One Player Time Out - Three Players First - Two Progress

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fulder
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Joined: 28 January 2021, 02:39

One Player Time Out - Three Players First - Two Progress

Post by fulder »

Hi,
in a Tournament with 4 players per match, where a game is closed after one player has a time out, there are 3 first places and one looser, but still only two players proceed to the next round. What decides which of the two winners proceed and which "winner" looses?
Thanks
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Meeplelowda
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Re: One Player Time Out - Three Players First - Two Progress

Post by Meeplelowda »

fulder wrote: 16 December 2024, 14:07 Hi,
in a Tournament with 4 players per match, where a game is closed after one player has a time out, there are 3 first places and one looser, but still only two players proceed to the next round. What decides which of the two winners proceed and which "winner" looses?
Thanks
Welcome to BGA tournaments. Unfortunately, BGA has not officially documented how it works. Our best collective empirical evidence is that the oldest BGA accounts advance.

Hopefully you are just asking this theoretically and haven't fallen victim to this system.
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fulder
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Re: One Player Time Out - Three Players First - Two Progress

Post by fulder »

I am playing a tournament, where an other player in an other match was victim of the system. Could happen to me to, as we have a timed out player in our match, but nobody kicked him until now. We will see how it ends.
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Meeplelowda
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Re: One Player Time Out - Three Players First - Two Progress

Post by Meeplelowda »

fulder wrote: 16 December 2024, 23:27 I am playing a tournament, where an other player in an other match was victim of the system. Could happen to me to, as we have a timed out player in our match, but nobody kicked him until now. We will see how it ends.
I see the tournament you're talking about. The two who advanced had accounts created in 2019 and 2022-02. Our unlucky player, with the fourth highest ELO in the whole tournament, made the "mistake" of not creating an account until 2022-09, and for that they were eliminated.

The frustrating thing is not that an innocent player gets eliminated with this system. That has to happen because it would be impractical to restart a game with the remaining players to have the decision made over the board every time this happens (as it would then delay the rest of the tournament). But there are at least four different ways it could be done: 1) by account age; 2) by ELO; 3) randomly; or 4) by the scores at the time the player was expelled (if the game even has scoring). None of these would be perfect, and some are objectively bad.

But one of them was chosen. Someone sat down and made this decision. Maybe it was one person. Maybe it was a small committee. But we have never been provided with either 1) an explicit acknowledgement that this is how it's done (there was a 1/3 chance that the newest account would be eliminated if it were just random, so this one instance by itself doesn't prove that it's account age), or 2) an explanation of the rationale of why this was chosen over other options. What was the thought process? Maybe there's a good reason we aren't seeing. Was there even a thought process, or was it just easier to code this way?
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fulder
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Re: One Player Time Out - Three Players First - Two Progress

Post by fulder »

Ok, thanks for the clarification. Still strange but at least I get the "rule".
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Calmon70
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Re: One Player Time Out - Three Players First - Two Progress

Post by Calmon70 »

fulder wrote: 17 December 2024, 01:46 Ok, thanks for the clarification. Still strange but at least I get the "rule".
I think it's different, the described rule is when somebody gets skipped! When nobody skips than placement will be sorted by time left!
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Meeplelowda
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Re: One Player Time Out - Three Players First - Two Progress

Post by Meeplelowda »

Calmon70 wrote: 17 December 2024, 02:03
fulder wrote: 17 December 2024, 01:46 Ok, thanks for the clarification. Still strange but at least I get the "rule".
I think it's different, the described rule is when somebody gets skipped! When nobody skips than placement will be sorted by time left!
Even better. There's yet a third rule that applies when the game finishes normally with no expulsions or round time expiring, but there is still a tie after all of a game's tie breakers have been determined. In that case, someone has reported that the person who advances is random based on an email they received from support. But I may be remembering what happens in final rankings if there's a tie. In either case it happens rarely (except in games like Lucky Numbers in which ties are super common).
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Mathew5000
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Re: One Player Time Out - Three Players First - Two Progress

Post by Mathew5000 »

Here's a previous thread relating to multiplayer elimination tournaments:
viewtopic.php?t=35946
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