Timeouts and elimination tournaments: potential solutions

[Lord Satri]

Hi BGA community,

I love BGA immensely, however, one of my biggest complain about tournaments is how timeouts are handled, especially in elimination tournaments. When an elimination tournament game ends before it should because a player timed out, the system needs to identify who will make it to next round of the elimination tournament, often generating player frustrations (such as for players in a winning position not making it to next round).

Current state:
As far as I understand, if a game where the best half of the players in an elimination tournament game should go to next round and the game ends with a player timing out, the ones selected for next round are randomly selected amongst non-timed-out players.

Potential solutions:

• (A) - all non-timed-out players advance to the next round of the elimination tournament, no matter the threshold of how many players should have made it. A drawback would be that losing players in a game would have an incentive to end the game as soon as another player is out of time.

• (B) - rematch for all non-timed-out players. That's potentially the fairest way but that would significantly impact durations of tournaments, which is a serious drawback.

• (C) - randomly select which players will make it to the next round. That's the current state as far as I know.

• (D) - players with the best scores at time of timeout get to the next round. I would avoid such a solution given in many games the last turns may have tremendous impact on final scoring. Plus some game don't have scores (e.g. Rallyman GT).

What would be other suitable options? Personally, I like the potential solution (A) the most, what do you players think? I'm really looking for a solution for elimination tournaments, but if it works for all tournaments, that's even better. Obviously the solution needs to be good and simple enough for the BGA admins to consider implementing it.

Thanks for your feedback!

[GeraldineMerida]

(A) would probably mean tournaments lasting for more rounds than planned to accommodate the extra players, or some players getting byes mid-tournament, but that still seems fairer than random skipping.

Another alternative is to advance the people with the most time left on their clocks, but then it becomes more about gaming the system than being the best player.

[FSKFSK]

My preferred solution would be "replay the match with 1 fewer player, if the rules of the game allow it, even if it means delaying the start of the next round". (unless all but one player was going to advance anyway)

Example: 7 wonders configured to be multiplayer elimination 3 of 6. There's a 6 player game and someone times out. Now you replay the game with 5 players.

If a multiplayer elimination tournament is configured to be 3 of 4 advance, there's no need to replay when someone times out. Just advance all 3.

[Lord Satri]

Another alternative is to advance the people with the most time left on their clocks

Good point, that's a valid option I forgot to include in the initial list. Thanks!

Maybe there could a tournament configuration setting letting tournament organizers choose themselves how games with timeouts will be handled in their tournament based on a list of options?

[JoysJoy]

Another alternative is to advance the people with the most time left on their clocks, but then it becomes more about gaming the system than being the best player.

I do not like this idea at all! This is the mess we have and it just means the person who is in the most advantageous time zone. It is not who played better or who was the better community member.

Why can't the terms be options set by the organizer? People can choose to play or not based on the options chosen when the tournament was created.

[FSKFSK]

Why can't the terms be options set by the organizer? People can choose to play or not based on the options chosen when the tournament was created.

That would require work by the developers to fix the tournament engine. BGA has placed a greater priority on releasing new games, rather than fixing tournaments.

[RobertBr]

That would require work by the developers to fix the tournament engine. BGA has placed a greater priority on releasing new games, rather than fixing tournaments.

Not really, it is two completely separate groups of people. There are developers who are not paid by BGA who make games - which BGA supports by providing them a platform. Then there are the BGA staff who are responsible for things like the tournament system and all of the other elements of the site, and putting it back together when it crashes. Tournaments have received hundreds (possibly thousands) of fixes, upgrades, and changes since I started playing, but some of the problems are very hard to solve, and often cause new ones (the timing issue is itself an unintended consequence of allowing multi-player games, originally tournaments only allowed two player games).

[sprockitz]

In my opinion the best solution is to first take the skip functionality out of tournaments. As you mentioned with each option there is a way to abuse this.

Then you limit this to games that time out due to tournament duration, so you avoid the last turn skips because someone was losing issues. To me this is the biggest issue players using it as a tool when they are behind to give them a chance to advance (in elim) or to get more points in a Swiss.

Then you still have several of the already listed options, but advancing based solely on time becomes more fair. At that point you can either rank players by time left (as is currently done), or you can add a caveat that anyone who still has a positive clock also automatically advances.

Most tournament games with simultaneous clocks will have multiple people in the negatives as the clock time is based on one person moving at a time, so in some of these cases everyone (or more people than should be eliminated) will have a negative clock...so advancing on time in this scenario seems fair.

For Swiss like Elim, I'd say all players with positive clock share the victory, those with negative are ranked accordingly...so time left only matters if you are negative.

[dgjxqz]

When a player times out, the system forces him to make a random move. Any problem with this solution?

[GeraldineMerida]

When a player times out, the system forces him to make a random move. Any problem with this solution?

A random move could hugely help a losing player; a series of random moves, even more so.