Repeatedly create the same tournament?

[Mathew5000]

It should be so the system used to recognise previous tournament names.

Yes: see https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=170210 (currently 4 net upvotes). This was a change made several months ago, as I recall. It used to be that when you created a tournament it would give you a dropdown menu of your previous "championship names" but with an update, sometime in 2025 I believe, that dropdown menu disappeared. I always assumed it was inadvertent, but is it possible the BGA devs made that change deliberately?

So if I pick "Heat Degens World Cup" it remembers the settings I used last time. I suspect a lot of the tournaments using the exact same settings over and over are like Season 1, Season 2 etc. It definitely would help from a convenience stand point, particularly because I don't know if it's like this for most games, but for example in Heat you have to change nearly every setting, and most tournaments are doing this, because the defaults are Beginner mode, 1 track with everything turned off, but hardly anyone would create a tournament with those settings.

I agree.

[RazorOz]

I actually do strongly believe in "look at tournament settings before you join", and I won't join tournaments that have settings I don't like.

If someone keeps creating stupid tournaments, there should be an option to filter out tournaments created by that person (i.e. a tournament red thumb).

This is an issue that works both ways. It's easy to say don't join obviously bad tournaments, but someone with not much tournament experience probably can't always identify what qualifies as a bad tournament, as a lot are linked to eg. unrealistic clocks. And bad tournaments are a net negative for all creators, as they give a negative impression of tournaments.

It's not uncommon for people to come to me complaining about a Heat tournament, and I had nothing to do with these tournaments, pretty much every one I could have told players was a bad idea before it started, but it's not like I can go around trashing an upcoming tournament, saying do not enter this, because it will end in tears is it. I also found when I first got into creating tournaments, one of the initial barriers was a number of players saying they'd had bad experience in tournaments previously, and being reluctant to join, which admittedly is made even worse in Heat because it's actually very hard to decipher from the tournament setting page what a Heat tournament actually is, which also causes problems both ways that I suspect some of the times creators don't really know what they've created, because the numerous settings are confusing.

The thumb option actually probably is a solution if you could red/green thumb tournaments by a creator so people could see the tournament creator's reputation, but it's not something I can ever see BGA doing, because it's kinda a very public and confrontational way of doing it.

I have constantly said I do think tournaments are relatively under explored on BGA, because with a bit of cleaning up they could be so much better, players love competition, and thriving competition drives traffic.

[Meeplelowda]

It's easy to say don't join obviously bad tournaments, but someone with not much tournament experience probably can't always identify what qualifies as a bad tournament, as a lot are linked to eg. unrealistic clocks. And bad tournaments are a net negative for all creators, as they give a negative impression of tournaments.

This here. Just last month we had an example of someone posting in this forum about a badly structured tournament that opened for registration 8+ months before it started (which is a separate issue) so they didn't remember they were in it and it was a round robin with 13 simultaneous games that had to finish in one day.

There is no functional FAQ for tournaments that explains coherently how they work and different factors you should look at before joining.

[RazorOz]

It's easy to say don't join obviously bad tournaments, but someone with not much tournament experience probably can't always identify what qualifies as a bad tournament, as a lot are linked to eg. unrealistic clocks. And bad tournaments are a net negative for all creators, as they give a negative impression of tournaments.

This here. Just last month we had an example of someone posting in this forum about a badly structured tournament that opened for registration 8+ months before it started (which is a separate issue) so they didn't remember they were in it and it was a round robin with 13 simultaneous games that had to finish in one day.

There is no functional FAQ for tournaments that explains coherently how they work and different factors you should look at before joining.

Round Robin's are honestly a problem in themselves, I'm pretty sure a good number of players who sign up to them don't realise it's going to give them 15 games simultaneously.

What could help to begin with is a recommended round timer, because that's the #1 trap of any tournament of any game I assume. Nearly everyone new to tournaments and creating will go way too ambitious with their clock thinking it will speed up the tournament, when all it does is annoy the participants, and leave a sour taste when half the games don't finish, and who qualifies goes on time etc.

One of the issues is the settings should be clearer what they do, I assume this is worse for some games than others, I've explained the complexity of Heat tournament settings in the past where you get multiples of basically every option relating to what mode you've set, whether the expansion is turned on or off, and it displays all the settings regardless of where they're not even active because of mode set etc. The problem is the developers tell me there is nothing they can do about this, it's on the BGA Framework side, because it would be so much better for both creators and players if only active options were actually displayed. Just to give an example there's a tournament coming up soon which has the expansion turned on, now the first circuit setting is set to random, the second circuit setting is set to USA (which to be clear is the default). I'd be 90% sure the creator and a lot of players think the circuit each round will be random, but it won't, the first circuit setting only applies if the expansion is off, every game will be USA. That's far from the worst example, because the tournament will at least be functional, but I'd be very surprised if it was the intention.

[Mathew5000]

Focusing on "low-hanging fruit", here's a few ideas that might improve things, and should be feasible to implement:

• On the tournament creation page, around the menu for choosing game duration, include a statement like this: "Unlike other games on BGA, tournament games have no time added per turn. Please ensure that all players can reasonably make all their moves within the time you select."

• When a player registers for a tournament, there's a pop-up that must be acknowledged. Add some language to that pop-up along these lines: "Unlike other games on BGA, tournament games have no time added per turn. Please do not register for this tournament unless you will be able to complete all your moves for each game within the time allowed."

• On the tournament creation page, when someone creates a round-robin tournament without editing the start times, have a special pop-up they must acknowledge, warning that all games will be played simultaneously.

• When a player registers for a round-robin tournament for which the start times have not been edited, they should have to acknowledge a warning that all games will be played simultaneously.

• On the tournament creation page, if registration is set to open more than 30 days ahead of time, the tournament creator should have to acknowledge a warning like this: "it is recommended to allow between 7 and 21 days for registration, because otherwise you may find that players register for the tournament and then are no longer around when it begins".

• If a tournament has "playing hours" set up, anyone registering for it should get a pop-up warning emphasizing the playing hours (specifying both time and time zone expressly) plus a couple of sentences about what that means.

I know that implementing the above would not solve the problems we are discussing in this thread, but I think they might improve matters, and I think they might be a bit easier (and less controversial) for BGA to implement than some other proposals.

About the main topic of this thread: as I said before, I am in favour of the proposal to allow tournament creators to easily populate the settings from a previous tournament as template. I hope that BGA implements that some day. But the warnings and recommendations I've discussed in this post ought to be higher priority, in my opinion, than a modification for making it easier to create tournaments with the same settings as a previous one.

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