How to report & need for better tournament restriction

[Silene]

First, tournament admins could get the ability to boot players from the tournament. Alternatively, extend the power of the red thumb to include inability to enter any tournament made by a player who gave you a red thumb (effectively equivalent effect).

It might fix the problem for your tournaments. But moust tournament-creators don't know who should be avoided for good reasons or put the effort to check - but the participants are still affected. Apart from that, you'd be creating bullying-problems where people can be excluded for all kinds of reasons. Not a good idea. If you want to be able to hand-pick all players then do a private tournament.

Second, you could have players automatically booted from a tournament if their karma is ever 0%. On the assumption that the karma system actually works, this should neatly get rid of problem players.

That might work but IMO it would still be better to remove someone from a tournament, who has timed out in a round (or timed out twice?).

You say your solution can fix the matter, but I don't think it does. souris' suggestion goes in a better direction imo. Some tweaks necessary, but I like the general approach.

[sourisdudesert]

First, tournament admins could get the ability to boot players from the tournament. Alternatively, extend the power of the red thumb to include inability to enter any tournament made by a player who gave you a red thumb (effectively equivalent effect).

This we won't do: too many potential problems with players excluded from tournaments without reasons. If tournament creators wants to be picky with participants, they should use private tournament feature. Otherwise, they should accept that anyone that fits the requirement could participate.

Second, you could have players automatically booted from a tournament if their karma is ever 0%. On the assumption that the karma system actually works, this should neatly get rid of problem players.

This could work but we still need some protection before registration.

[Doubleshoe]

First, tournament admins could get the ability to boot players from the tournament. Alternatively, extend the power of the red thumb to include inability to enter any tournament made by a player who gave you a red thumb (effectively equivalent effect).

It might fix the problem for your tournaments. But moust tournament-creators don't know who should be avoided for good reasons or put the effort to check - but the participants are still affected. Apart from that, you'd be creating bullying-problems where people can be excluded for all kinds of reasons. Not a good idea. If you want to be able to hand-pick all players then do a private tournament.

I actually agree that this would be a bad idea - but it would solve the problem in most cases because someone would have authority to do something, and could be contacted. The bullying problems would likely not be worth it, though. If there was a way of implementing, say, a report function for "player is sabotaging a tournament" that could have a similar effect, but the workload on moderators might get too high.

Second, you could have players automatically booted from a tournament if their karma is ever 0%. On the assumption that the karma system actually works, this should neatly get rid of problem players.

That might work but IMO it would still be better to remove someone from a tournament, who has timed out in a round (or timed out twice?).

You say your solution can fix the matter, but I don't think it does. souris' suggestion goes in a better direction imo. Some tweaks necessary, but I like the general approach.

Strictly speaking, your suggestion would both be stricter and less effective than what I suggest. It would still allow players like the one in question to mess up the first round or two of literally every tournament, and dependent on the stringency of your criteria for "timing out" it screws over players who are fairly objectively not a problem. Perhaps if the "timing out" criteria is something like "lost a game that was abandoned", but, like my suggestion of booting players from the tournament, that carries some heavy potential for a bullying issue, albeit a lesser one.

That said, as previously stated Souris' action #2 might actually work, with minimum of unwanted drawbacks.

[Cruella-Devil]

Players could be restricted from joining tournaments inline with their Reputation Penalties.

[Jellby]

Allow tournament admins to specify a timeframe for the karma restrictions. For example, players must have 75% karma or more during at least 1 week prior to the tournament start. Or, more or less equivalently, players must have no more than 25 karma penalty points during the week before the tournament start.

[Doubleshoe]

In danger of straying the topic of discussion back to the start, I have a question about how moderation works. I was, admittedly in line with the terms of conduct, moderated against for posts in a different thread. Reading the moderation report, however, it show that the moderation option chosen was "Doubleshoe: didn't do anything that you can see above". That is to say, #3 in Silene's image. However, as noted by Silene, it is actually impossible to file a report while citing that reason. I assume this moderation report was generated by the moderators themselves, thus circumventing that little issue, but my question is: if that is, apparently, a legitimate way of filing a report, why is it not possible for your users to file a report in this way and actually write an explanation of what happened?

