I don’t think you can draw a clear line here. You do not have enough information to be able to accurately and knowingly perceive the difference between a legitimate timeout and a purposeful one. In the online world, this seems to be an unfortunate, though expected, aspect of play.
Assuming we aren’t talking about any of the clear cut and obvious cases of escaping, or someone flat out admitting to the behavior, I find the idea of moderation in this area to be risky and to potentially do more harm than good. Without a clear way to target guilty parties, you run a high risk of accusing or punishing innocent people.
If you really wanted to do something without doing something directly, you could adjust the “left the tab” functionality (5 minutes of inactivity) and extend it. Something along the lines of: after X amount of minutes the user receives a pop-up warning which contains a countdown. When that reaches 0, they timeout. If the want to avoid this, then they will need to pause the game to disable the feature, or to interact with the box to show that they are still actually in the match.
This steps around active moderation and doesn’t risk OGS having any kind of reputation for being a strongly policed or enforced community.
Nice idea, but there’s no way to force push this to the api which would mean people using the apps would be randomly losing matches with time left on their clock and no idea what happened.
I’m not sure if this is a goal - to avoid being seen as having solid moderation?
People who are exasperated with escapers, especially if we don’t act, say “OGS is full of escapers - do something!”. People who are exasperated with sandbaggers says “OGS is full of sandbaggers - do something!”. These are potential the reputational issues I’m aware of. I haven’t yet heard a complaint that says “OGS is overly moderated”.
[ One easy community solution to being overly moderated would be to stop raising reports ]
FYI my totally qualitative guess is that escaping reports are the most common of all - I flipped over to the list of reports just now, and at the top is “left game after bad position without resigning, let game time out”.
That’s pretty typical. It’s what has made me personally think that this is one of the most disliked problems we have at OGS.
Curiously, this thread is not drawing any such commentary. I’m not sure what to make of that yet.
I’ve rarely had difficulty distinguishing a real timeout from a dishonorable timeout (“rage quit” sounds too dramatic, inadvertently serving as an excuse). If there is any question about it, I let it slide. If the game is over and no serious move is left, or if a blunder or a big loss just occurred, it’s pretty obvious. Or, in the other direction, if it’s 10 sec or even 15 sec a move and there is really something on the board to think about, that is obvious too.
I don’t care for the phrasing of the question, because drawing a line implies a continuum, and escaping versus legitimate timeout is not a continuum. They are opposites. Also, I don’t believe that time-wasting is the most important consequence of escaping. The widespread, intense hatred of escaping that we see in the reports is not predicated, in my opinion, on the trivial loss of 30 seconds here or a minute there. Escaping is an expression of disrespect, which is why it is dishonorable. As such, the exact amount of time lost is irrelevant. Escaping is in some cases just a thoughtless act committed by a child-like mentality, but in the worst cases (quite plentiful), it is a malicious act that poisons the environment.
It remains curious to me that the most significant response to my question is coming from the moderator panel itself.
I had thought that the community, who raises all these reports, would be here telling us how much they want escaping to be eliminated, and giving useful insight into their experience of when they legitimately time out, and under what circumstances they find it disrespectful when their opponent leaves.
I want to note that while timeout and escape themselves are opposites, the symptoms of these appear on a continuum. If we knew exactly which black and white opposite we had on our hands, there wouldn’t be this question. However, for the reasons elaborated in this thread, it is not always easy to distinguish.
A more concrete test of this might be like this:
If the opponent has an hour on the clock in the early game, and times out, was that escaping?
If the opponent has 10 minutes on the clock in the mid game and times out, was that escaping?
If the opponent has 1 minute on the clock in the mid game and times out, was that escaping?
If the opponent has 10 seconds on the clock in the mid game and times out, was that escaping?
If the opponent has 1 second on the clock in the mid game and times out, was that escaping?
At some point in this continuum, for me at least, the answer flips from “yes” to “probably not”.
My thoughts are that in reality its going to be hard to enforce any kind of rule in the game that is able to effectivly stop this from happening. or to even lessen it.
that being said… if we are looking for a more accurate sense of when it becomes rude then for me it would be:
1 Hour+ game// half the main time, plus buyomi.
30-50 mins game// Half time plus buyomi.
10-20mins game// Five mins plus buyomi
5-10 mins game// Three mins pluss buyomi
Anything below this, time out is acceptable i think. (With the exception of longer buyomi, of which if there are five on min buyomi, then after four i generally know they are most certainly not coming back)
We are using continuum in two different senses. You are using it to speak of the clock time. I am using it to speak of whether or not the timeout is legitimate. There is no case, for instance, that is 60% legitimate and 40% malicious. Either the person accidentally timed out, or he did so deliberately.
Definitely: it’s either legitimate (I was thinking and ran out of time) or malicious (I never intended to play anymore).
The question here is what the community thinks about where is the reasonable line to draw in moderating the grey line cases.
(The question is specifically not how can we implement solutions in the system to fix it in some other way. I’m taking it as given that this is one of those hard things to make a call on, which is why we have moderators. The moderators just need to be calibrated from time to time by the community…).
