Issues with Tournament Participastion ....

[JFCovaleski]

Good Afternoon. I have been a member since the early part of last year. I became Tournament Qualified in Castles of Burgundy first, and immediately joined the next tournament that was open to get a "feel" for what that was like. This Tournament is still going on and my experience has been less than stellar. Initially I was frustrated waiting for players on the literal "other side of the world" from me to make their move - but I understand the international nature of things, so I made do. But lately I have had issues with something else. I did not finish well in games early on in the tournament, so I am, being matched up with opponents at a similar level. As such, none of us are competing in the upper echelon. Because of that, I am continually dealing with players who have lost interest in playing. But instead of surrendering in the game, they just stop making moves. Yes, we can "SKIP" their turn once their time is allotted ... but as soon as that happens, everyone ELSE in the game quits. I am currently in a game where one of the players has yet to place their starting piece ! No one has skipped them yet, but I fully expect that once they do, it will end the same. This will mark the 4th time in this tournament that I will "win" a game because of this. I realize this is not BGA's fault, but I would think they could do a better job of filtering absentee participants out of tournaments. While I enjoy using BGA to play with friends, based on this experience I doubt I will try another tournament.

[BananaHarambe]

Hello, sounds like you've experiencing a common frustration from all players regarding tournaments which is inactive players. If you are near the bottom of a 4 player Swiss tournament with 30 day duration you are almost guaranteed to have a high number of non-games from absent players. There are some serious issues with BGA tournaments not having a system to automatically withdraw completely absent players. Players have been asking for changes for a long time, but we haven't have a qualify of life update for a very long time. I started creating my own tournaments for my favorite game with good settings because I wanted to participate in "good" tournaments and grow the tournament community.

I looked at the tournament you're in and I would recommend withdrawing from the tournament, which can be done from the main page menu here: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=216778 You are ranked about 170th out of 200 in your group so your future pairings will be a nightmare. If you drop out you can start a new casual game with a much higher chance of having active players than this ongoing tournament so no reason to stay in it. If you look at some of the bottom players, some of their accounts have been inactive for 3+ months and they have just been getting skipped or getting paired with another inactive player and getting a free win because another inactive player got skipped instead. The Karma requirement for the tournament is 65% which means these players won't get kicked out of the tournament unless they drop under 65% reputation (if this feature still works, not sure). A tournament skip/abandonment only gives a flat penalty of 4% (frustratingly low in my opinion) so a player could be inactive for up to 12 rounds, 360 days before getting booted.

I don't see many new tournaments for Castles of Burgundy, perhaps you could create your own tournament with a smaller size and more preferable settings. There are some serious red flags with the tournament you signed up for that would make me run away personally:

-It's a group stage with 2 stages of Swiss
-Each stage is 20 matches!
-Game duration is 30 days so the first round will take 600 days to complete
-4 player games means higher chance of timeouts and inactive players
-Reputation requirement is only 65% which means unreliable players can sign up, low bar for entry
-The tournament registration appears to have been open in advance for a very long time, about 1 year? This isn't a good thing. This means that many players have signed up a long time ago and forgotten about it or quite BGA. The tournament system won't kick them out so expect a lot of inactive players in the games.
-Pairing policy is "Try to prevent same players to be opponents twice" which sounds nice, but the pairing system has some serious bugs and always struggles to make good pairing in a long Swiss stage 1 like you are in, especially with 4 player games, which actually have "6 pairings" per game.
-The second stage Swiss is actually completely broken because of the "try to prevent" pairing. 2 groups of 20 players qualify which means there will be 40 players playing 4 player games for 20 matches. It will be impossible to prevent duplicate pairing part way through the second stage. Best case would be after round 13, each player has played all 39 opponents and needs to repeat pairings, but it would likely be sooner than that because all "6 pairings" at each table would need to avoid duplicates so it would likely fail earlier. There's a bug in the setting where if BGA is unable to pair duplicates their pairing algorithm completely brakes down and it gives repeated and broken pairing for the remaining matches and spoils the whole tournament. It will start pairing the #1 player with 3 players from the bottom over and over or something like that.

All of this combined means this tournament is guaranteed to fail/spoil before the end of it for the weaker players in stage 1 and for the stronger players in Stage 2. What's crazy to me is how it's going to fail in the later rounds after players have already played many rounds over at least a year of the time. Truly time wasting from a tournament perspective. These tournament settings are so wild it's hard for me to distinguish them from ignorance of the pairing bugs or intentional trolling with knowledge of the bugs. I have studied how tournaments work on BGA enough to know to avoid settings like these, but most players don't know much about tournaments because the information is hard to find.

Recommendations for good tournaments:

-High reputation requirement
-Keep signup window limited to 1-2 months to avoid inactive players.
-Lower player count (number of players per game) in tournaments are more reliable in general, be aware of that when choosing player count
-Keep the player count and number of rounds low to begin with, then expand over time for future tournaments
-Avoid the "try to prevent duplicate pairings" option for Swiss tournaments with high round number and/or 3+ player games
-Consider the affect of skipping a player on tournament outcome. Multi elimination tournaments have issues with skipping causing some non-skipped players to be eliminated. For example a 4 player tournament with 2 players from each game advancing will have issues with skipping because if one player is skipped, one other player will need to be eliminated as well as per how the tournaments work. The way it works on BGA is that the remaining players with the longest account ages will stay and the newer accounts will get eliminated (to the frustration of many players).

