But the Problem is that I am also an innocent party. True enough, the best way would be, probably, to enable AI features only if both players are above 10 Kyu and the game is ranked. Then, you would avoid confronting beginners with AI where most of the AI feature “cheating” (even if unintentional) is happening. But if this will not happen I argue that more innocent people are hurt by not including good anti-cheating mechanisms that replace a real-life referee.
I would argue that being punished unfairly by the server is a much greater “suffering” than encountering a staller.
There is something about “unfairness” that humans simply can’t accept.
“My opponent is this game was a dick” is easily accepted, but “I would have won this game if the server hadn’t arbitrarily decided I should lose” is not.
Not to mention, there are thousands of users, but only one server. If I encounter one opponent with a bad behaviour, that’s not going to affect my pleasure when playing with other opponents. But if I encounter an unpleasant behaviour of the server, I’m going to worry about this server behaviour in all the games that I play on the server.
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That’s true, but there’s another factor we haven’t mentioned yet, which actually is probably the reason why this feature is in: moderator load.
Every time someone is left powerless to leave their game in the grips of perceived stalling, a report is raised.
Every report like this that’s raised reduces the chance of other more serious reports being raised - we need to reduce the need for moderation action.
That’s what this feature does: it let’s “the player(s) sort it out”
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But in the other case the server also arbitrary decides that I am not allowed to win because a game result can be never changed. And one score cheater Ruins the game of 20 people before they get banned by a moderator. If an AI Feature goes wrong you stop playing and get somebody involved about what happened and then you actually learned something that makes you a better player. In the other case suffering is all there is.
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The AI-assisted server decisions are not arbitrary. Three passes and a 20pt(?) lead late in the game is a pretty decent indicator that the game was going that direction.
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I thought so as well. The element of “I want to try this tricky liberty removal thing, which the AI won’t factor in” bothers me a bit.
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Yeah, the teire example is a good one, I just don’t see it happening very often. I guess it all goes to ratios as @Uberdude says.
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This would be considered very rude behavior in all offline-tournaments I know and by means of social pressure it would be discoursged unless it is a real half-point game where an additional defense can decide everything. And if we have the offline tournament experience as the bar to clear I will say that this “meddling” with the final Position can be disregarded for non-beginners
That’s where arsen’s “I don’t like this server” compared to “I don’t like this sucky player” has some sway.
But … we all hate the server when moderation is not keeping up as well…
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Yeah but there are only so many Moderators with so much of spare time. Therefore, for non-beginners tricky play during dame is not a legitimate interest for me unless it is an extremely close game where you have to go to the very end.
To rephrase @GreenAsJade’s point: the balance is between, say, 10 games ruined by stallers and one game ruined by the server. Let’s keep in mind that no one knows what the actually ratio is. However, many games are indeed ruined by stallers (or were before the algorithm was implemented), while the other situation seems pretty rare.
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The 20 points lead is not a so decent indicator because it’s calculated by an AI not by humans who may have a very different opinion (for example due to a group status)
They can really be arbitrary. Once a close game between 2 six dan. Both thought a group was alive but that was kind of hallucination it was dead. Then I can imagine that to make a few things clear one pass a few times while the other add a few stones. Here could come a surprising win for stalling… This may even more happen with players of a more intermediate level, as soon as the AI estimation is quite different from the players estimation.
So then
Exactly
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I agree with this. It goes against the spirit of the game to have any third party (AI or otherwise) decide when a game is over. Go is the only game in the world that ends when both players decide that it’s over. This feature disrupts this aspect of the game.
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We know that the feature has a price. We’ve chosen at present to accept that price to counter the other problem: the nature of the game that lets one player be held hostage by the other who choses to stall.
I guess it’s time to start collecting examples of where this feature was manifestly not in the interests of the game.
We can talk all we want about the pros and cons, and the spirit of the game - they are well established.
What matters is how it unfolds in practice.
Feel free to post examples where the server decision is against the spirit of the game. Let’s see how frequent they are.
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This unique aspect of Go can easily be abused online, and it makes sense to have a way to force counting (Fox did it before OGS).
We can certainly discuss how to improve it, but the point is not to remove it.
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Fair enough. Thanks for your response.
I think this is the most important part, either it’s been frequently abused and so it should change, or it’s not very frequent and we can just ask players not to abuse it occasionally.
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