I played a dozen of games yesterday with people ranging from 11k-2k. Almost half of my games end with either my SDK opponent trying random things that obviously won’t work in my territory. I was under the impression that this kind of behavior is more common among new players. Just wondering if people are noticing the same thing. Is this due to rank inflation or go etiquette in OGS is getting worse lately?
Eg.https://online-go.com/game/12871953
Eg: https://online-go.com/game/12868984
Eg: https://online-go.com/game/12859396
It comes off to me as kyu bot behavior. A lot of people are implementing and programming bots these days. That said, it doesn’t really seem possible that all three could be bots without the tag. I think OGS has a specific protocol that needs to be followed in order to connect a bot to the system. In all of the games that you posted, the other player did not say “hi” or anything at the beginning of the game, which is another related but probably irrelevant point.
Hmm… yea I don’t really don’t think half of my opponents are bots. That would be kind of horrifying given that it is also rather difficult to program and human-like kyu level bot and their filling-stone play are a bit human-like as well(bot tend to go for more direct Atari or something). There’s a few other examples of the player saying gg or other stuff but end up doing the same thing to me. I wonder if it’s because I was playing some troll opening…
You see similar play on tygem as well. It’s basically just players trying to take every possible path to victory even if some are reliant on opponents making seemingly obvious mistakes. Some players simply don’t like to resign until every possible path to victory is explored.
There is an opinion that this kind of play is not very “respectful” but I think that opinion is a little too Japanese in a world where China and Korea dominate professional play.
(For the record, I too am a little Japanese in my play, but for me winning isn’t everything, for others it is)
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I recall a top Korean pro did something similar in an official pair go tournament a few years back(like 7-8 years ago) and people still haven’t really forgiven him for doing so even though it’s because he misinterpreted their coach’s instruction. It’s common but I guess no one will brag about playing like this to their friend in China/Korea. You can see in the games above that we’re both aware there’s were no path to victory(given that they are SDK level players) unless I time out. I recall kind of behavior was not so common in my memory after I pass the 15k threshold (maybe once in 15 games or so) back then in OGS… Definitely not anything like 5 times in 14 games or something. Is it just me who’s feeling this way?
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I would definitely agree that such play gets less common as you climb the ranks… perhaps it is simply a statistical anomaly that you happened to find a bunch of these players all close together. In my experience it’s rare enough for a large percentage of games to go all the way to end game but I mostly play 19x19 rather than 9x9
I think in 9x9 people tend to have more of an attitude that anything is possible.
As you climb the rank shenanigans get more high-level and harder to counter. Even Haylee tried some shenanigans against Leela.