Not according to previous moderator posts in this thread.
I do, however, agree with you that it is the pattern that counts.
No, it is not common at all compared to other means of sandbagging.
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I think it’s important to emphasize the last phrase. Taking the occasional loss will not distort rank (beyond what is normal by random chance and “real reasons to lose”.) Sandbaggers usually need to lose quite a few games in a row before their rank is substantially mismatched from reality.
Edit: in fact, the sandbaggers I have met that were deflating their rank (admittedly few) made no attempt to get into a winning position before resigning. They played a few random moves then quit. So I have to take issue with the claim that “resigning when you are ahead is exactly what sandbagging is”
To add: I see too much effort into a strong player must not lose a game they “should” not lose. But no other consideration.
For example, if someone says “I’m a strong player who agreed to fast settings, but then it was too hard and I used means to artificially override the agreed settings” nobody says “hey, this might be a violation of the Honorable agreement of the time settings”.
It’s again a matter of available features and intention.
I personally don’t care, but some opponent might. Just sayin’.
I agree with pretty much all of what @ArsenLapin1
says above.
In particular
This statement sticks in my craw. If my opponent annoying me and I don’t want to continue playing that game anymore, then I resign and move on with my life!
To be suddenly told this is against OGS policy is bewildering.
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Yeah, I can see this point of view.
I think that the statement that you objected to (my statement) is too black and white. It’s wrong in that respect, and I need to clarify/elaborate.
“If my opponent annoying me and I don’t want to continue playing that game anymore, then I resign and move on with my life!”
The problem is that people hate it when you do that.
The moderator report queue has a continuous stream of people complaining about abandonment sandbagging.
It would be too easy for a sandbagger to say “my opponent was annoying me, that’s why I resigned”, if there was a written policy that said it’s OK to say that. 
If you were reported for “sandbagging by resigning” and a moderator found that your opponent really was being a jerk, I don’t doubt that the moderator would say “Oh, I see what you mean”.
FWIW, this is why we have so few written policies - because as soon as you write a statement, it can be picked to pieces legitimately, and the only way of getting it fixed is more words. When in general judgement applies - is the behaviour respectful and considerate or not.
So when I said “my opponent is being annoying isn’t one of them” that was wrong, in a literal sense.
When I typed it, I was thinking of “my opponent is being annoying by having vacation on” … or other similar “marginal or allowable annoyances”. It really isn’t OK to resign because of a minor annoyance, or because you are annoyed by something that is allowable. For example, I think it’s not OK to resign because your opponent played Tengen. Or because they chose a joseki you don’t like.
In general, I think that people expect that when they start a game, it will be completed in good faith - the sentiment I’m trying to share is that it’s not OK to break that faith on a whim.
In this instance, then, we’re actually debating whether use of vacation is disrespectful. I think that we have largely agreed that mostly use of vacation is fine, but there is a disrespectful way of doing it that Gia described.
Up till now, I think that moderators have been fairly black and white about “vacation use is OK”. And I personally have never seen a game resigned “because the opponent was on vacation”.
However, after reading this thread, I feel more sympathetic to the idea of “moderators encouraging people not to abuse vacation in that way”.
So if you are ahead but you need to leave, rather than resigning you should say “Hi, sorry I need to leave but as I’m ahead could you resign so that I don’t sandbag”. I recall previous discussions considered asking your opponent to resign as rude and even worthy of scolding by mods.
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I get that this is what you are trying to promote here, and I agree with that.
But the resign button is a good faith way of completing a game when I cannot or do not want to continue playing it. Sure it can be abused and in such cases appropriate moderator action would thus be warranted.
If that big red button can only be legitimately pressed if I’m losing the game, then you should probably only allow access to it when AI says I have less than 5% chance of winning. Otherwise I might get uppity ideas about my right to use it.
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Obviously you’re supposed go make a pot of tea so that your opponent gets equally bored and resigns without any prompting in chat
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The underlying problem here is not how you chose to leave, but the fact that you need to leave before finishing the game.
Once this is established - the fact that you need to break faith with “I joined this game to complete it with you” - then no matter what happens, it’s awkward. There is no “ideal” way to do this.
And indeed, I think resigning in that case is the best of a set of unfortunate choices - as people usually do in this situation. And usually nothing will happen. IF your opponent feels that you did it because of sandbagging, or disrespectfully, then they may report it. IF they do, a moderator is likely to send you a warning saying “please don’t do that”. At the end of this chain of IF we arrive at if you respond saying “look, I understand that it’s not great, but I had to leave at that point because [some good reason]” then in all likelihood the moderator will respond saying “ah, no problem, thanks for letting us know”.
It will only ever turn into an actual issue that might become contentious if you’re repeatedly doing this, or if your reason for doing it seems unreasonable.
And all of this has this reason at it’s heart: generally, we expect our opponent to finish games properly … as evidenced by the continual stream of complaints about players who do not do so.
This discussion has focussed on the possible unfortunate side-effect in a very rare corner case that follows from this - I think it’d be good not to lose sight of that underlying expectation: we don’t like it when our opponent bails unexpectedly.
