I tried to start a 45min 40/5 overtime game, and it said it wasn't allowed in a rated match. why?

There are upper-time limits for rated matches to avoid the case where one user uses an absurd amount of time to play, forcing the opponent to stay online to avoid the loss. This happens because there is no game adjourning.

The case would be , for example, after move 20, you can wait 44 minutes before playing a move.

There are other ways to solve this, for example, making a certain time limit per move , but its less elegant.(Fly or die does this)

Also one could argue that this abuse is very clear and a admin should take care of it, without preventing users to start such lengthy games.

Last but not least, those time settings are games that last more than 3 hours, easily being vulnerable to an interruption by the users daily life.

Regards,

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs

If you choose that time setting, that's what you're signing up for, right? Why bother adding an arbitrary restriction?

(Especially for such a relatively low limit. If there's a limit for some reason, it shouldn't be "half of the time you might get in a tournament game.")

I find this post extraordinarily disappointing. For me it is right up there with wms' nonsensical attitude about fischer time (a half dozen games on Kaya have been sufficient to prove him completely wrong BTW). Please prove me wrong! Post your actual experience with this type of abuse that shows a real (rather than imagined) problem of sufficient scale to justify preventing people from even offering longer time limits.

I assume this means you would not like to host things like the L19 tournaments or the ASR league on Kaya.gs since people have the bad habit of playing overly lengthy games. Am I wrong? Would you program special exceptions for such events, or what?

The biggest issue so far on beta.kaya is the lack of game offers rather than abuses. I do not think that additional, arcane restrictions that are not well explained are going to help that situation. As always YMMV.

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

Players aren't babies. They're seasoned competitors who are well aware of the potential for this type of abuse. They won't agree to time limits they can't handle. In this example, they'll have anticipated the potential for a 44 minute delay. They'll wait it out and happily demolish their underhanded opponent who is now direly short of time to think.

I too find this post disappointing, but not surprising.

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finito ludos regula

I like the idea to avoid this type of abuse. However, I think there are still lots of players who would like to play those type of games.

Why not show a warning message instead that comes up when you are about to accept such a game and which explains the potential problem?

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Stay out of my territory! (W. White, aka Heisenberg)

A rated game is a rated game. No one is preventing you from playing games with any sort of weird settings you like, but if you want the win-loss data for the game to be used to calculate ranks across the whole server, you need to play the sorts of games that the server considers rating-worthy. Even if two nutcases want their :30s SD 3x3 game to be rated, that doesn't mean they get what they want; just because the server offers the option to play a game doesn't mean it needs to offer a rated option.

I have to admit, I'm rather shocked by this policy. I cannot fathom why you would stop people playing a serious, long game of Go (the most enjoyable kind IMO) and have it rated.

Of course, people can abuse it, but surely if someone's creating a rated game with those time controls, they're happy taking that risk themself to play the sort of rated game they enjoy - why take this away from them when they haven't complained for the need for it?

As it was stated before, free games have much wider time settings, so its not preventing people from playing long games.

Its a given that there has to be some sort of upper-limit.
In the same way a 1 minute absolute time should not be rated, a 9999 absolute time rated game should not get started. Its guaranteed to end in an upset game.

Also its to note that we will support "turn-based"/deferred go eventually, and those will be rated. In principle they can be played as live as any other game, and wait as long as the players want. It wouldn't be a problem in that case, because neither player is forced to be online and present all the time, as with regular live matches.

The current settings are maximum 30 minutes main time, and its trivial to change that to another number.

How can we measure what would be the best maximum time allowed for rated matches?

Also, i remind that the players agreeing to the time setting does not guarantee a good experience or a precise rateable match, a.k.a Absolute Time, or ultra blitz.
A player with 30 minutes left could be in a position to resign, and choose not to, expecting their opponent to have any kind of connection issue or boredom for the next half-hour. This is a common practice by users in all servers, something i experienced first-hand many times. The default time in asian servers is 20 minutes, and on FlyOrDie, because they only have absolute time, they resorted to limiting the time on a single move to prevent this.

