Nobody resigns

Dear OP: Why don't you quit whining and just quickly win your "totally won" games?

yes, he is whining but I think it's important to see both sides of the argument.

What argument? "I want my opponent to resign" isn't an argument. If you have a totally winning position you can (A) mate your opponent or (B) increase your advantage until your opponent decides to resign, or (C) blunder away your advantage. pick one.

And mercy has nothing to do with it!  

What I meant to say was "understand why he's whining".

So every is in agreement that @TheImposter is being a poor sport by purposefully dragging a game out. Good.

I once was losing to a higher rated player in OTB by a queen, rook and knight, and even then he stalemated me. People can choose to resign or not if they want.

most of these situations are exceptions, however. 

They'd be more common if more people played on, by default.

checkmating would be more common as well. I believe the stalemate-cheese to win ratio would be the same.

Atleast then every result is absolute.

Absolutely not! Only the player can decide for himself when he wants to resign--or if he wants to play until mate.  If you don't like it, win faster

Exactly. Very poor form by The Imposter and the OP.

yes i once won a game a rook down

You were born to walk around in your sloshy bag of molecules trapped in a gravity well that keeps you confined to this infinitesimal speck in the universe, out of trouble, and then die and decay until the matter that formed you is consumed by other more fit stewards of those molecules.  No more .  Just like everyone else.  Human beings will have the honor of being the direct cause of their own extinction event, which makes us dumber en masse and less significant than the dinosaurs, in the end.

Once your accept that truth, *then* you can attempt to elevate yourself.

The "never surrender" marching band crowd will never get that they are hurting their own chess game by not learning when to properly resign.  It allows you to play more games of better quality in general, and it also affords you more respect from people rated higher than you, which gets you more games against them, which improves your chess game.  Never surrender is the watch cry of the snowflake.

Novice players often can't evaluate chess positions accurately, and don't understand end games anyway.  So, when in doubt, such players should continue playing, and try to learn from it.  We're not discussing titled players here.

It works at every level.

If two beginners are playing a K+P endgame, and one player gets a clear passer that is going to queen long before the other, and both beginners know from previous play that the player with the passed pawn knows very well how to mate with K+Q, then the other player should resign, and both of them should start a new game where they can actually learn something useful instead of playing out the foregone conclusion.

Novices need to prepare more realistically, meaning actually practicing the move sequences, over and over again, needed to convert the point.  Otherwise they won't be sufficiently prepared to apply them in their tournament games (where it would be ridiculous to complain if an opponent doesn't resign "soon enough").  I can understand expert and stronger players expecting the respect of a sophisticated opponent resigning a lost position.  But novices simply haven't earned that level of respect yet.

People often use that argument, but if you are at a level where you don't know how to finish off an ending and are playing a same-level player its highly dubious what you would actually learn from them, even if they do convert it!  People would be better off looking at the position afterwards with an engine or stronger player, in the time they save by resigning.

As the majority have said, playing on is the best choice. Especially against an opponent who isn't trying to win any more.