stupid rule at the end of a tournament

[VilBoub]

sevenwonders • never-ending battle February 2023
https://boardgamearena.com/6/sevenwonde ... =395465991

stupid_rule.jpg (51.8 KiB) Viewed 10232 times

In all games of the tournament, the first 3 players are qualified for the next round, but in the penultimate game, only the first is qualified for the final, accompanied by 3 players who have not played!
Why not organize games with 3 players?

[nik592]

Because the tournament organiser set it up to say minimum of 4 players per game. However, in fairness, they may not have realised this is how it would work at the end, and it would also depend on how many players entered the tournament (which they can't predict). I suspect the players chosen to be skipped in Step 13 has something to do with 3/4 of the players in the Step 13 match already having been skipped in another round in the tournament. I'd probably be annoyed too, but there are a number of issues with the current tournament framework that don't seem high on the BGA fix radar.

[RicardoRix]

We had a similar problem with an Agricola tournament, only it was worse. The last round did not actually take place, because there are not enough people left. It made 3 tables of 3 players and it would not eliminate anyone.

https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=28586

We had the same tournament settings as you:

Number of players in a match: 4
Number of players in a match (minimum): 4
Number of players to keep for each match: 3 qualified players

With 9 players, it used to make 3 tables of 3. 3 people always qualify, and no-one ends up getting eliminated. Endless rounds of play.

Luckily they have fixed this bug, but we ended up with exactly what you've described. It made a 2 4's and 1 person got a skip. After the next round, just 7 people where left. 3 go straight to the final, 4 players have to play a match and only 1 of those go through to the final. Seems very unfair - it's not great.

I believe it's possible for the 1 player that got the first skip, could have also got a skip also in the following round.

The limitation where the 'minimum' equals the 'Number of players in a match', needs to be looked at. But it's very hard. Try and start with 9 players, map out the preferred last few rounds....

[RicardoRix]

Yeah, I can't come up with anything. Or at-least anything significantly better.

[Romain672]

Let me try.
You would want to have many free pass at the start, and few at the end.

So firstly we got the solution to make the game goes from 7 players to 6, to 5, to 4, to 1. Which has upsides, but has downsides with the duration of the tournament.

Another option is to work what happen from the end:
- 1st round from end) 4 players remaining: 1 winner
- 2) 8 players remaining: top 2 qualified
- 3): 10 players remaining: top 3 qualified, 2 free pass
- 4): 13 players remaining: 1 free pass
- 5): 17 players remaining: 1 free pass
- 6): 22 players: 2 free pass
- 7): 29 players: 1 free pass
- 8) 38 players: 2 free pass
- 9) 50 players: 2 free pass
- 10) 66 players: 2 free pass

So yeah it work well. And so if you are outside this number of players, you force during the first round to arrive in that range (even if only one match is going on first round).

I don't think you can do better than that, without adding annoying tiebreakers.



But the main problematic thing here as programmer, is that the player asked for games with top 3 qualified / 4, but ends up with a top 2 qualified in the second to last round.
It look great here, but could cause some troubles somewhere else, maybe.

[Zoorim]

The system should continue to eliminate only one player each game.

For the specific case from this tracking, there should have been 2 other rounds:
after round 13: there should be 6 players remaining in the tournament
round 14: the 3 players on the bench come in and 1 of the remaining 3 players complete the table,
round 15: the 2 players on the bench come in and 2 of the 3 remaining player complete the table
and finally the round 16 will be the last remaining 4 players for the ultimate game.

[lucy williams]

The system should continue to eliminate only one player each game.

For the specific case from this tracking, there should have been 2 other rounds:
after round 13: there should be 6 players remaining in the tournament
round 14: the 3 players on the bench come in and 1 of the remaining 3 players complete the table,
round 15: the 2 players on the bench come in and 2 of the 3 remaining player complete the table
and finally the round 16 will be the last remaining 4 players for the ultimate game.

yes, that was how I was expecting it to work - long drawn out, but then these whole tournaments are long drawn out...

one person set up a lot of these "never ending battle" tournaments, and then they suddenly disappeared...maybe they were scared of complaints when they realised that the final table situation didn't work well... some of these tournaments were extremely popular though, i entered quite a few myself. There are no new iterations of these tournaments being created any more, which is a shame, but some of the existing ones look set to continue for a long time - the Azul never ending battle March 2023 tournament has taken 4 months so far to get from 400 down to 120 players.