Should a rengo timeout kick a person from all rengos?

It occured to me that if a person times out their casual rengo, they are mostly likely not really interested in rengo at all.

I wonder if we should kick someone from all casual rengo games that they are in, at that point?

Or is that going to be “hey, how dare you kick me out of this one, I only lost interest in that one”

My feeling is that if you lost interest, then you should have resigned out. If you time out, it indicates that you just aren’t around, so we need to free up the other rengos…

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One scenario I can think of is the one where a person joins two rengos, rengo A has aggressive time settings (12 hr), rengo B has lax time settings (3 days). Person may drop out of rengo A, but still be interested in finishing rengo B.

I don’t really have a strong opinion about casual rengo, but if someone suggested the same for tournaments or ladders, I’d be strongly against!

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Yeah that’s definitely a point.

I’ve been watching rengo recently, and what I see is that there are a few players who joined every rengo in sight, and now each game that starts has to wait one or more of those same people to time out.

I’m leaning in the direction of the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few in this case…

… you can always join another slow rengo :smiley:

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I think it’s a bit drastic to kick someone out of all of a certain class of games, when they just time out in one game. Some people serially time out in a lot correspondence games. It’s not like we’re applying the same sort of policy for that situation.

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What about the case of the person who just mistakenly times out in one rengo game, but is otherwise able and intending to continue playing in the rest? It seems really harsh to then lose participation in all of their ongoing rengos.

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The questions is whether this “harshness” on one person is worth the hashness that they inflict on all the others, when they signed up for every rengo, and hold up each one when they disappear.

This is not like any other “class of game”, due to the sheer number of people that the disappearance stalls.

I was finding it irritating going to the “Watch” page and seen the same few people’s names on “stuck” games.

But maybe it’s a small delay in the scheme of things, just an idea :woman_shrugging:

Well, I think this policy punishes everyone. For example, I don’t generally hold up any of my Rengo games and I try to avoid timing out in general, but it does happen occasionally. I would find it a lot more painful to find that I’ve been removed from all of my rengo games, just because I accidentally timed out in one, than the current situation of having to wait on some people that tend to time out in my casual Rengo games.

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Yeah i agree with yebellz, sounds very harsh and extreme solution for somewhat small, altought annoying problem. Guess it would make some sense to drop users from open challenges if the account clearly has been abandoned, but idk what metric to use for that. Maybe ‘serial timeouts without user having been seen since the timeouts’ or something like that?

But kicking user out from any ongoing games because timeout in some other match(es) is pretty cruel xD

(i’ve also timed out from one or two rengo games that had short timesettings, would have been really sad to be kicked out from all the other ones because that)

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I’m one of those people who find the holdups extremely annoying.

But I find kicking players out of all their rengos too harsh.

The “problem” with rengo is that, unlike with vanilla games, you can’t just visit a player’s profile to see if and how they time out, the information needs lots of digging.

But as @benjito said, it’s very easy to time out in one of the faster ones. I’ve timed out myself in 12h ones, and I like them the most! And I timed out during vacation, so it’s not like I was snubbing the rengo in particular.


This is more a thought, not necessarily a suggestion: could we put rengo players on the bench? As in, they timeout and they have to opt in again, but if they do they keep their place?

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Although I’ve not played OGS rengo, it also seems harsh to me. If you do want an auto kick rule it needs more conditions: at a minimum only kick from games where it’s your turn. You could then kick when it becomes their turn faster than the normal turn timer if they don’t somehow clear a rengo abandoner flag you set, but then it’s a lot more complex state machine separated by time than some simple logic that runs only at rengo timeout. And any bugs in it are harsh to users.

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Just suppose that a rule to kick a rengo time out person from all the rengos would become effective, what would be the next step?
Kicking out players who time out of all other games?
Or even banning them permanently?
Wouldn’t take long for OGS to become a house full of ghosts with only a handful of players left, I think.

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We could go with something more sweet if timing out become a real problem in casual rengo.
For example each time you join one, you have to chose yourself how long it will take to kick you out this rengo.
Another idea is to let you just skip your turn maybe?

Somehow I always seem to trigger off fear of the end of the world when I discuss Rengo :smiley: :smiley:

It’s amazing how seriously everyone takes “casual” rengo :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

Anyhow, it was just an idea, but obviously not a good one :joy:

The specific problem I’ve been observing is not just “timing out” but “joining all the rengos, then forcing them all to wait”.

There is a (small, but noticeable) group of players who appear to have joined every rengo, but now they appear to be not around the place.

Maybe if you time out of a rengo, it should remove you from pending challenges, so at least you don’t clog up games that haven’t started yet?

This sounds better as the kick. Inconvenience is that the player may have elected one or a few of the games to play, discarding others. Of course it’s up to them to be more consistent afterall, i am just considering side effects.

Or maybe put a warning sign :warning: next to the username of players who have a high timeout rate (say >50% among the last 10 rengos) that organizers of rengos can see, and thus can decide to kick out before the game starts.

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better create fast correspondence rengo mode

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I really like that idea.

It’s not a quick or easy thing to do, but it sounds like totally the right thing.

Yeah… something like this has merit, though it’s even more involved to do and has implications on all the players. If I can get to something, I’d look at the :warning: first.

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Sorry, impossible to resist posting this meme.

Like it!

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First, such a rule would probably incentivize some people to play a crappy move. Second, it contradicts OGS’s current policy of allowing timeouts from correspondence games, and therefore might cause confusion. Third, it raises the question why timeout from casual rengo can’t be treated just like habitual timeout from live games (setting aside point two, above, for the sake of discussion).

Timeout from casual rengo is indeed a dreadful disease of the game, often wrecking the rengo experience, so a robust discussion of the problem may be worthwhile.

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It’s wonderful to find something we agree on - let’s try to build from there :slight_smile:

What would be a helpful way to tackle the problem?

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