shown as resignations, because they are resignations, albeit in a highly dishonorable form (i.e., not a bug). But escapes that result in timeout by the regular clock before the thunderbolt strikes (i.e., less than 5 minutes on the regular clock), are shown as timeouts.
I think there might be some of those jerks who timeout because of a bad connection though, that would be quite sad, to hurt them. Luckily I play correspondence here, because my internet can be quite choppy (nothing is as annoying as losing a game you’ve practically won because your internet stops working)
I agree that it is very rude behavior and extremely juvenile in nature, whether done by 12-year-olds or 50-year-olds. I wouldn’t mind seeing them called out, but OGS discourages shaming actions—an understandable policy.
Yes, I agree that some of them are surely network issues. This is why I’d only want to block people who are greatly exceeding the statistically median number of disconnects over time.
