Is it acceptable to ignore (not deny) an undo request indefinitely?

Previous topic - Next topic

DanielVanciae

I know that no player is ever obliged to grant an undo, even if no information is gained; some players refuse ever to ask for, or grant, any undo on principle, and that's fine.  I just ran into a bit of an odd situation, though, that seems at least bad manners if not bad sportsmanship. 

Duplicate, Border Village, and Swamp Hag were in play; I had a Duplicate on my Tavern mat and bought a Border Village while Swamp Hag was in effect.  I knew I would get a Curse, of course, but wanted to Duplicate the Border Village (and gain a second cheaper card); however, I accidentally called the Duplicate right after gaining the Curse (whoops)!

Not being a Stoic myself, I requested an undo, and put a note in the message box apologizing and explaining why I wanted it. My opponent merely sat there; he neither granted nor denied the undo, nor did he reply to my message. I posted another message saying that he was within his rights to refuse, but he should at least be willing to do so explicitly. He continued to ignore it, and I timed out and was auto-resigned shortly afterwards.

I admit that I knew that this would happen eventually; if he had denied the undo under the circumstances I would have been a bit annoyed, but I would have finished the game.  I was determined to make him explicitly deny the request if he wouldn't grant it, though. 

Is it reasonable to expect that one's opponent will either grant or deny an undo (perhaps after first asking why one wanted it), or am I just being silly?



Ingix

Of course you are not silly for hoping your opponent will consider the circumstances and react in a reasonable time, even if in the negative (deny the undo). Of course, we both don't know exactly what happened, and if your opponent was actually at the keyboard or they had to leave just seconds before the undo request for some interruption. Also there might have been a language barrier involved (not sure if you chatted with them before).

OTOH, it seems your opponent might have wanted to get a win by time-out, and if that is right, I would consider it unsportsmanlike.

We can't really know, but I can surely understand that you feal annoyed by that behavior.

Megas_Droungarios

Perhaps the interface should be reprogrammed to make the player receiving the undo request and not responding the one who gets timed out, rather than the player whose turn it is.  Or if that's too radical to void the game entirely rather than giving the player who got no response a loss.

Ingix

The problem with this approch is simply that it would make slow playing that much easier. You just ask again and again for the same undo and if that resets your timer, you can stall indefinately.