Unacceptable "Skip turn of players out of time" exploitation

[doubleawilly]

I am in a game with someone with extremely high ELO who decided mid-game that they couldn't complete the game. Instead of conceding the game, they just left. Somehow, either the "Skip turn of players out of time" button is completely broken, or they found a way to exploit the button so that it never gets below 20 seconds to kick them out of the game. I have a video of this happening here: https://youtu.be/94QC3CtDfJY

How is this acceptable? I have reason to believe that since the player cherishes their high ELO rank so much that they found a way to hack the button to keep them "active" (the button has always worked for me in the past if someone has abandoned a game). So now, I am forced to concede the game that THEY left, hurting my ELO score and boosting them even higher. This is absolutely aggravating.

[dschingis27]

You have to wait 20 seconds after you pressed the button. By repressing the button, you just restarted the timer somehow.

[Ranior]

I think they know how they're supposed to use that screen, the video is a bit weird/unclear about what is going on though because you are clicking it so much. You need to click and leave it up, wait for the 20 seconds, and then click to kick them. However I think you know that is what you're supposed to do, and indeed something weird is happening.

I'll admit there do look to be a couple other tables like yours with the same situation happening, given this player has timed out in a few games, but players look like they have to do what you did--just abandon the game rather than kick. Hard to know for sure though as the kick requests don't hit the game log that I can see (although I wonder if BGA admins can see kick requests)

With that said, I'm also not sure anything nefarious is going on here or not. The player is playing a lot, and does lose some games. There aren't that many examples of this. Basically what I'm saying is if they are somehow cheating/hacking the system, they're being fairly judicious in their use of the exploit.

[doubleawilly]

The reason I am clicking it so often is that the countdown window disappears on its own after N number of seconds and restarts. So every time it disappears and I click it again I have to restart the timer from 20 seconds. It only counted down between 0-4 seconds before resetting itself and dismissing itself every time I pressed it for the 45 minutes the player was gone.

I am not the one resetting the timer. I am only *retrying* the timer because it cancels itself so rapidly. The only reason I know of this happening is when a player moves a piece (unseen by the opponent - me - until their move is confirmed). This player was obviously not moving a piece every ~2 seconds while they were over time by 45 minutes.

[dschingis27]

Ok, thanks for the explanation. I think you really found an odd behavior there and you should file a bug report. https://boardgamearena.com/bugs

I don't really think that the player is doing it on purpose (could be of course) but this should probably be investigated.