Auto-resign policy needs to be changed!

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Avatar of Orbrin

There is a policy that if player thinks for too long in a game before 10th move, he will be auto-resigned. Small notification bellow the board will appear with countdown to your loss.

This is just blatantly outragous and should not be in the game at all. Why are we playing with the clock if we are not allowed to use our time to think.

What is worse, even if you notice the countdown, there is no way to turn it off. A pop-up "are you still there" would still break the focus, but at least it's better than forcing players to panic move.

When I play 3/+2 its my problem to weight proper calculation of complicated position in the opening compared to missing 90 seconds later. I remember that coundown ticking several times in a past, but back then nothing ever happened after it reached 0, just this month it resigned my game (and made me panic move in another).
I don't understand the meaining of this policy. Even back then when nothing happened after countdown ticked, it just made me move slower, because I spend 15+ seconds on looking to "what the hell is happening, how do I make this stop" instead of trying to come up with the correct move.

Avatar of Martin_Stahl
Orbrin wrote:

There is a policy that if player thinks for too long in a game before 10th move, he will be auto-resigned. Small notification bellow the board will appear with countdown to your loss.

This is just blatantly outragous and should not be in the game at all. Why are we playing with the clock if we are not allowed to use our time to think.
What is worse, even if you notice the countdown, there is no way to turn it off. A pop-up "are you still there" would still break the focus, but at least it's better than forcing players to panic move.

When I play 3/+2 its my problem to weight proper calculation of complicated position in the opening compared to missing 90 seconds later. I remember that coundown ticking several times in a past, but back then nothing ever happened after it reached 0, just this month it resigned my game (and made me panic move in another).
I don't understand the meaining of this policy. Even back then when nothing happened after countdown ticked, it just made me move slower, because I spend 15+ seconds on looking to "what the hell is happening, how do I make this stop" instead of trying to come up with the correct move.

The long move timer is only if it takes more than half the base time in the first 10 moves.

https://support.chess.com/article/338-how-does-game-abandonment-work

Unfortunately, enough people essentially force their opponents to wait out the timer early in the game and a "are you there" prompt wouldn't help in all cases if the opponent was doing it maliciously since they could just click yes.

There's likely not a perfect balance between letting the timer run and trying to limit malicious time wasting.

Avatar of Orbrin

I know how it works, but it really shouldn't do this way.

There are plenty of ways to implement it better if you are so concerned about griefing. I can understand that this might be happening far more often on lower ratings with new accounts, but in my games it's so rare I don't recall ever to be bothered by my opponent doing so.

It's not justifiable to prevent anti-chess behaviour with policy that is strictly anti-chess in it's core.

It might be restricted by
- the age of the account, rating, number of games...
- setting to choose "I will never abandon games, but it will count towards not playing fair more severely"
- "Are you there" pop-up would cover real life emergencies decent players have.

All of those options would be much more preferable than what is in place now.