I’m surprised this made it so far without a poll
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Would it be reasonable to have the flexibilities kick in for more than 2v2?
In that for 2v2 you get “normal Rengo”, team clock, loss on timeout and all that. For 3+ on a team (or 1vX I guess) you get individual clocks, pass on timeout or next teammate plays on timeout and all that more casual stuff.
5 Likes
I’m amused with the thought that this could be an advantage in a high Dan/tpk pairing where the tpk passing is actually better than the blunder they were thinking about…
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It’s not just trolls, but also players who might get tired of the game and want to leave or who just disappear for whatever reason. In tournaments of any length, usually about half of the players resign or time out. There’s no reason to expect Rengo games with random players to be any better.
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Sorry, but this is not a good idea for ordinary games. It would simply enhance the annoyance value of escapers. First you would have to wait for the usual interval (game clock or lightning bolt), then you would have to pass, then you would have to wait for the scoring clock to time out. Escapers are already a plague, and we don’t need anything to enhance their power.
By the way, no one should be surprised if a troll does one day attack a rengo game, like any other game. Rengo would be an ideal target for NYCT, should he ever return to OGS. (I am not spelling that out in case a troll or potential troll is lurking here. The mods know who I am talking about, and that is enough.)
1 Like
I would have thought that if the lightning bolt were triggered then this would still be loss by disconnection. (But actually Rengo might need a different solution…)
OT thoughts on time settings and pass on timeout
And pass on timeout would not work with absolute timing since you would still have no time after the pass.
Does pass count as stone placement in Canadian?
What about byo-yomi and Fischer? Would you just get the last byo-yomi period or Fischer increment back each time?
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You are right about the lightning. My mistake, However, the bulk of 5x30s games end in timeout when someone escapes.
My first thought was Among Us, they do a similar thing for booting. I like this.
I think for a single genuine troll, all players would probably be motivated to kick, and a unanimous vote prevents tyranny by the organizer 
if there’s two trolls, I don’t know what to say besides “call moderators!”
The way I understand it though, the more frequent case is not trolls, but inexperienced users who just forget about/leave the game. Hopefully that will get better when rengo settles in? Maybe a bunch of folks joined OGS just to see if the rengo rumors were legit 
2 Likes
I rather suspect that if there is a/are genuine troll(s) in the game then people will just resign or leave as that is likely to be easier/faster than any kind of booting voting system.
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In a game where any player can click resign at any time and ruin it for everyone, a complicated troll-voting system is bound to be useless. And the 50% of players who will timeout the whole game for more innocent reasons seems like a far bigger problem.
These are non-serious unranked games anyway, so at least let organizers have a little power to run the game, just as tournament directors or really anyone inviting friends to a real-life game would! Then as long as we choose organizers we trust and are lucky enough not to have real trolls, we’ll have a chance of finishing some fun games.
2 Likes
I think this could be solved by forking. If a game ends by timeout or by troll resignation, then just let the game end. If the players want to keep playing, they (or the organizer) can fork the game. They can communicate in the game chat to coordinate who will do the forking.
Only problem is, the forking interface doesn’t support this. It would be nice if whoever makes the fork could invite multiple players, so they can keep playing with the existing players/replace the player who dropped with someone else (e.g. send out an invitation on the site chat)/reassign players to teams/etc.
6 Likes
But this means that the whole clock has to run down waiting in the mean time.
If you had a clock per person, you can keep it shorter and wait less time…
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How it is now able to work only with people who know each other.
With big enough team with anonymous random people, “troll” problem becomes close to 100% chance
no, anonymous random people will just go to random new games and no one will return to fork of time-outed game
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Yeah, I agree that alternate ways of timing the game and handling timeouts are called for in correspondence and many-playered games. I’d love to have the option, but if we must have one or the other, I don’t want to sacrifice vanilla 2v2 rengo in favor of an edge case.
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Can you clarify what is precious that would be sacrificed?
I haven’t properly appreciated this yet.
In a conversation on this topic (in a game somewhere that was being held up by an escaper) I came to realise that the clock in 1v1 serves TWO purposes.
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It is a contract between the players about how much each person is allowed to think … it is part of the “pressure of the game”, and the skill of winning includes managing this time. We often give each other a budget of “main time” to use for this purpose, so that we can think enough between each time we have to play.
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It is a way to deal with people who disappear. Even in 1v1 it’s not perfect, which is why we have the lightning bolt. But that doesn’t work for Rengo, because it doesn’t help with people in the game but AFK
In 1v1, however, the only person who suffers the punishment for their AFK is the person themselves.
In Rengo, the whole group of players suffers for the one person’s bad behaviour - which is why this setup doesn’t work.
So if we say “well, we agree that we each have X minutes per turn” then this achieves the same thing a different way.
- You only ever have to wait X minutes if someone leaves
- You get N * X minutes to think between each turn, so you don’t need main time
It seems like a good deal.
The only fly in the ointment is that it is true that Rengo is easier with less players, so in some ways the team with the escaper benefits. I can’t think of a way out of that yet. I’m not sure it’s a showstopper, just a small unfortunate fact maybe?
2 Likes
Part of the skill of rengo is working with your partner. Does your partner have trouble in time pressure, but you don’t mind going into byo-yomi early? someone needs to compromise.
This is only true if a team suffering for their teammate’s bad behavior necessarily implies that the suffering shouldn’t happen. It is a part of team games that you will sometimes suffer because of your teammates. It is unfortunate when it happens, but it would be even less fair to your opponents who managed to work together to not let your team reap the consequences of poor teamwork. Rengo is a game between two teams, not four players, and the clock reflects that.
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I see - I get it.
This points even more to the fact that we DO need an option here.
Some people will want to play rengo without the risk of “that darn rando abandonning”, and per-player clock with no main time seems perfect for this.
Others value the broader teamwork skills, and like the team-clock-management …
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I definitely think it would be a useful option to have individual clocks so long as we don’t lose the option to play as it is. I think the correspondence and many-playered (I’d say maybe 4-6/team or more?) games brought up in this thread are great use cases for this.
OT EDIT: the 4 per team is taken from Heinlein’s “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” where Prof. Bernardo de la Paz says that more than 3 people can never agree on what to have for dinner, never mind anything of greater importance.
2 Likes
Suggestion for team games: use absolute time settings but with per turn timers. If a player fails to make a move on their turn, they get kicked out. Then their team gets a time penalty (maybe equivalent to the timedout player’s proportional share of the clock?).
This deals with the rando problem in large team games while still maintaining an element of time management.