Hi. The amount of people that let their clock run out (and even leave the browser) in rated games instead of resigning is absurdly high. Whatever lichess is doing to discourage this seems to not be working. Just now I had two games in a row where the players left, their activity icon turned grey, and yet they were allowed to timeout in a completely lost position until the clock ran out. If you're not connected to the website, it should be an immediate disqualification imho. If your connection is unstable, too bad.
As bad as this is in rated play, in non-rated anonymous games this is problem is on a whole new level. It's very rare that people resign in lost positions. Suggestion there, make the resign button bigger and remove the requirement for "double click" for it to work, and immediate disqualification if you close the browser session.
Ty. Great site otherwise.
It seems to me that the reason that time drainers don't get bigger penalties is that it is technically legal. Think about it; When you click on a 10+0 game, you implicitly agree to spending as much as twenty minutes of your time playing chess.
I don't like drainers (and it is bad sportsmanship) but I agree with lichess's current policy.
Also, pleeeease do not remove the double click feature.
I agree with the OP about penalizing people more strictly for leaving and timing out intentionally. Draining time substantially and then making another move is legal and shouldn't be penalized. Leaving the game entirely is a different thing. Penalizing people for "rage-quitting" wouldn't even affect poor connections, by my reasoning. If your connection goes out and you time out, you would lose by the current rules anyway, no?
I see the little message pop up about a temporary ban, but I agree that whatever the banning protocol is (# of violations, etc.), it is not effective at preventing this.
Obviously, fixing this is complicated by the "claim victory" feature, since it ends the game before the clock runs down. The first workaround to come to mind is to let people voluntarily wait for the clock to run out and then report their opponent, or have the report filed automatically for >2 min of abandonment (or something similar). 3 reports and you're out for a month?
I completely understand the frustration with people who leave without resigning, it is very annoying for me as well.
We're aware of the problem but it's a difficult one. There is an automated playban system that punishes this behavior. But, remember that sometimes users have a legit connection problem so we can't ban after one game.
I don't think that you should lose the game merely for disconnecting due to an unstable connection. You might lose more regular players than salty time drainers this way. You probably won't be able to solve this problem in online chess, other games have had the same problem for years.
Sometimes there are legitimate reasons to suddenly leave a game (like if the boss walks in or something). Then it is fair that you lose instantly (because you shouldn't play at work).
FICS had an option that you could enable "loss on disconnect", but when you did it, you would only pair with other people who had enabled the same option. I think this will be fair if it's an opt-in feature.
I had two cases recently where people leave their clock running from 30 minutes to 0. The icon stays green but they don't make any move. I'm not too annoyed about it but it seems like a bigger deal than if you had 5 minutes left for example.
Maybe lichess could cause drainers to lose 2x rating points for failing to make a move in a reasonable amount of time and timing out. For example pick something like 25% of the time control as the basis for failing to make a move. In a 5 minute game if they let the clock tick down from greater than 1 minute 15 seconds, they'd lose twice the rating points.
Edit: Disconnects already allow the game to end early, so no problem there.
Idea: punish habitual leavers by putting them on the ragequit timer in their next banMinutes*someMultiplier games whenever the game tab loses focus. This means they won't be able to use the computer for anything else while timing down if they want to annoy their opponent for longer than 10 seconds.
Why don't we have some kind of "timeout index" for each player and then try to pair up people with similar indices? That way they don't get directly punished however they then also face off against such people. (and "well behaving people" don't)
While it's a slight punishment for people with bad connections it doesn't actually hurt them as much as something like a ban would.
