my personal opinion is that the only time it's really appropriate to resign is when you have absolutely no chance [...] It just seems spiteful not to let the other person take the "real" win, if it's only going to take 2 min.
Opinion is fine, but I'm interested about why does it seem spiteful to you? There is just winning and losing in a 2-player game, nothing else. Resigning is actually a courtesy of the losing player to save both players from the likely boring last 2 minutes.
But part of that community norm is an expectation that the losing player's willingness to stay put and lose graciously is not going to be abused by the winner.
I don't believe that such a norm can be established in sufficiently high-level play. There is no benefit to playing out decided games, but resigning them has an advantage. It's also is a well-established custom in most other game communities.
Five responses:
1. In sufficiently high level play,
you take the win when you can. My example involved a player
deliberately prolonging an already-won game, by multiple turns. There's a lot of adjectives for that behavior. "High-level" isn't one of them.
2. Isotropic, in aggregate, is not a sufficiently high-level community. The average play level is simply that - average. I agree there might be different norms for BGGDL games, or lvl 30+, but then you're referring to a very small % of the total players.
3. Resigning is NOT the community norm in Dominion or isotropic. Apart from all the background disconnects, lags, and "crap-the-boss-is-coming" time-outs, I am certain that if we trawled councilroom we'd find that end-game resignations cluster around the cards and situations that people hate most: KC-Possessions, KC-Saboteurs, Torturer pins, or mass-Ambassador, persistent Ghost ships, and 8-2 curse splits with no trashing, etc. Moreover, I expect that 98% or more of Province only games where one player has over 43 pts
before the last turn are NOT resigned. Ditto for nearly every other objective standard of points-based hopelessness where there is still a plausible end within 3-8 turns.*
4. Beginners are least likely to resign. If you're reading this board then you're not a noob. But you've played against lots of them, and many of those games are NOT close. And yet, noobs rarely resign when down 6 provinces to zero. A "play-mean-until-he-rage-quits" norm will encourage far more bad behavior than a "tit-for-tat-be-a-good-sport-or-else" norm does, and the former will drive noobs away from the hobby. It's very bad for the community and the hobby to excuse abusive behavior by winners, but decry such behavior by losers.
5. Good sportsmanship involves respecting the other player's enjoyment of the game. There is satisfaction in completing a game, for winner and loser alike.
*Thus excluding perpetual motion vp machines, like Goons-Watchtower, KC-Monument, or Bishop-Gold-Gold-Gold.