Adjourning a game instead of making opponent resign

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therem.harth

I feel uneasy making an opponent resign, when it is not clear who is winning. May I suggest to have the option to adjourn the game, rather than making the opponent resign, so that we can resume later? To prevent abuse, there can be a cap on the number of adjourned games (10 games sounds reasonable to me). In fact having the option to adjourn in general (with opponent's consent? probably one has to count who asked to adjourn to deal with the cap etc.) would be really useful, I think.

I realize this potentially adds a whole level of complexity to matchmaking, but I wanted to throw the idea out there.

Thanks for a great product!


dane

I've had a couple of games in which an opponent who I felt inclined to trust not to leave the game without warning has mysteriously disappeared from a game that was still evenly balanced.  In both cases I suspected that they were having a connection problem and waited quite a while (in one instance I had my dinner) before reluctantly resorting to forcing their resignation.  Adjourning those games would certainly have been a preferable course of action.  Failing that, I would have liked the opportunity to abandon the game rather than force the resignation.

Jacob Marley

Adjourning would really only matter if you can reliably reschedule the game with that player, which means open communication.  In most situations, I imagine that if they are not back within, say 10 minutes or so, you will never get to finish that game.  Abandoning without recording a win/lose is certainly an option.

I'm not against the idea of suspending a game (which I think is a better term than adjourning), I think it can be useful when friends play each other, I just see it as having very limited applications, and doesn't really solve the problem you are describing.

therem.harth

Restarting a game can be made a lot easier by giving notifications when someone who has an adjourned game with you logs in, or is already logged in when you do. This used to be standard in chess servers, but I did not use those for a long while now. It worked pretty well in my experience.

Quote from: Jacob Marley on 12 July 2017, 07:14:21 PM
Adjourning would really only matter if you can reliably reschedule the game with that player, which means open communication.  In most situations, I imagine that if they are not back within, say 10 minutes or so, you will never get to finish that game. [...]
Do you have experience to back this up? In general I would like to finish a game I had started, I assume other people would feel the same.

Quote from: Jacob Marley on 12 July 2017, 07:14:21 PM
I'm not against the idea of suspending a game (which I think is a better term than adjourning), I think it can be useful when friends play each other, I just see it as having very limited applications, and doesn't really solve the problem you are describing.

Yes, it would. I do not have to make an opponent resign (or resign myself) when the outcome is not clear. How does it not solve this problem?

Cave-O-Sapien

At first blush, I like the idea of giving the remaining player the option to end the game with a Tie or with no result; upon reflection, however, I think this is likely to lead to even more rage quits/disconnects.

If there is some non-zero probability that an opponent will not choose "force resign" then some subset of users will disconnect rather than resign.

therem.harth

Quote from: Cave-O-Sapien on 13 July 2017, 12:00:43 AM
If there is some non-zero probability that an opponent will not choose "force resign" then some subset of users will disconnect rather than resign.
I agree that this can be abused. That's why there should be a cap on total number of adjourned games. If someone who has reached the cap disconnects, they automatically lose. This also provides incentive to finish your games, rather than leaving them in limbo.

I have the feeling that this would be very complicated to implement though.

dane

Quote from: Cave-O-Sapien on 13 July 2017, 12:00:43 AM
At first blush, I like the idea of giving the remaining player the option to end the game with a Tie or with no result; upon reflection, however, I think this is likely to lead to even more rage quits/disconnects.

If there is some non-zero probability that an opponent will not choose "force resign" then some subset of users will disconnect rather than resign.
This possibility had also occurred to me, but I think (hope?) it would be a very minor increase.  As the remaining player I would choose "force resign" if I felt it was a game I was likely to win anyway and would choose "abandon" only if the game was still evenly balanced (or a likely loss for me), neither of which are positions that are likely to have led an opponent to quit.  The other factor that would influence my decision would be if I had any prior experience of playing against the opponent.  For example one game that I would have liked to abandon was the sixth game I'd played against that particular opponent.  I'd won all three games the previous day and had already won the first two games on this particular occasion when suddenly my opponent disappeared in the middle of a very even game. I really don't believe that he disappeared voluntarily.