Remove from tournament games the ability to skip players out of time

[nik592]

As much as I agree that awarding rankings based on current score when a game is ended prematurely is not fair (especially on those who employ end game strategies), I'm curious what other suggestions people have. Currently in tournaments, it's based on remaining thinking time (where the game times out because of the time limits set as part of the tournament) or oldest account (where games end due to player booting). Most people agree both of those also tend to be unfair. Replaying the game isn't workable because for one it would blow out tournament times, and for two, one assumes you wouldn't include the booted player, and now you have an unbalanced match (ie. everyone else was playing 4+ players, but now your game only has 3, which can turn a game into something entirely different in some cases). I personally can't think of anything that would be totally fair. Maybe based on highest ELO? I know people would still cry foul on those as well, especially in luck based games, where ELO is basically meaningless. But determining a winner fairly when a game hasn't played out is tough.

[dudi2]

What if a ranking rule like this would be implemented for (multi-player) tournament games:

- 1st positions are players with positive time not kicking other players (tied by random order)
- below is the player who ended the game by kicking other players
- then players out of time ranked from least to most amount of overtime

Then the kicking player cannot get advance of non-kicking-players with positive remaining time.

Any thought on that?

[Alloran]

1. A player who is out of time can be expelled only with the unanimous agreement of all players who are not out of time.

This does seem like the most elegant solution short of disabling skipping turns in tournaments entirely. In fact, I feel like this should be the case everywhere on BGA. It allows tables to kick people who really are egregiously not playing (just vanish for days or whatever), while removing the ability for players to abuse the system by kicking someone who is still playing for selfish reasons. I like this a lot, it seems like it has a lot of upsides, no downsides, and should be very easy to implement.

[TensorosneT]

I'd like to see a setup option added to tournaments to enable/disable player-driven time-outs for that tournament.
This feels like a simple change, adding a flag settable in tournaments and referenced inside every instance of the player-timeout button. Not sure how easy it is to implement, but it does seem straightforward. Through usage, we would see how many people find this to be serious issue and useful feature.

Having more and longer time-horizon options would also be useful.

Also, redesigning the tournament signup page to make the time constraints much more prominent at sign-up time might also help people avoid signing up for tournaments they won't be able to keep up with. This may not be a trivial effort, but it does seem like the simplest possible change which could have a positive effect on the issue.

[Pandora_004]

1. A player who is out of time can be expelled only with the unanimous agreement of all players who are not out of time.

This does seem like the most elegant solution short of disabling skipping turns in tournaments entirely. In fact, I feel like this should be the case everywhere on BGA. It allows tables to kick people who really are egregiously not playing (just vanish for days or whatever), while removing the ability for players to abuse the system by kicking someone who is still playing for selfish reasons. I like this a lot, it seems like it has a lot of upsides, no downsides, and should be very easy to implement.

I totally agree on that ! Should be a decision from all players with remaining time

[Alloran]

I just had another perfectly fine game (that had been running for weeks) ruined just a few turns from it ending because one player went 2 hours over his time and the guy in third place (with a high rating, wonder where he got it from?) kicked him.

I'm actually cancelling my gold until this is fixed, I no longer want to use this site for tournaments until one of the many suggested changes in this thread are implemented. I know my $3 a month isn't exactly going to hurt their bottom line or anything, but I don't want to support the site anymore while the basic functionality of tournaments is so broken (and ignored).

[potatopizza84]

I'm salty and want to complain about this happening to me in this table: https://boardgamearena.com/6/cantstop?table=412559523

4 player Can't Stop tournament where the time allotted to each player is 12 hours. I was skipped because I was 2 hours over the 12 hour limit, BUT the time between when the player before me went and my turn was up was only around 6 hours, 5 of which were ones I was sleeping for and then was skipped. So you're telling me (or really BGA, everyone on this page gets it lol), that even though I did my turns in a timely manner but other people took longer, I'm penalized for that? Also can't help but note that the player who skipped me had 0 points when everyone else had 2.

Guess this is a lesson to not participate in multiplayer tournaments with short time frames.

[nik592]

Guess this is a lesson to not participate in multiplayer tournaments with short time frames.

Pretty much. If it's a 24 hour tournament and you like to sleep, make sure you allow a reasonable number of "sleeps" in your turn time (for Can't Stop, it might only take one night, but for other games, probably at least 3-5, maybe more). Or hope you get nice opponents who aren't more interested in "not losing" (as booting does not usually result in a win, nor does it guarantee non-elimination) than actually playing to see who wins based on the gameplay.

[katmk]

I'm going to throw another frustrating example in here to support the "All players with positive time have to agree to skip" camp because it just happened and I'm really put out by it.

Challengers tournament with 18 hours per player. This is very tight for a turn-based Challengers game, particularly if you have a deck that involves a lot of manual decisions. In a match with players from the UK, Japan, China and USA (assuming flags are correct), it would have been a tough one to do with everyone in positive time.

In Challengers, you play 7 rounds and the top two players after that play a final round to determine the winner.

One other player and I hit negative time around round 6 and ended up 3 hours over on the clock. We also both made the final. It was at this point that one of the other players who had already been knocked out decided to skip my opponent and neutralise the game.

I firmly believe that the majority of players just want to play fun games and will make reasonable allowances for time infractions, especially in a tournament like this where it can happen to anyone if the time zones don't work out for you. It's a minority who choose to ruin the fun. Our fourth opponent was completely sympathetic and I doubt he would have agreed to a skip if it had been proposed.

[Fuchur]

1. A player who is out of time can be expelled only with the unanimous agreement of all players who are not out of time.

This does seem like the most elegant solution short of disabling skipping turns in tournaments entirely. In fact, I feel like this should be the case everywhere on BGA. It allows tables to kick people who really are egregiously not playing (just vanish for days or whatever), while removing the ability for players to abuse the system by kicking someone who is still playing for selfish reasons. I like this a lot, it seems like it has a lot of upsides, no downsides, and should be very easy to implement.

This seems a good idea to me.