"It's not a bug, it's a feature".

The idea is that if your opponent behaves badly or insults you, you are able to leave a game without resigning or saying another word. This is comparable to just stand up and walk away when facing your oponent on a real board. That is the idea why people are allowed to start other games, although they left an open game.

OTOH, maybe trolls and rude players are more common at different rankings? I`d imagine both escaping and goading becomes less frequent, generally speaking, as the players become more skilful. Besides, if your opponent is saying irritating things, you can always censor them. If somebody won`t resume their losing game, though, there is currently no recourse other than hiring a ninja.

The real problem is that, according to a KGS admin, not all escaped games count as losses for the escaper if he does not exceed an, to me, unknown percentage of the games he escapes. This encourages escaping and punishes honest play.

There`s a glaring drawback to this policy, though. I don`t know about other players, but in my experience objectionable loudmouths are much less common than people who just escape because they don`t want to lose. It seems to me that KGS is solving the smaller problem at the expense of encouraging the greater one.

It's hard to tell if this is true, of course. Perhaps the current policy discourages rudeness at the expense of having more escapes. Perhaps, if the policy was changed, there would be fewer escapers but more loudmouths? Certainly I can imagine that, with a policy where a disconnect is an immediate loss, some of those that now maliciously escape would instead resort to insults and goading.

Reread Dakre's post.

Reading it for a second time does not alter my opinion that escaping must always be punished.

The annoying part here though is that the escape clause seems to get used by the goaders more often than by the goadee's (Who may or may not have facial hair).

A naive question: Suppose A and B are playing. Player A temporarily loses his connection, becoming an escaper. He (A) logs back on, wanting to resume the game, but B shows no inclination to do so, ignoring A instead. So A will continue to be marked as an escaper from this game, though IMO he does not deserve to be. (If anything, B deserves that label.) Other than appealing to a moderator, is there any way for A to fix this? (Or maybe I'm not understanding how this escaper policy works...)

A naive question: Suppose A and B are playing. Player A temporarily loses his connection, becoming an escaper. He (A) logs back on, wanting to resume the game, but B shows no inclination to do so, ignoring A instead. So A will continue to be marked as an escaper from this game, though IMO he does not deserve to be. (If anything, B deserves that label.) Other than appealing to a moderator, is there any way for A to fix this? (Or maybe I'm not understanding how this escaper policy works...)

A naive question: Suppose A and B are playing. Player A temporarily loses his connection, becoming an escaper. He (A) logs back on, wanting to resume the game, but B shows no inclination to do so, ignoring A instead. So A will continue to be marked as an escaper from this game, though IMO he does not deserve to be. (If anything, B deserves that label.) Other than appealing to a moderator, is there any way for A to fix this? (Or maybe I'm not understanding how this escaper policy works...)