Hello,
basically I agree with YNWA.
I have nothing against this option being added, but I really don't think this should be the default. This is because at least in the games I play in my community, this option is never used to randomly modify the scores, but there's a purpose behind it.
- Either someone misspelled something and then another person typed that same answer but with a correct spelling, in which case the game won't correctly interpret them as the same word, so with manual points we can fix it so they both get a point, of course you can personally agree on the different rules so that the one with a correct spelling wins over, but that's usually not what we do, unless the spelling is really horrible,
- Or an answer was incorrectly refused when we all agree later on it should have been accepted. In this case you need to manually add points to fix it, 2 or 1, or if that person is the one who stopped the round, you need to add even more.
Depending on the mode you play, even if somebody screws up really badly and adds 100 points to a wrong person, the game won't end right away. You can still fix it before the round ends, but well, if the judge doesn't want to fix that, then it's really not even worth playing with that kind of judge in the future. I think you will just face even worse trust issues than adding/removing points manually, and it kind of already shows whether it's worth playing the game with that opponent or not.
I was going to suggest that there should be a limit and you shouldn't be able to add/remove more than 2 points, but then stopping the round was implemented, and now there's really a legitimate case to add more than 2.
Well, 5 is the maximum amount of points you can earn when stopping the round with 9 categories, and I guess we could set this limit to 12.
I reached 12 because 2 for a correct answer, 5 to negate the penalty because the correct answer was refused by mistake, and 5 more to add the bonus back for stopping the round.
You really shouldn't have any legitimate case to add or remove more than that unless I'm missing something. Of course even with that kind of limit this can still have an illegitimate usage, but this is a special kind of game already that requires more trust and responsibility than others. If you disabled adding and removing points completely, you may have a legitimate case to do it in one round and then you will find yourself not being able to.
I have played a game of Cribbage where someone was trying to type 8 or 9 and typed in 89 and that ended the game but you just start again.
By the way this is now fixed, and in such a case, the maximum amount of mugging points your opponent can get is 10.