if the escaped game is still open? Is it possible to make it so that if the game is still up, they can't start another game? I don't see how this would interfere with people with bad connections and it would make it harder for real escapers to play games. And there are ways to deal with people who try to abuse this system, namely getting a mod involved. Is this a good idea?

Then they escape, switch accounts, and play again.

Yea, but that's the point, make it more inconvenient for them.

"It's not a bug, it's a feature".

The idea is that if your opponent behaves badly or insults you, you are able to leave a game without resigning or saying another word. This is comparable to just stand up and walk away when facing your oponent on a real board. That is the idea why people are allowed to start other games, although they left an open game.

Ah! I didn't think about that. Then yea, from that perspective it makes sense.

There`s a glaring drawback to this policy, though. I don`t know about other players, but in my experience objectionable loudmouths are much less common than people who just escape because they don`t want to lose. It seems to me that KGS is solving the smaller problem at the expense of encouraging the greater one.

OTOH, maybe trolls and rude players are more common at different rankings? I`d imagine both escaping and goading becomes less frequent, generally speaking, as the players become more skilful. Besides, if your opponent is saying irritating things, you can always censor them. If somebody won`t resume their losing game, though, there is currently no recourse other than hiring a ninja.

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Learn the "tea-stealing" tesuji! Cho Chikun demonstrates here:

The real problem is that, according to a KGS admin, not all escaped games count as losses for the escaper if he does not exceed an, to me, unknown percentage of the games he escapes. This encourages escaping and punishes honest play.

I have yet to reach a rank at which goading has disappeared... and the frequency doesn't seem to have changed all that much, either. I remember it happening about as frequently at 5k as it does now.

The annoying part here though is that the escape clause seems to get used by the goaders more often than by the goadee's (Who may or may not have facial hair). In my experience, one of 2 things happens:

1) You beat them despite their trash talk. They escape.
2) You lose to them, they continue to talk trash

In either case, I lose out. I guess the right move there is just to leave the game. But I would be much happier being able to pull a Hikaru No Go and use the game to take them down a peg. (Since rating points are the only thing that is apparently valuable to them, that's what I'd like to take from them)

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Tactics yes, Tact no...

Reread Dakre's post.

It's hard to tell if this is true, of course. Perhaps the current policy discourages rudeness at the expense of having more escapes. Perhaps, if the policy was changed, there would be fewer escapers but more loudmouths? Certainly I can imagine that, with a policy where a disconnect is an immediate loss, some of those that now maliciously escape would instead resort to insults and goading.

That is certainly possible, but then again you can always censor a goader. If you win, you can uncensor and have a right good laugh at whatever foolish asides they wrote while you were ignoring them; or you can just leave then censored to shout at the wind!

To be honest, it`s been a long time since anybody insulted my actual play (although there`s certainly a lot to insult ). The only goading that I recall in recent times has concerned my playing slowly. My response to that is usually to remind them that they agreed on the time controls, to censor them, and then go and make a cup of tea before returning to the board.

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Learn the "tea-stealing" tesuji! Cho Chikun demonstrates here:

Reading it for a second time does not alter my opinion that escaping must always be punished.

This opinion is not shared by KGS.

Speaking as someone who has an unreliable internet connection, I really like the way disconnection is handled on KGS. I know that's not the situation that the OP was complaining about, but I've found that good sportsmanship is far more common on KGS than bad sportsmanship. I've even logged back in to games I disconnected from to find that rather than just leaving, my opponents had actually resigned first.

Even for those who do have good connections, the freedom to end a game how and when you like, or pick it up again later, seems like a good thing. Is it really worth stopping this for everyone just to punish a few abusers? What happens when you end up in the dead stones marking phase with a would-be escaper? I'd rather they left and we both went played other people than risk playing the game out only to have to argue about who won.

Allowing resumption in case of disconnection during alternation or scoring, scoring all escaped games and treating bad language are not mutually exclusive. All can be achieved in principle.

"Liked" for this.

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

A naive question: Suppose A and B are playing. Player A temporarily loses his connection, becoming an escaper. He (A) logs back on, wanting to resume the game, but B shows no inclination to do so, ignoring A instead. So A will continue to be marked as an escaper from this game, though IMO he does not deserve to be. (If anything, B deserves that label.) Other than appealing to a moderator, is there any way for A to fix this? (Or maybe I'm not understanding how this escaper policy works...)

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And the go-fever which is more real than many doctors’ diseases, waked and raged...
- Rudyard Kipling, "The Light That Failed" (1891)

Not really. You just have to hope this doesn't happen often enough to you to start being marked as a chronic escaper. This is why there is some leeway.

No (and appealing to admins is pointless as they can't do anything). I used to suffer from this problem when I played on a crappy dial-up connection, such refuseniks were a sizeable minority, maybe 30% (this was when I was improving fast so had a ~85% win ratio and was thus winning most of the games I 'escaped'). To work around the chronic escaper flag I acquired uberdude2 was born (but not used because I forgot to capitalise), then Uberdude3, and Uberdude4. Apologies to mathematicians.

As others have mentioned, you will be marked as the escaper since you were the first to leave the game. However, if you resume the game and your opponent enters (that is, if both of you are in the game at the same time) the flag is reset, and now the first person to leave from that point will be flagged.