Ban accounts who abandon games

I played this account the other day and they let their time run out. I checked their other games out of curiosity. Literally every single one of their losses is game abandoned. I encourage you to try it [removed -- MS]. How can you abandon like 50 games in a row and not get banned?

https://support.chess.com/en/articles/8562517-how-do-i-report-someone

If you would like to report someone, you should use the option on their profile to do it. Posting abuse accusations in the forums isn't allowed.

That said, players that abort too often, as a percentage of recently completed games, do get restricted.

https://support.chess.com/en/articles/8598007-what-is-chess-com-s-sportsmanship-policy

A little of 12% of the player's games are lost by abandonment and a little under 24% of lost games. Seems a little high but without looking more deeply, it's hard to say how many of those were in losing positions versus potential connection issues or losses due to being already impacted by the sportsmanship policy and letting the get to the abort timer (where it's considered abandoned if impacted by the sportsmanship policy)

Does the algorithm not take into account consecutive abandoned games? I just checked and 15 of their last losses are all game abandoned in completely lost positions. I would think instead of having to report someone the chess.com algorithm would be able to flag people after abandoning a certain amount of games in a row.

It is very annoying to sit and wait out the abandonment timer when your opponent disconnects from an obviously disastrous position. Could you simply change the rating algorithm so that abandoning a game (after a move has been made) costs more than resigning? Even just an extra point or two would likely enforce the courtesy of resigning.

Another issue (and related to my next point) is the practice of "fighting out every game to the end, even from truly hopeless positions." I understand that it is common advice to beginners to do so, partly for the practice and partly in the hope that the opponent will make some truly spectacular blunder. OK, I get it, and I even do it sometimes. But it can be annoying, PARTICULARLY when they blundered badly early in the game, have a lot of clock left, and play really slowly.

And a final question, that this is perhaps not the right place for -- but I just played two games against players near my rating, and in both cases they tried aggressive attacks, I was able to stall them, and then mate them with a counter-attack that they completely missed because they were so intent on their own attack. Their ratings dropped far more than 8 points, the second of the two dropped 25 points! How/what is the rating engine doing this?

The system does flag things like that automatically and restricts the accounts.

The rating system is designed to help pair players of similar performances, so penalizing rating for abandonment will begin to skew that system and make those players underrated by some amount. Also, a point or two is unlikely to be noticed by a player, so wouldn't be a great deterrent anyway.

They already get restricted by being placed in a poor sportsmanship pool and get delays before they can start new games

Regarding the point loss, the site uses the Glicko rating system that includes a measure of rating uncertainty called the rating deviation (RD) value. Without looking for that member, they likely have a slightly higher RD value so the magnitude of rating changes after games will be higher until the value drops.

If the system is meant to flag accounts it's clearly not working. I checked the account I reported over a week ago and the 3 losses I checked at random were all abandoned . Can you take this back to the dev team please?

It doesn't ban them. It restricts the accounts and put them in a poor sportsmanship pool.