I personally think that in this case, its somewhat a good idea to have a general guide to this issue.
My reasoning is this. Whether or not the behavior is malicious or not isn’t the issue I think, not really, its the cause. The actual issues are or rather the question to be asked, is: Where is the line between nuisance and acceptiable behaviour?
Removing the intentional vs non-intentional leaves behind a simple problem. Of which, having a guide that can help specify when something becomes a nuisance can mean that moderators have more control over a situation that they perhaps don’t have a great deal of control over as it is in this moment.
There are one or two cases I know of where a person left a game open, running down the clock for a long period, in order to annoy their opponent (perhaps they used the time to cook dinner). But the vast majority of cases (99.9%) are limited by the 5-minute disconnection timer. And half or more of these actually time out in 2.5 minutes or often less (since 5x30 is the most popular byo-yomi). So again, I think it is clear that loss of time is not the main issue. It is the disrespect involved. Many people become enraged if someone spits on them, and it is not because of a concrete fear of germs. Escaping is the go equivalent.
I see what you mean. I think my suggestion is still valid, as a sort of option in the future if needs be. But i should indeed think more deeply on this before i respond again.
I mean, you are just telling us that it is a problem and that it is reported a lot. We haven’t seen the analysis of whether or not a small minority is responsible for the large majority of reports, if the reports are false reports, what the reporting trend over time is, etc.
So it’s not like you can really expect us to make a decision about what to do, without us knowing what and where the issues are, and then discussing the impacts of the options and what outcome the community is most comfortable with when dealing with the downsides.
I wasn’t asking the community to “make a decision about what to do”.
I was inviting the community to share their opinion, as guidance for moderation decisions on this topic.
The type of input from Lord_o_o_Spoon is helpful, as is the earlier input of “actually, I don’t care if someone times out my game” (even though that was surprising).
In my opinion, most true escapes should be pretty obvious. Either the person lost a large or important group or they were annoyed by your play style and spent 20 minutes “thinking” when there isn’t a difficult problem on the board. Those are really the only times I report. If I think it’s questionable I just let it go.
The end result may be the same, but resigning respects your opponent’s time. Escaping/rage quitting is just rude.
As an mostly corr player, i feel like timeouts are just part of the game ^^
(Correspondence could be renamed as “endurance go”)
Also the same is true with blitz, timeouts are almost like “mandatory evil” and dealing with the time pressure is as big part of blitz than remembering joseki sequences.
For live games, i feel that the line between escaping and simply timing out can be drawn on usage of pauses. Like, everyone knows that you can pause the clock and still keep playing, right?
If i see that i’m myself running out of time and i still haven’t came up with my move, i do pause the game quickly and ask my opponent whether it is ok for him/her, if we keep playing with the pause on. Or play a ko threat as timesuji. Also if i see that my opponent is going to time out, i usually put the clock on pause since i do not wish to ruin a good game by winning on time.
I personally feel like if a player is doing something - anything - to prevent the timeout, it is not escaping. But if someone is constantly losing games on time without even trying to prevent those, that player is an escaper and causing harm to vast portion of his/her opponents.
But then again, i usually play live games only with the people i know, mostly from from chat. They don’t usually want to act rude and escape, so i can’t even remember when was the last time that i encountered an escaper ^___^
You’re right, it isn’t a goal. I only have experience with OGS. I’ve seen users discussing bad experiences with moderators with KGS and Tygem though, which is why I mentioned this aspect of enforcement. I have no personal experience with poor moderators and Go, though I’ve had my fair share with forum moderators at other sites over the last 20 years. So overall, I just wanted to be thorough
That is a very good point and I had no idea that OGS had this sort of issue with Escapers. I personally have dealt with a few, but really only in Live games. I’ve been playing Blitz games, almost exclusively, for the last six months. When I play Live games it is with a friend. In Blitz games, timeouts are expected, though sometimes I do encounter Escapers. I know this because they are playing fine with the format, and all of a sudden, when clearly losing, they let all their time periods time out.
To me it is only 30 seconds, and I don’t sweat it. If it were a larger period of time or a bigger board than the 9x9, then I would find it a much bigger problem. But it really is about the time for me. That is the disrespectful part, that they wasted my very precious and limited time. I don’t think that is the case for most people and disrespect, as @Conrad_Melville has eloquently discussed.
I am very curious, if Escaping is the biggest thing you hear about, what percentage of these reports qualify as legitimate instances of Escaping in your mind? And what percentage do you feel are people being overly sensitive/judgmental/rage-reporting?
Unfortunately, most OGS users, from my perspective as a forum user, do not use the forums. I’m not sure how many users even have accounts, much less are active. If you want serious feedback, you could setup a web form/poll and then mass message everyone on OGS. That would get you crazy feedback
I don’t see that part in the first post . But I know now
What are your personal desires for handling Escapers? It is obvious that this is a problem and something that eats up a lot of Moderator attention. How do you think this situation could be better handled or what would you like to see done to improve the situation? More warnings, bannings, an algorithm to identify Escaper accounts followed by a “stop it, or else” email and mandatory probationary periods?
]
. But I know now 