[Meeplelowda]

There are some serious red flags with the tournament you signed up for that would make me run away personally:

-It's a group stage with 2 stages of Swiss
-Each stage is 20 matches!
-Game duration is 30 days so the first round will take 600 days to complete

Good advice

I think the problem is many people don't review the tournament settings at all. Those that do often just give it a cursory review and/or don't understand the settings and the implications of the settings. Not understanding is not really their fault because many of the nuances of tournaments are either poorly documented or not documented at all.

That's how you get people entering round-robins with a three-day round in which to play 10 simultaneous really complicated games with 24-hr playing hours. There are two lines of defense against this: 1) the tournament administrator not making ridiculous settings; 2) the players not entering tournaments with ridiculous settings. Often both lines of defense fail, but for the second line of defense players inexperienced with tournaments have a hard time evaluating whether the settings are realistic, i.e., where there are "serious red flags."

This particular tournament is called "The Long Game." At least there's a little bit of warning. But clearly not everyone who entered understood how Swiss tournaments work. Nine months ago in this tournament someone asked "When does the next round start?" The tournament administrator responded "When the current round finishes."

If the person who asked the question understood that a Swiss round lasts as long as any table in a round has not finished up to the maximum round time, maybe they would not have joined the tournament at all. If everyone said, "um, no, I don't want to be playing a tournament for 3 1/4 years [because the second stage is just as long as the first]" then the tournament would fail and the TA would learn a lesson. So far 30 people have withdrawn from this tournament!

[BananaHarambe]

Thanks Meeplelowda,

The issue of poorly designed tournaments is unfortunately very common, which gives many players a bad taste of BGA tournaments.

I think tournaments in general should be made shorter, smaller, and more frequent which allows new players to join them and grow communities easier. I'd like to see less of these 20 match, 30 day tournaments and tournaments with shorter signup periods to avoid inactive players from joining and forgetting.

In terms of getting more tournament participation I imagine 20 matches is a detriment. Do players actually look at the tournament settings and think "oh wow 20 matches, great! I am free for the next 600 days, that's perfect!" ? I imagine such a long time commitment is off-putting to many players who would prefer shorter tournaments, but many games have a very limited number of tournaments to join. 6-8 rounds Swiss for a 30 day game is plenty for 3-4 player games. If you want to make the ending more interesting then make it group stage with Swiss Stage 1 with a sensible number of players qualified for finals to decide an all around winner. Hopefully we get group stage with only 1 group as an option soon.

Anyone can create tournaments with sensible settings as long as they know the time requirements to complete games at the chosen number of players for their specific game and does some basic research to determine an expected player turnout so they make a properly sized tournament. My favorite tournament formats are 2 player group stage with Swiss to qualify, but make it "double elimination" or "triple elimination" style so X-1 or X-2 or better players qualify top single elimination finals and 3 player multi-elimination where 2 players qualify from each game.

[Meeplelowda]

-The tournament registration appears to have been open in advance for a very long time, about 1 year? This isn't a good thing. This means that many players have signed up a long time ago and forgotten about it or quite BGA. The tournament system won't kick them out so expect a lot of inactive players in the games.

In all honesty, this is so...ill-advised (although I'd like to use stronger language) that I thought surely you'd misread something, so I went through the same process you must have and kept hitting "show more" in the Latest Results areas to get to the earliest registrations, which only expands 4 entries at a time (I wonder if there was a more efficient way to do that). But you're right.

All of this combined means this tournament is guaranteed to fail/spoil before the end of it for the weaker players in stage 1 and for the stronger players in Stage 2. What's crazy to me is how it's going to fail in the later rounds after players have already played many rounds over at least a year of the time. Truly time wasting from a tournament perspective. These tournament settings are so wild it's hard for me to distinguish them from ignorance of the pairing bugs or intentional trolling with knowledge of the bugs. I have studied how tournaments work on BGA enough to know to avoid settings like these, but most players don't know much about tournaments because the information is hard to find.

I'm not a mind reader, and there isn't enough data to make a specific accusation, so all I can say is I'd love to see a statement from the tournament administrator of why they thought any of this made any sense.

Recommendations for good tournaments:

-High reputation requirement

Definitely. No guarantee, of course, but just because something isn't perfect doesn't mean you do nothing instead.

Keep signup window limited to 1-2 months to avoid inactive players.

I personally only allow two weeks max. But I also directly recruit by directly inviting top rated people in the Arena and people I've played against and green thumbed, and sometimes posting in the forum for that game.

-Lower player count (number of players per game) in tournaments are more reliable in general, be aware of that when choosing player count

I only create tournaments for two-player games (for reasons discussed in other topics), so obviously I agree with this.

-Avoid the "try to prevent duplicate pairings" option for Swiss tournaments with high round number and/or 3+ player games

The 3+ player games is the relevant part. I haven't seen this be an issue for two-player games. That said, I think the most rounds I've had was 5 rounds for a 32 player pool.