Allow tournament admins to specify a timeframe for the karma restrictions. For example, players must have 75% karma or more during at least 1 week prior to the tournament start. Or, more or less equivalently, players must have no more than 25 karma penalty points during the week before the tournament start.

+1 to this

[Cruella-Devil]

Doubleshoe, your Moderation should be retracted.

This problem has been here for more than a year and BGA have done nothing to resolve it.
The number of times players have complained about this player on here is unbelievable.

I reported this player via email a year ago whilst he was playing under his other account because there was no way to do so on here.

Prior to sending BGA my email I wrote to either Sourisdudesert or Een, I can't remember which one, as it's been so long and they instructed me to report this player on here. I tried everywhere and was unable to do so.

BGA never responded to my email.

What option do you have to report such a player?

Furthermore, everyone knows who this player, you mentioning his name makes no difference.

[lundeeng]

In danger of straying the topic of discussion back to the start, I have a question about how moderation works. I was, admittedly in line with the terms of conduct, moderated against for posts in a different thread. Reading the moderation report, however, it show that the moderation option chosen was "Doubleshoe: didn't do anything that you can see above". That is to say, #3 in Silene's image. However, as noted by Silene, it is actually impossible to file a report while citing that reason. I assume this moderation report was generated by the moderators themselves, thus circumventing that little issue, but my question is: if that is, apparently, a legitimate way of filing a report, why is it not possible for your users to file a report in this way and actually write an explanation of what happened?

Allow tournament admins to specify a timeframe for the karma restrictions. For example, players must have 75% karma or more during at least 1 week prior to the tournament start. Or, more or less equivalently, players must have no more than 25 karma penalty points during the week before the tournament start.

+1 to this

Moreover, if moderators can generate their own report and take action under the "none of the above" category, why don't they simply do that with the problem player who shall not be named? They've claimed this player's behavior is "not allowed" in other threads, but ostensibly don't take action because the moderation reports have been made in the wrong venue (while ignoring that is impossible for a user to actually report this type of behavior without hitting a dead end).

Since it is not possible for a user to file this type of report, please consider this post a formal request for a moderator to review this player's history and initiate a "didn't do anything that you can see above" report based on the player's pattern of mass registering for hundreds of tournaments and abandoning all of them.

1 player is responsible for the vast majority of issues that people are complaining about in these threads. It will continue to bubble over into the forums if you don't take action, or at least provide a legitimate venue for users to report how the quality of their experience has been negatively affected by the player in question. The worst possible response is the dismissive gaslighting that says "this isn't a problem, the system works, the responsibility is yours for avoiding this player (even though the tools we've provided to do that are ineffective), and if there's really a problem, you should file a report."

Why all the hand wringing about the unintended consequences of changing how tournaments are administered when most of the issue could be resolved by a moderator reaching out to start a dialogue with the problem player, find out if they have a legitimate reason for continually repeating this cycle, and if not, reprimanding them for their pattern of disrupting hundreds of tournaments?

[sourisdudesert]

This subject is handled right now.

After a deep analysis of the case, I am 99% certain that this player is not doing this to hurt other tournament's participants. To say the same things differently: if he was willing to destroy a lot of tournaments, he would have been easy for him to do much more. Basically, what we have here is a player that have long period of unavailability that prevent him to play.

Because he should not take commitment to play in tournament while he obviously cannot, his karma is zero, so at least this part is working. We are not going to moderate this player because "not playing" is not against the TOS and because what I just said (99% certain that this is not "on purpose").

However, there is obviously a flaw in the way we manage this kind of players in tournaments. This is going to be fixed quickly and the effect will be immediate not only on this player but for all future players that would like to follow his path.

It would have help that someone reported this player sooner, which I agree is not easy because no category is really adapted, but in 6 months we had only 1 email about him, at the end of February, which was a period where it was not so obvious than it is today.

Now that we are working on the subject, I would ask you to be a little bit patient. Fixes are coming.

[Cruella-Devil]

I appreciate it immensely that BGA are working on a fix. I can start joining tournaments again.

Furthermore, I will add that a couple of players and I wrote to this player regarding his behaviour, however, with no joy, see attached link:
https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... t=countess

This player could have played REAL-TIME OR TURN-BASED Games rather than ruin a vast number of tournaments over such a long period of time.