Tournament module 2020 UPDATES: Swiss system v2

[Mathew5000]

It's the old way of elo.
Before you was starting at 1500, and you could gain or lose elo.

All elos were decreased by 1300.

Now, you start at 0 and can't lose elo below 100.

Thank you, Romain672!

I would never have guessed that was the explanation.

It's a bit weird, there must be some process inside the BGA server that still calculates Elo the old way, and the tournament listings (for Swiss System tournaments) are getting information from that old system, instead of the way every other part of BGA calculates Elo. Somebody should file a bug report.

[DerIKM]

We have, though, run into another case where the pairings don't seem to make sense. We just started a Small Islands tournament with 11 players, set for 4 player games. Instead of the tables being 4p/4p/3p, we instead got 4p/3p/2p/2p. This is for round 1, so previous pairings aren't an issue.
Tournament link: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=67984

I guess it prefers 4-3-2-2 over 4-4-3 in order to have 4 winners which lets it create a 4p winner's table.
Im actually happy to read that the system seems to plan a little bit ahead. Otoh it also makes it a lot harder to predict/understand what it does

[BananaHarambe]

I'm really hoping for a new tournament update that allows organizers to create a single group Swiss tournament with a top cut for finals, typically single elimination finals. This is a very common system for tournaments in games with a luck & skill combination such as Magic: the Gathering, Pokemon TCG and other TCGs.

This could be fixed by allowing players to make only 1 group in the group stage tournaments, very simple in concept but no idea how much work it is to implement. Ideally this would create the tournament updates all in one place like the existing tournaments like this Swiss tournament: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=332479

So it would display game results updates as they happen. The Stage 2 single elimination results would be in a table underneath Stage 1 with updates also showing up in the latest results.

I have a workaround I'm using for an ongoing tournament, which is to create 2 groups for Swiss here: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=335519

There is a bit of awkwardness in having to split into 2 groups which avoids certain pairings with a Swiss, making higher round numbers for the initial Swiss not make a lot of sense since half of the potential opponents are not available. The number of rounds and people to qualify has to also be chosen differently than a simple 1 group Swiss. There's also the awkwardness of the results being split up into the 2 groups with no latest result updates from group stage tournaments, making it hard to track as an organizer. I want to see all the results from each round so I know the number of timeouts so I have easy feedback on the speed settings.

An alternative to the group stage adjustment would be to make the adjustment to Swiss tournaments directly. To do this, the tournament creator would be given a yes/no option for a single elimination finals and the option to choose either the number of players that qualify for finals or choose a specific score required to advance. (For example 5 wins in 7 games for a 2 player Swiss or Top 8 players).