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Whenever I have to leave during a live game I just write in the chat “sorry I have to leave” and resign. No one has ever complained about that.
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Just for reference, I prefer an opponent that bails unexpectedly before someone who goes on vacation and/or times out. I would assume you can agree that we are entitled to our personal preferences and that there isn’t any objective right or wrong here (as proved by the vast opinions in this thread).
My main concern here is when you make comments like the one I quoted and write in “we” form. I assume (and hope) there are mods who don’t feel that suddenly resigning a game for whatever reason is even close to other offences like stalling, trash talking, abusing vacation, mass time outs etc.
I always felt that if I can use the resign and block-buttons freely, it doesn’t matter what potentially silly rules and “features” like vacation a particular go platform has. According to the information given here, it sounds like that is actually not true on OGS. I have to drag a game out for 45 extra days if my opponent decides to take a break even though I signed up to play now. And if the opponent times out after that I won’t get the points because he/she has done it 14 times already. To top it all off, I can get punished for not putting up with it? It doesn’t make sense.
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Basically 
I think that really the tough problem that is at the heart of this thread is the tension between the need for a vacation feature and the desire not to be impacted by it.
On the one hand, there are strong arguments for “I need a way to be able to take a break from my correspondence game commitments”.
On the other hand, there’s the sentiment that is expressed above: “I don’t want someone to take a break from their correspondence game commitment with me if it forces me to wait”.
Moderation decisions are generally a judgement call, and up to moderators and the circumstances that present at the time. We strive to meet the community expectations in doing so.
I think that it is fair to say that up to this point moderators in general have focussed on honouring vacation as a feature, thinking that people would generally be understanding of correspondence opponents needing time off.
This thread calls that into question: there’s a very strong sentiment of “no, I don’t want to extend my opponent that opportunity and be obliged to continue when they return”.
This makes sense to me: it’s not actually inconsistent. I imagine we can agree that correspondence players will inevitably need time out from time to time, but also agree that this doesn’t have to mean that the opponent is obliged to wait for them to return.
If this is correct, then we need a way to “get out of” vacation-hit games, and we probably should be talking about how to achieve that in a sensible way.
Resigning and taking a loss doesn’t seem sensible, because of the sandbagging effect. I wonder whether it would make sense to implement “a resignation during an opponent’s vacation anulls the game”?
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And yet it has always been sensible in real-life tournaments as well as on every other internet go server.
A player chooses to stop the game. That’s a resignation. This player takes a loss. That’s a natural consequence. No need for moderator intervention, no need for moral judgement, it’s just a simple resignation.
Resignation is typically a conjunction of several factors. It’s never going to be black and white “I resigned because my opponent took a vacation.” But a much more likely scenario could be “I’m slightly behind in this game, in any other context I would give it my all and try to win, but if my opponent is going to drag out the game for months then I don’t want the slow agony of waiting months to lose this game, so I’d rather resign”.
Annulling the game would be unfair to the player who is winning, and giving a warning to the player who resigned because he wasn’t motivated enough to give the game his all and try to win just sounds like the moral police is trying to make OGS an unwelcoming place to play go.
Most people are not wilful sandbaggers, Conrad_Melville has already repeated several times that resigning was barely significant as a sandbagging method, so I really don’t understand the insistence of trying to establish a rule and give warning to people who resign games.
There have been many threads before where moderators talked about what’s acceptable or not on OGS, and by reading their posts I got the feeling that if I ever invaded an opponent’s moyo and my group died, I would get a warning for “uselessly prolonging the game with a hopeless invasion instead of resigning”. Now with this thread I get the feeling that if I ever not invaded the opponent’s moyo and resigned instead, I would get a warning for sandbagging because I didn’t give my best shot to win the game.
I hope and I believe that this is only a result of the way moderators express themselves on the forums rather than a reflection of how moderation is really done (if only because the number of games played on OGS is huge, so emitting a moral judgement on every game sounds unrealistic) but this is the feeling I get from many threads and posts on the forums.
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I still think a no vacation toggle can solve much of that.
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Indeed. I think the correspondence players pool migtht be divided into two groups with incompatible preferences.
- people in group A want a vacation feature with basically no restrictions and don’t care how their opponents use it
- people in group B don’t want vacation and don’t want to wait on players taking vacation
Let them play in separate pools and they can all be happy at the same time.
There may or may not be people who want to use vacation but do not want their opponents to use it. If they do exist I’d be happy to ignore them. 
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I think there isn’t even two separate pools.
Personally, I could go on vacation for the rest of my games and play a fast no vacation game with a friend, because they were nice and sent a challenge 
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Maybe it’s just a wrong idea that resigning due to the fact that you are sick of a game should be discouraged?
This seems to be what this says:
It seems clear that the people engaged with this thread feel that way. It’s less clear to me that this would be a widely held view.
I think if we agreed that this is the case, then it would follow that sandbagging is no longer disallowed.
You can’t on the one hand say it’s OK to resign when you feel like it, but it’s not OK to deliberately lose.
Actually yes?..
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Care to elaborate? I can’t tell the difference. The sentence to me reads like “It’s OK to lose on purpose, but it’s not OK to lose on purpose”