Tournament matchmaking is completely broken

[Frooty_Bazooty]

I am playing in a Welcome To tournament over 15 rounds and I am currently 1st (https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=98101). the tournament is matches of 4 players and there was initially 32. One person left after Round 10 and so theres now only 31. So since then, every of the 3 subsequent rounds that I have played, I have been paired with the 3 lowest ranked players. These are mostly players who are timing out and therefore are bottom because they get no points. I won all 3 matches, but in 2 of them, someone saw it was the last round and timed out someone else so that they could get some extra points. Despite winning, I then get 4 points instead of 6. Its impossible for me to win, because they can just time each other out when they see it will be the last round.

What sense does it make to continuously pair the leader with the 3 bottom players? Its not enjoyable for me or them. I hate playing with these people who run over and are disrupting the tournament for everyone else. Why dont I get paired with the people who are at the top of the table?
also, how can I possibly win if I am paired with people who are timing out every single game? Whenever it gets to the last round, whoever is in 3rd or 4th just times out someone else so they can get 4 points instead of 0 or 2.

[FSKFSK]

I see what happened. This is a bug in the matchmaking algorithm.

The tournament is set for "don't play the same opponents twice", which is what you wanted.

But the tournament lasted long enough that you already did play everyone else once. Rather than changing it to "don't play the same opponents 3 times", the pairing algorithm just gives up and makes stupid pairings.

You might want to report this as a tournament bug.

[Mathew5000]

But the tournament lasted long enough that you already did play everyone else once. Rather than changing it to "don't play the same opponents 3 times", the pairing algorithm just gives up and makes stupid pairings.

You might want to report this as a tournament bug.

I reported what I believe is the same bug here: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=56504

Please vote to encourage the devs to fix.

Also, "try to prevent same players to be opponents twice" is checked by default; it should be unchecked by default. Even disregarding the bug discussed in this thread, that option being checked goes against the whole philosophy of Swiss System. For example consider a four-player game, where three rounds have already been played. A player who is undefeated should be matched against the other players at the top of the standings. But with that option checked, it may well be the case, by chance, that the top player has already played against the second- and fourth-ranked players, while the third-ranked player has already played against the fifth- and sixth-ranked players. So then instead of the next round having players #1, #2, #3, and #4 in the same game, we'd have players #1, #3, #7, and #8. That makes it very, very difficult for the #7 and #8 players, since they are matched against a couple of the top players in the tournament, when the logic of Swiss System says they should be matched against players near them in the rankings.

[Gulchen]

Also, "try to prevent same players to be opponents twice" is checked by default; it should be unchecked by default. Even disregarding the bug discussed in this thread, that option being checked goes against the whole philosophy of Swiss System.

Well, for Swiss System, what it should do is try that, but give absolute priority to
respecting the current scores. ​ However, I imagine that's not what it currently does.