It’s happened a couple of times now – opponent loses, game ends, but the opp keeps flagging all my groups as dead. If I unflag, they flag back, indefinitely.
Obviously I do not accept the fake score, and don’t have time to play the flag-unflag game all day, so I call a moderator with “Score cheating” and leave the game.
One or two days later, I get a message “game was annulled”, which means I didn’t win = cheater got rewarded for cheating. Well done.
I found no way to appeal that moderator decision, i.e. to get the game properly scored, rather than annulled.
Do you know of a way?
There already is a button for “Score with AI” – so why isn’t there a button like “Accept the AI score for this disputed game”? Wouldn’t that save time for everyone, including the moderators?
As for why games are annulled instead of you getting granted the win, this is because as of yet we have no option of changing the outcome of a game. The best we could do is annul a game.
However, there are some tools that can prevent games from being wrongly scored. Particularly, if a player refuses to end a game by playing nonsense, you can keep passing (three times) and let the AI automatically score the game.
Also, if a player keeps flagging the wrong stones, you should be presented with an option to end the game as scored by the AI. That is:
This is actually the button you suggest it should be. If you click it next time, this should end the game with the player winning who has the most points (according to the AI).
There is of course another meaning to the question, which is “why is it that moderators don’t have the power to change the outcome of the game?”
I don’t know the detailed reason. The loose reason I’ve always accepted is “because the side effects of that are more complicated than you imagine, making it a headache to do”.
It could be a nice time to have a better explanation, if anyone knows it?
Yes, board was reset to the “correctly counted” state, but game did not end. Opponent simply started clicking on alive groups again, marking them dead.
So, in the end, the cheater got what he wanted, avoided a loss, game annulled… Secret strategy to never losing a game on OGS?
I remembered that there was a time where the option to end the game appeared when a player kept changing the status of the stones.
I’m surprised it is not the case anymore. Perhaps the scoring system was changed and this was unintentionally removed… (would you know, @GreenAsJade ?)
Thankfully, very, very few players don’t care about being banned and want to be cheating trolls. That is one safety valve. Another is that cheats eventually get caught, despite the low rate of reports, and they either reform or get banned. Some cheats also lose interest and stop playing, which I guess is a third safety valve.
I strongly suspect that everyone who is “official” reads threads like this one. So, you have already succeeded in putting the issue before them.
Someday the AI may be perfected so that it will score games perfectly with no option for players to alter that. We are not there yet.
As for reversing the outcome, @GreenAsJade has explained above the rationale for not doing that: it would create cascading ranking effects that would cause system-wide processing problems. I’m not a techie, so I don’t know how accurate that is, but I accept it.
Probably the next rounds of the Forever Tournament we won’t even play the games, in fear someone might mistake a dead group for alive and upset the ratings.
It actually does cause problems if you annul enough of them. I think at least one time that I recall, annulling too many games caused ranking updates to stall sitewide until it caught up.
It could’ve been changed since, but I don’t necessarily want to test it
So there’s also some limitations with annulling too many games.
Why we can’t alter the result after it’s been accepted, or after it’s been incorrectly “accepted” and annulled I don’t know.
It’s always been like that that I can remember and if it was a small job to change I assume it might’ve been done by now.
It might be worth taking a closer look at this. I’m thinking of a workaround where games flagged for moderator review are not processed for ranking until after they’ve been reviewed. This would mean out-of-order processing, but that’s probably less disruptive than processing it immediately and flipping the result later. On the other hand, it may not be easy to implement (I don’t know; I’ve never looked at the code).