This would ruin the experience of the player that honestly just wants to play a long game. And its also a rated match doomed for failure.
It would be a much lesser upset in a Free game, because neither player has the motivation to wait the for the time to finish, nor any problem in resigning the game.



Well, its something to evaluate on a case-basis. Its not hard at all to make exceptions for certain leagues and tournaments, however i do remind that league players might have vastly different ratings and they have to play forced even games. Its not necessarily good to have tournament matches rated, specially when they are not handicapped.

ASR games are mostly free, even when they could be decently rated (similar rank).

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs

A 30 minute cap on the main time for rated games seems kind of arbitrarily low. I thought that speedchase was talking about Candadian overtime, where 45+40/5 could lead to an endlessly long game. It's weird to let blitz addicts rate their games but not let people who want a slow game rate theirs... but regardless, the point that not all games need to be eligible for rating still holds.

I disagree, except in a vague theoretical sense. It is up to individuals to decide what is appropriate and what is not. No-one has a problem with this in chess (where time settings like 1 minute absolute time are not uncommon), and I don't see why it's up to the server to restrict it.



Again, I have seen plenty of evidence to the contrary, but not evidence supporting this view.



Are the same ratings used for both turn based and real time?



Having a middling allowed time also does not guarantee anything, which is precisely my point of the objection. 45 mins + 40/5 is not a particularly slow game, if we are to have a floor than I definitely feel this is too low. It's _probably_ not enough to stop me playing on the server, but it is a fairly strong point against playing on it as my regular place for Go. The experience is ruined in the situation you outline, regardless of whether the time control is 15 minutes, 2 minutes, or 120 minutes in these cases. Sure, it may be a longer wait to have it ruined in longer time controls (although if this is your main argument, you lose the justification for the _bottom_ floor on time controls), but this is something the user has already taken on willingly - I'm not convinced anyone will appreciate this restriction being forced upon them.

The EGC had the following time controls (per player):

7 dan to 4 dan: 2.5 hours basic time + 1 minute byoyomi
3 dan to 3 kyu: 2 hours basic time + 3 times 30 seconds byoyomi
4 kyu and below: 1.5 hours basic time + 30 seconds byoyomi

So even the weakest players could well be playing a 3 hours+ match. I don't remember hearing any complaints. In the UK, there are 3 categories of tournaments (again, time per player):

class A A 60 minutes minimum 75 minutes minimum
class B B 40 minutes minimum 50 minutes minimum
class C C 25 minutes minimum 30 minutes minimum

A is considered "serious", B "standard", and C "quick and dirty", loosely paraphrasing what I've heard from a number of people. By your limits, it's virtually only possible to have class C games considered rating, and nothing above that. There's at least a couple of people I know on L19 who don't _play_ games with less than 45 mins each + byo-yomi. Are you basically telling them: "find another server if you want to play rated games"? - that feels particularly short-sighted to me.



45+40/5 is not going to be endlessly long. If both sides play 60 moves in the first 45 minutes, which seems reasonable, it's unlikely to last two more time controls on each side - maxxing at 55 minutes each. That's not very long really.

It frustrates me that people think the internet is only really the place for fast games of Go. I enjoy long games online just as much as offline, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. Every person who is used to the abuses you fear have encountered them and see them as acceptable risks for setting up the games they actually want to be playing. I think you're potentially alienating a reasonable chunk of users with a restriction based on very little evidence.

Actually, if the main issue is that "This happens because there is no game adjourning.", why not added a feature that allow to adjourn a game?

It would not address the problem of an opponent refusing to make a move for the remainder of his or her allotted time, but that is their allotted time and it's not fundamentally different from a player who is 50+ points behind and refuses to resign.

I can only echo what others have said in this thread: If you accept a game with X minutes for each side, you do so in the knowledge that your match may take X + X minutes, plus the overtime. It's a mutual agreement and if it's more time than you have available at the moment, or more than you want to put into one game, choose others settings and find an opponent who has the same preferences.

I'd not give a (hypothetical) handful of abusive trolls (who won't stick around anyway) the power to cause severe restrictions for serious players (who will stick around) wanting to use the server for serious matches.

