Life In 19x19

TMark wrote:My only complaint about the escaper system as it stands is the length of time one has to wait before the game is forfeited. I believe that it is 6 months at the moment; I believe that 1 month would be a more reasonable time frame.

Check the help page more carfully. The forfeit happens when your opponent has "enough" escapes; "enough" is given on the web page. It may happen instantly if the server has decided that your opponent escapes all the time, in which case you will get the "your opponent resigned" message and you can only tell that they escaped by looking at your game records and seeing "+Forf." as the result.

Mef wrote:...

Tygem - It was mentioned in another thread you submit your games for adjudication. This would go against criterion 1 as there is a human element now directly involved, it would also increase the effort required by the average user in order to have a game resolved. In theory, this could have an advantage with criteria 3, because (should they be willing to put forth the effort) now all games can be evaluated on a case by case as to what the effect of the various outcomes of the game could potentially be. It's hard to compare the two systems with respect to the 2nd criterion, it would depend upon the specific person making the judgment.

...

Tygem is my favorite system, so I'll comment only on that.

Tygem allows for adjudication, but also has the 5 minute timeout rule. So if you have an escaper, after 5 minutes you get your win without adjudication. Admins have the power to adjust game results in the event of some sort of problem (eg. disagreement on the status of a live/dead group). And as a third measure, Tygem allows for you to apply for a "no result" game. So if you have to go, and you don't want it to affect the score, you could request with your opponent to have no result for the game.


I think that this system has a lot of positive aspects:
1.) The escaper issue is eliminated. They just lose if they leave.
2.) If there is a situation where you have to go, there is the option of agreeing upon having no result. The opponent does not have to agree, but I don't feel that he should be required to agree, since both players initially agreed to the time settings for the game.
3.) For issues where people are goofing around or causing problems, admins are able to resolve the game result.

The disadvantage to the system, compared to KGS is:
1.) I'm not sure if there's a way to stop a game midway and resume it on another day.

But considering the escaper issue, I much prefer the pros to the cons of this system.

Of course, you can define a set of criteria as you have and indicate that KGS meets those criteria well. What the debate is about to me is, which criteria are important. Personally, I think that eliminating escapers altogether is more useful than allowing for games to be suspended without mutual consent.

Ideally, I would like to have Tygem's system with one added feature: the ability to request that the game be resumed at a later time. I think that this should still be subject to agreement by both players, though... But this is how I would design an escaper system that fits my criteria and my preferences. I am sure that my preferences are not universal.

Considering that, the KGS system is a well-defined and working system. It just is based on different criteria and preferences than I would have chosen.

I would define a working system as one that reduces the instances of escaping.

Question for those who play on multiple servers: do you experience

1. less escaping on KGS vs. other servers
2. more escaping on KGS vs. other servers
3. about the same amount of escaping on KGS vs. other servers
4. can't really tell

zinger wrote:I would define a working system as one that reduces the instances of escaping.

Question for those who play on multiple servers: do you experience

1. less escaping on KGS vs. other servers
2. more escaping on KGS vs. other servers
3. about the same amount of escaping on KGS vs. other servers
4. can't really tell

I play mainly on Tygem, and sometimes on KGS. After having started playing a game, I have never been escaped on in Tygem. However, sometimes when I offer a "long(?)" time setting on Tygem, the user leaves before the game has started, without giving a counter-offer. The same happens on KGS, though. On KGS, I haven't been escaped on a lot, either. I would say I have been escaped on maybe 2 or 3 times over all of the accounts that I have.

So, in my case, escaping isn't really an issue that I care about at all. I'm mainly just discussing the hypothetical benefits of each system.

No matter what rules you apply, escaping will still happen. The only change is that for the few cases where escaping will happen, you will get a couple more points to your rating. Given how rare an instance it is, there are other things I'd like to see on KGS more.

xDragon wrote:

SpongeBob wrote:And, guess what, if somebody escapes on me, I get angry. If he stays on the server and happily starts a new game while I wait for him to return, this makes me even more angry. He leaves the game to avoid the loss and the system allows him to do that. If the system wouldn't, him leaving the game would be essentially the same as a resignation.

There is a reason that the KGS system is so 'unique'.

the admins have actually told me that they think the player has the right to leave the game if they dont want to finish it. so theyre telling me i have the right to escape if i want to.

Unashamed there if it was me...

If your opponent tells you to f--k off and die and that he's going to r--e your children I think you have a right to leave the game and not finish it.

Less extreme, for an obvious misclick, 1,1 point, I don't see anything wrong with leaving. Anyone that tells you - well you couldn't undo in a tournament has never been to one. Ever dropped a stone a little in a tournament? What do you do, you move it to where you wanted to place it.

