Just to confirm what Cool1 has said: as I understand it, the rules are still the same - if you time out a batch of games, only the first one to time out counts against you.
If this has changed, or is wrong understanding, it would be great to have someone who really knows say so.
Aassuming it is the case, what it means that you will get rank from some games that time out, but if your opponent timed out a bunch and you were one of the bunch, then they probably escaped from your game.
Personally, I think this stinks: it is so wide open to abuse. It’s quite easy to see how to line up the timing of play of all the games you are playing so that all the ones you’re losing time out at the same time. If you make the first one to time out the one you’re playing against a high ranked person, then you lose nothing.
This would be especially attractive to tournament players, who have games going in batches as a result of that.
As I understand it, the argument is that if the person timing out did so due to some real life event that caused them to unfortunately not be able to play, then the impact of timing out a bunch of games is unfairly high on them.
Personally, I think that if real life is impacting in this way, then the least of your worries is whether your ranking took a hit from timed out games. The impact of this maybe happening occasionally to someone does not seem to balance the certain chance that people can use this to cheat.
My observation is that so far, the people running OGS don’t share this view of the compromise: decisions on OGS policy tend to favour “benefit of the doubt for someone who was affected by real life” over “but this lets people cheat”.
Another argument I’ve read for not ranking a bunch of timed out games is that it might put “the whole ranking system out of balance” due to that person losing to people they otherwise would not have.
This is hogwash. If the ranking system were so fragile that the occasional event like this “puts it out of balance” then it is a bad ranking system. But actually, the only effect is that a number of people get one game as a victory that they might not otherwise. This happens for other reasons routinely - games time out individually for “real live events” and they count. The very occasional “bunch of them” is in the noise.
Personally, the rest of the benefits of OGS over other sites outweigh this irritation, but I certainly don’t like it.
GaJ