Doesn't 40/5 imply forty minutes for five stones? I don't every play with it, so I wouldn't really know.

Chase mentioned "45min 40/5", so I believe it's 45 minutes main time and 5 byo-yomi periods at 40s each.

I can't remember which way around, but I just assumed it was 40 stones in 5 minutes, which is a fast but not completely unreasonable overtime. However, 5 periods of 40 secs byo-yomi makes more sense I suspect. Either way, it doesn't feel _that_ long to me, I'm used to 60 minutes main time games + 30 stones in 5 minutes, so it's faster than the majority of tournaments I attend.

I can assure you no man alive ever played a 9999 absolute time live rated game. He would have to be awake for 7 days straight without sleeping.

A (midly)less extreme case is 38x38 games.
Both players could agree to play such a game in a rated fashion, but i havent seen anyone finishing one of those games ever yet.

Yahoo with live player replacement,FoD with absolutes, and KGS with its escaper system, they all require agreement. Yet the upsets still happen.
As i stated, agreement does not mean precision or a good experience.



Maybe. Depends on popular demand, and the player base.



Concerning your comparison to Real life, you have to take into account that the internet has anonymity. I have never seen anyone in real life escape, yet is one of those issues all servers have to deal with.
The internet is also less stable. People lose connections, get distracted, have technical issues, lose power.

A single user that resorts to this tactic will do so for every single game on long time settings.

It happens. It has happened to me on 15 minute games. On all servers I ever played in. Some servers have even taken measures to prevent this precise case.

And it will happen simply because the other user has nothing to lose by waiting instead of resigning, he can just leave the computer on. His inaction is prized with opportunity.

The motivation for bottom limits is that a game with a very low time limit produce very imprecise results. A 9d can easily lose to a 10k even game in a 2 minute absolute time game.
I dont think anyone advocates for those games to be rated.




There is a delicate balance here between escape control and playability.

KGS gives the power to a player to adjourn whenever he wants, which in turn allows escapism.
Requiring agreement would not solve the situation as the "troll-ee" would always deny it.

Thats why very long games are suited for deferred-go, one that doesnt require the players to be present at all times.


There is always an upper limit, that is unvoidable. The current one is arbitrary, so the question is How can we measure what would be the best maximum time allowed for rated matches?

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs

Why does there need to be a cutoff? Why not weigh a games effect on the rating by its time limits?

I can't work out if you're being deliberately obtuse here or not My point is that both fast and slow games are often deliberate choices by players who also want their games to be rated. There is plenty of evidence supporting the fact that people like to do this, and I have yet to see a single individual ask for time limit caps on rated games to prevent game-ruining abuse. Why are you taking this choice away from them?



If I come across someone who does this, I'll add them to an ignore list or equivalent, and just not play them again. If a player just leaves the computer on, it will still time out and he'll still lose, it's hardly a great opportunity! Besides, why should one guy being a jerk stop me from playing long rated games with other people who want to? You aren't punishing the abusers with your policy, you're punishing the honest players who just want long games.



I don't think anyone advocates for them not to be either. Find me a single 9d who has played a 10k in a 2 minute absolute game. People are aware of what they are doing when they take these games on, and I'm sure the potential increase in error margins isn't very high in their mind. Again, if they are happy with the risks to their rating by doing this, why are you telling them to take it to another server?

Why does there have to be a maximum if any given time setting requires mutual consent from both players? If they want to allot 5 hours to their game, why not? I'd not agree to those settings, but the system would also not force me to. I see no harm in choice.

How about a warning if a player is about to accept "unusually long" time settings? Like, "Do you really want to play a game with 75 hours base time and 555 periods at 60 seconds each? This could take a long time and games cannot be adjourned."

I have explained in the previous posts why agreement is not sufficient, in practice. Confirmation of agreement does not solve the expectation of your opponent to actually play go with his alloted time.

I also add that there is a lighter limit on the byoyomi time itself.

In speedchase's case, he can use 30 minutes main time, and 60-70-80 seconds byo-yomi period.
He can get his slow game also, but preventing an absurd abuse of time as i stated before.

_________________
Founder of Kaya.gs