-Consider the affect of skipping a player on tournament outcome. Multi elimination tournaments have issues with skipping causing some non-skipped players to be eliminated. For example a 4 player tournament with 2 players from each game advancing will have issues with skipping because if one player is skipped, one other player will need to be eliminated as well as per how the tournaments work. The way it works on BGA is that the remaining players with the longest account ages will stay and the newer accounts will get eliminated (to the frustration of many players).

This is why I only play in and administer tournaments for 2-player games, despite enjoying many games at higher player counts.

[RazorOz]

Recommendations for good tournaments:

-High reputation requirement
-Keep signup window limited to 1-2 months to avoid inactive players.
-Lower player count (number of players per game) in tournaments are more reliable in general, be aware of that when choosing player count
-Keep the player count and number of rounds low to begin with, then expand over time for future tournaments
-Avoid the "try to prevent duplicate pairings" option for Swiss tournaments with high round number and/or 3+ player games
-Consider the affect of skipping a player on tournament outcome. Multi elimination tournaments have issues with skipping causing some non-skipped players to be eliminated. For example a 4 player tournament with 2 players from each game advancing will have issues with skipping because if one player is skipped, one other player will need to be eliminated as well as per how the tournaments work. The way it works on BGA is that the remaining players with the longest account ages will stay and the newer accounts will get eliminated (to the frustration of many players).

Only thing to note on this is changes are being made, I don't know how many games it will be brought too, but Heat already has it, where now if a player leaves the game the game plays to conclusion regardless and the final result stands. I have to assume this will be brought to other games, it will be a game changer in terms of elimination tournaments.

[Meeplelowda]

Recommendations for good tournaments:

-High reputation requirement
-Keep signup window limited to 1-2 months to avoid inactive players.
-Lower player count (number of players per game) in tournaments are more reliable in general, be aware of that when choosing player count
-Keep the player count and number of rounds low to begin with, then expand over time for future tournaments
-Avoid the "try to prevent duplicate pairings" option for Swiss tournaments with high round number and/or 3+ player games
-Consider the affect of skipping a player on tournament outcome. Multi elimination tournaments have issues with skipping causing some non-skipped players to be eliminated. For example a 4 player tournament with 2 players from each game advancing will have issues with skipping because if one player is skipped, one other player will need to be eliminated as well as per how the tournaments work. The way it works on BGA is that the remaining players with the longest account ages will stay and the newer accounts will get eliminated (to the frustration of many players).

Only thing to note on this is changes are being made, I don't know how many games it will be brought too, but Heat already has it, where now if a player leaves the game the game plays to conclusion regardless and the final result stands. I have to assume this will be brought to other games, it will be a game changer in terms of elimination tournaments.

I'm guessing that this is being done not because they care about the effect the current system has on tournaments, but because of the poor user experience in regular games. [speculation]Maybe Days of Wonder twisted arms behind the scenes.[/speculation] It just helps tournaments as a side-effect.

[more_speculation]Oh, wait! Maybe there's going to be an official DoW Heat tournament, and they want to make sure it's not pure rubbish.[/more_speculation]

[BananaHarambe]

At this point I would be content if they further monetized tournaments if it meant that they gave them more updates and support.

Currently a standard member can sign up for an unlimited number of tournaments and play in them, but only premium players can create tournaments.

Do they view tournaments as clashing with premium membership sales? Why buy premium to play a premium game if there are plenty of tournaments? Biggest reason IMO is always for the real time matchmaking. Most tournaments are turn based.

If they put some limitations on standard membership participation in tournaments then there could be a better incentive to improve tournaments. What if there was a limit to the number of tournaments that a standard membership can sign up for and/or have in progress? Would this push more of the heavy “variety tournament “ style players to premium? I’m not sure.

[nik592]

While the analysis of 20x 30 day matches and the registration being open a year in advance leading to high amounts of inactive players seems completely correct, as a player who signs up for tournaments, but doesn't generally run them, I wouldn't have looked at these factors in determining whether I would enter. I normally check if the game options are suitable (ie. don't include expansions I'm not familiar with), that it's not round-robin, that the time per player is at least 2-3 days, and that's probably about it. Even if I did clock that we're talking 600 days for Stage 1, I actually do plan on being around BGA basically indefinitely, so that probably wouldn't immediately put me off. I'm not saying that's necessarily a good decision, but I don't consider myself super new to tournaments (nor anything of an expert) and I'm just pointing out my own thought process in choosing tournaments to play. It's no wonder a less experienced (with tournaments) player wouldn't spot these things.

[JFCovaleski]

Wow ! Was not expecting this much of a response. I just wanted to see if mine was a unique situation, and I just kind of needed to vent. But thank you all for letting me know that I am not alone, and giving me some idea of my options.

As of this morning, the player in question has been skipped, and one of the "Active" players quit. But the remaining player DID make a move, so I will stay in out of respect for them. But as soon as this game is over, I will probably withdraw.

Again, thank you all for your response. It's good to know that the community is out there to help. I really do appreciate it.