SpongeBob wrote:

Bantari wrote:There are issues in the world actually WORTH bothering about.
You mentioned one, I could mention more. Getting bent out of shape over a silly game on a silly game server is not one of those issues.

If I remember correctly, you got quite involved in a thread on GoDiscussion discussing the quoting style of Robert Jasiek.

But this cannot be compared, I guess.

I engage in these pointless squabbles with Robert periodically, jut to keep myself (and him) honest. And anyhow, when you read the argument my problem was not with what he does as much as with how he tries to justify it.

Please understand - I am a very complex person, and what I do may seem contradictory to you, but that's only because you don't fully understand.
So there.

Point is - if such experience lowered my enjoyment of GD, I would not have let it - and I would have stayed out of the 'dispute'. I actually enjoy these squabbles with RJ... to a point. So, if people enjoy bitching about escapers, go for it. But if they get really bothered, get a life.

Redundant wrote:

xed_over wrote:I concede the point that my argument assumes the system is flawed. This is a debate in and of itself. However, I don't think Bantari was arguing that those who think the system is fine need to learn to live with it. He was responding to those who don't like the current system, by telling them to stop caring.

Not really.
My argument was that the whole escaper issue in and of itself is not worth bothering about.
This is absolutely independent of the fact that this or that system is flawed or not. I assume KGS is the way it is by design, but this is unimportant to what I was trying to say.

Here is the core of what I wast trying so ineptly to say:
There will always be minor things which you dislike. And if they fix them to your liking, somebody else will be upset, and so on. One way or another, you will always be on the receiving end of such minor irritants, if not in this area then in another, and each time you fix things to your liking chances are you'll just irritate somebody else.

So, looking at the great scheme of things, you need to learn to pick carefully what you will allow to bother you among all those little thorns life throws at you, and what you simply learn to live with. My opinion is that Escapers are a very minor issue, really not worth all the excitement. Genocide, World Hunger, and serious stuff like that is certainly worth bothering about. Curiously, talking to Go players, I hear them bitching much more about Escapers than about World Hunger. But that's personal perspective for you, go figure...

Personally, I would only let escapers bother me if the problem was big enough to seriously influence the ratings (not that I care about ratings much, but I see their importance). In my opinion, on KGS the escaper 'problem' is by far not that big.

That's all.

Sorry I took so long to answer. I have very little time for Go and Discussions lately.

Thanks to wms for correcting my use of "Forfeit". Now can we get the period down to one month?

Best wishes.

Kirby wrote:Of course, you can define a set of criteria as you have and indicate that KGS meets those criteria well. What the debate is about to me is, which criteria are important. Personally, I think that eliminating escapers altogether is more useful than allowing for games to be suspended without mutual consent.

Ideally, I would like to have Tygem's system with one added feature: the ability to request that the game be resumed at a later time. I think that this should still be subject to agreement by both players, though... But this is how I would design an escaper system that fits my criteria and my preferences. I am sure that my preferences are not universal.

Considering that, the KGS system is a well-defined and working system. It just is based on different criteria and preferences than I would have chosen.

I completely agree that it is important to discuss the criteria that are important, that is why I wanted to shift the discussion that direction. Perhaps my original post was misunderstood. I was not attempting to define a set of criteria that I thought KGS's escaper system met well. I was doing my best to recall the set of criteria that were suggested/used back before the current KGS system was ever implemented (in fact, I think a case could be made that the old system was better...however that one was liked even less than this). The typical "debate" over this system usually starts with something along the lines of "I am angry because someone escaped, and I think they should be punished." This unfortunately does not give a very good metric, because if you are using general user anger reduction to measure performance you may as well implement a system to eliminate playing bad moves or losing games (after all, these anger many people).

Instead, I was hoping we could actually have a useful discussion over what might be desirable, objectively measurable criteria around which to judge a system, and perhaps provide a basis for why each criterion should be included. Without having criteria set in place, you cannot even establish that there is such a thing as an escaper issue. Once again, the typical argument goes "there must be an issue, why else would so many users be angry about it and complain?" however this statement again assumes that reducing overall anger is a metric by which to judge the system. Until a set of criteria is listed, it cannot be determined if something is or isn't an issue, much less how to mitigate it.

I guess an analogy that could be used would be speed limits on roads. There are many times people are frustrated by or disagree with the posted speed limit on a road. Does this mean those speed limits are wrong? Depending on the criteria you use you can typically make a case either way, and most often an argument for either side will also have to make assumptions about difficult to quantify impacts on other systems.

