Yeah, I guess you're actually right. It's just that it was annoying to have to read messages while in deep thought.
No.
I agree that abandoning due to foolish mistakes are rather flagrant abuses of the way the timer works. Correcting the problem IS more difficult, though, considering that there are specific timers in place on each game type...
I would think that a 5|10 would be better than a 15|10... I find that very few players are actually doing the random abandoning, but the ones that do are rather frequent with it. =\ Perhaps an average time to move being recorded could promote a promt to appear to ask if you're still active, giving you a certain amount of time to reply? Or maybe a "BRB" button alerting the other player you're going AFK?
Neb, I understand your concern for being interrupted. But in an online game such a query is fully appropriate.
He only asked once. You could have taken the same amount of time typing "y" and hitting return as disabling chat.
If he continued to talk to you, then fine, disable chat. But the query was appropriate in a world where people just walk away from games or get disconnected and can't reconnect.