But you can still play with a cheat. In fact, it can be particularly fun to beat a cheat despite their cheating:
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One person I played with regularly must have been using an on-line word finder. I never saw so many obscure and 7 letter words. So, when I won against her, I really enjoyed it.
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Spoilsports don’t *violate *the rules of the game. They repudiate them.
I was playing Scrabble on my Android phone against a random person, but because of a bug I couldn’t continue the game. It would tell me it was my turn, but it couldn’t take me to my game, it just searched forever. Eventually the other guy had to quit, he probably thought I was being a rage-quit douche because I was losing. I know this likely rare, but at least sometimes it’s not on purpose.
Lexulous deals with quitters quite nicely. The game gets adjourned and you have a chance to finish it – say if your computer crashed – then after a period of time (I forget how long) the other player is awarded the win. Now I do resign on occasion, if I’m far behind with awful letters near the end of the game. However if the other player is close to making 500+ points (a good high score) I play on for the sake of their enjoyment. And I always sstay to congratulate them on the win.
Total Denialation!
I was actually able to do “Deviated” on my first play with some random player about 2 weeks ago.
I’m still waiting for his second move. :rolleyes:
Then there’s the game where we were playing pretty close, using common words, then at the end of it he comes out with “Axcite”, “Eikon”, and “Ramies”. :rolleyes:
I do this as well. I have a regular partner in another state that I play over and over again (never met the guy, but we’re pretty evenly matched).
One game we had chosen a random board, and it was his turn to go first. I looked to see what letters I had… next to the starting square was something like this: start, triple word, triple word, triple letter, double word, triple word. I messaged the guy real quick with “I’m SO screwed right now!” He played “aloof” for 300-some-odd points, and messaged back, “There that wasn’t so bad!”
I lost that game. 
I was thinking of online scrabble. I only play WWF with friends, rarely a game with strangers, but I used to play scrabble a lot, and people would insist you were using a word finder because I dared use an obscure word you remembered. I just take my ass kickings in games when it happens, how else do you get better?
Once, quite a few years ago, I thought I’d take up online chess. So I went to Yahoo Games and signed up for a chess game. Things were going fine, a normal game, until I began to get an advantage. Suddenly out of nowhere, it says I was “booted”! WTF? The other player somehow “booted” me out. Game over, and it was scored as a loss for me. I couldn’t believe that you can kick over the virtual chessboard, and your opponent loses!?! I was so disgusted, I never went back for another game.
Yeah, ragequitting is a pain. (I admit to doing it in one-player games without an online component, since I’m the only one who’ll ever see my rating, and rarely bother looking at it myself - unless it’s part of unlocking something, in which case I kind of have to, if I want the unlocked stuff. But I never do it in multiplayer.)
On the flipside, though, when there’s a way to acknowledge the loss and move on, I hate people who won’t accept a forfeit…luckily, I’ve never seen an online game that will let the winner refuse to accept a forfeit, or if I have, I’ve never seen anyone exercise the option (and don’t expect to for the same reason that ragequits exist). But it happened to me a lot when I played M:tG IRL, and I hate, hate, hate having to play out a game after I can see the loss coming, and I’d rather cede the point and move on to the next round where I can try to get it back.
I tried online backgammon some years ago. First, some woman started coming on to me, so I bolted. The next game, I had some great dice rolls near the end and the guy got pissed and started yelling at me. End of my online gaming.
Interestingly, quitting is a strategic move in Magic: the Gathering. There’s nothing wrong with resigning the game if you see yourself completely beat: it just speed sup a preordained end, and nobody sees it as dishonorable. In fact, it can be advantageous in multiplayer games to do this.
See, many effects deal damage (thus beating you) while also giving the guy who did it an advantage. But! You can resign at any time, and everything related to you is immediately cleared from play. Immediately. And anything he planned to do to you to give himself an advantage is also wiped off the table clean. Sure resigning strategically won’t win you the game, but it can make people less likely to mess with you in the first place if they know you’ll do it.
I’m really reluctant to suspect, let alone accuse others of using anagrammers, because my vocabulary has led to me being accused unfairly too. Nonetheless sometimes a series of amzingly obscure seven and eight letter words gets me going mmm and deciding against a followup game with that person.
Sometimes people challenge you to provide the meaning of an odd word to check if you are cheating. One of my best words for this was* herries*. I dunno what it means I replied but Walter Scott wrote a novel called “Rogue Herries” and I took a chance it wasn’t a proper noun.
I used to play Spades quite a bit and delayers were thankfully rare, but what got me to quit was the bifurcation in the rankings, where the upper rankers would just refuse to play intermediates, and the only way to get a high enough ranking to get into the upper ranks is to play upper rankers (unless you can win like 50 games in a row.) The few times the upper rankers would deign to play with me, I’d invariably lose – mostly due to mistakes from my (random) partner, who would then blame me for playing trickier than my ranking showed, even when what I did was the ideal play in actuality.
Not to mention that people would often tell me to “play faster” because I was still on dialup.
There’s a huge difference between quitting/resigning/conceding when the game is clearly lost versus rage-quitting too early.
Call it what you will. But if you call it repudiation, then it’s a selective and expedient repudiation, and in particular it is a selective and expedient repudiation of the rule(s) that specify how the game is supposed to end. Just like cheaters, spoil-sports respect the rules when they work in their favor, and indeed demand that other players respect those rules also. But then they repudiate those same rules as soon as they do not work in their favor. In that respect, repudiation is just a ten cent word for cheating.
Does the game theorist say anything about the huge contradiction here? That is, it is only by honoring the validity of the rules that the cheater or spoil-sport can ever claim victory (and thereby, I suppose, eke out some pathetic crumb of anemic self worth), but then they freely repudiate those same rules to avoid acknowledging defeat.
fwiw, I have no problem with resigning or forfeiting. That is, according to the rules of backgammon and most other games, a legit way to end a game.
Well if your playing a backgammon game with Death…
This reminds me… Long, long, long ago (I’m talking like 10 years ago), I used to play ranked chess on Zone. Now I didn’t mind losing, unless it was to someone with a sub-1300 rank, because it would kill your rank if you were 1800+. If/when I was about to lose to some lowly ranked person, I would disconnect the modem so it would appear as a disconnect, with came with no penalties unless you acquired a few of them, rather than a loss, which would result in losing like a hundred points.
/randomanecdote
Hmm. Did the winning player that you bailed out on at least get the win in the form of a forfeit?
Damn. If you were rated 1800+, then you really had no business losing to someone ranked under 1300. And it conforms with what I already know about you that you would have dodged taking the hit.
I never got above the low 1700s myself, and it’s been a couple of decades since I’ve even played the game, but even today I bet you could wake me up out of a sound sleep, put me at a board with a 1300-rated player, start the clock, and I’d still win easily.
Whatever you were doing to screw up against a player of such a low caliber, you earned it, and you should have owned it.
Why does this not surprise me in the least…