Mef wrote:

Kirby wrote:Of course, you can define a set of criteria as you have and indicate that KGS meets those criteria well. What the debate is about to me is, which criteria are important. Personally, I think that eliminating escapers altogether is more useful than allowing for games to be suspended without mutual consent.

Ideally, I would like to have Tygem's system with one added feature: the ability to request that the game be resumed at a later time. I think that this should still be subject to agreement by both players, though... But this is how I would design an escaper system that fits my criteria and my preferences. I am sure that my preferences are not universal.

Considering that, the KGS system is a well-defined and working system. It just is based on different criteria and preferences than I would have chosen.

I completely agree that it is important to discuss the criteria that are important, that is why I wanted to shift the discussion that direction. Perhaps my original post was misunderstood. I was not attempting to define a set of criteria that I thought KGS's escaper system met well. I was doing my best to recall the set of criteria that were suggested/used back before the current KGS system was ever implemented (in fact, I think a case could be made that the old system was better...however that one was liked even less than this). The typical "debate" over this system usually starts with something along the lines of "I am angry because someone escaped, and I think they should be punished." This unfortunately does not give a very good metric, because if you are using general user anger reduction to measure performance you may as well implement a system to eliminate playing bad moves or losing games (after all, these anger many people).

Instead, I was hoping we could actually have a useful discussion over what might be desirable, objectively measurable criteria around which to judge a system, and perhaps provide a basis for why each criterion should be included. Without having criteria set in place, you cannot even establish that there is such a thing as an escaper issue. Once again, the typical argument goes "there must be an issue, why else would so many users be angry about it and complain?" however this statement again assumes that reducing overall anger is a metric by which to judge the system. Until a set of criteria is listed, it cannot be determined if something is or isn't an issue, much less how to mitigate it.

I guess an analogy that could be used would be speed limits on roads. There are many times people are frustrated by or disagree with the posted speed limit on a road. Does this mean those speed limits are wrong? Depending on the criteria you use you can typically make a case either way, and most often an argument for either side will also have to make assumptions about difficult to quantify impacts on other systems.

I basically agree with you, but I have also described an alternative system that would be ideal to me. Is it "right" or "wrong"? That depends on what's important to you. Do I think my proposed system is "right"? Well, yes, because I came up with it based on my own preferences. I think wms probably did the same thing in making his own ideal system.

SpongeBob wrote:

topazg wrote:My personal preference has always just been "leave the clock running. When it hits 0, it's a loss on time" and leave it at that. The person who didn't escape should have the power to "stop the clock" if they feel their opponent has left through disconnection, and leave it running if they want also.

That would not be a good solution. Assume you are playing a slow game, 30 minutes or more, and your opponent makes a serious mistake and escapes when there is still lots of time left on his clock. You would be required to essentially wait until his time runs out, even not being able to start another game after some time. It would also distort the game in case of connection failures, which we all know do happen.

This is a bit of a straw man. KGS lets you have lots of games concurrently (I've done it myself before), and your opponent can simply just leave the game window open and start doing something else. There is absolutely nothing you can do to avoid waiting until his time runs out if that's what he wants to do to you, whether it's the current KGS system, my proposal, or the current systems on other servers. If the opponent appears to be there, that clock will run.

People escapes when they loose.
So someone who escape your game means you have won. In your game listing history, it doens't show as a win, but it doesn't show as a loss either. The only thing the escaper is taking from you in the short term is the few rating points you should have won. But we all know that in the long term, one game doesn't count much for our total rating.

We all look (I assume) at the KGS graph, but in the long run, we want to improve at GO ( at least it sounds like the adult thinking about it). So when someone escapes you, he is in fact resigning.

I get mad when someone escapes me. But I try to think that way, and it bother me less and less. Maybe because my KGS rating is less important to me now that 1 year ago when I started go.

Cheers !

Tortue wrote:People escapes when they loose.
...

I know this is OT, but...why do people always misspell "lose" with "loose"? I see this mistake more often than the grammatical misuse of "you're" versus "your" but at least to me the latter is understandable...the former though, I just don't get.

Araban wrote:

Tortue wrote:People escapes when they loose.
...

I know this is OT, but...why do people always misspell "lose" with "loose"? I see this mistake more often than the grammatical misuse of "you're" versus "your" but at least to me the latter is understandable...the former though, I just don't get.

A possible reason might be that many forum members are non-native English speakers, and are likely to have different spelling errors than native speakers because we have trouble distinguishing some words. I would pronounce "lose" and "loose" identically, for instance. On the other hand, I believe I'm less likely to make an apostrophe error because the apostrophe is very rarely used in Norwegian, so I pay more attention to that issue when I'm writing in English than a native speaker would.