deleted accounts should be kicked out of tournaments

[SpongeDon]

Anyways, can we get back to topic?

This is about removing deleted players from a tournament before it starts, which should be an absolute no-brainer. Ridiculous that a player isn't removed automatically when they literally don't have an account to participate.

The tournament in question is one of the most prestigious high-elo tournaments for Ark Nova, many players wanted to participate but didn't get a spot. Now two players miss out, meanwhile the account corpses will also warp the entire tournament.

Admins, please help.

Well said mr. Panda! But it's seems admins can't help with this or they would already

[tbhp]

Anyways, can we get back to topic?

This is about removing deleted players from a tournament before it starts, which should be an absolute no-brainer. Ridiculous that a player isn't removed automatically when they literally don't have an account to participate.

The tournament in question is one of the most prestigious high-elo tournaments for Ark Nova, many players wanted to participate but didn't get a spot. Now two players miss out, meanwhile the account corpses will also warp the entire tournament.

Admins, please help.

Well said mr. Panda! But it's seems admins can't help with this or they would already

I think everyone already agrees that not removing deleted accounts is absurd. That's why the discussion switched to other topics.

[Rukus McUallas]

I don't agree with the second suggestion.

If an account is deleted, it makes sense that they'd be removed from the tournament, since they are never going to come back anyway.

Now, if I have a game set up against someone who has been inactive for a long time, I don't want that game to be cancelled and just get a free win and automatically advance. I want the game to remain open so that hopefully the player comes back and we can finish the game before the maximum game duration is reached.

You don't automatically advance in a swiss tournament. Currently I'm waiting for games to end with players who haven't logged into BGA for 30+ and 40+ days. And those players will likely stall other games as well, messing up the results and dragging the entire tournament.

And in case of a K.O. tournament, you'd also very likely auto-win. Either because those absent players never show up, or just run out of time. The upside in a K.O. tournament is, such players get automatically eliminated from the tournament at one point. But image they never show up again in a long turn based tournament with kicking disabled. Do you still disagree, or do you at least see why I'm asking for this option.

[tbhp]

I don't agree with the second suggestion.

If an account is deleted, it makes sense that they'd be removed from the tournament, since they are never going to come back anyway.

Now, if I have a game set up against someone who has been inactive for a long time, I don't want that game to be cancelled and just get a free win and automatically advance. I want the game to remain open so that hopefully the player comes back and we can finish the game before the maximum game duration is reached.

You don't automatically advance in a swiss tournament. Currently I'm waiting for games to end with players who haven't logged into BGA for 30+ and 40+ days. And those players will likely stall other games as well, messing up the results and dragging the entire tournament.

And in case of a K.O. tournament, you'd also very likely auto-win. Either because those absent players never show up, or just run out of time. The upside in a K.O. tournament is, such players get automatically eliminated from the tournament at one point. But image they never show up again in a long turn based tournament with kicking disabled. Do you still disagree, or do you at least see why I'm asking for this option.

I was talking about all kinds of tournaments, the automatically advance part was just a reference to when it's an elimination tournament.

In the case of a Swiss tournament, I don't want the game to just be cancelled and get the free points. Of course, there is a good chance the player will never come back and that's what is going to happen anyway. But if they are removed, there is a 100% chance of it happening, whereas if I wait there is a small chance the outcome will be different. Players should have the right to decide if they want to wait for an opponent to come back, rather than the choice being made for them by an automatic system.

Regarding messing up the results, it is true that they can become unbalanced if the other players get the free points while I don't, and potentially go on to lose against that player. But again, that's my choice, I wouldn't consider it right to get the points when I didn't even face the player. After all, no one can know how the games would have went on if everyone had played that player, so how can I claim to receive the same points as everyone else? You can look at it both ways. Other people are probably thinking "the player is not here so we can just all claim we did equal against them", but in my opinion that's just conveniently avoiding playing the game and risking finding out you would have lost.

If the tournament lasts forever, that's just how it goes. When you sign up to a tournament, you should look at the maximum game duration and multiply that by the number of expected games. That's the duration you are potentially signing up for. If it ends up lasting that long, it's not like anyone wouldn't have been warned.

[Rukus McUallas]

You want it super fair, but I don't think it's fair, that everybody has to wait for somebody who may (likely) never show up. It can be really frustrating. And knowing that it's going to happen next round again to others and actually the entire tournament ain't better. The "what you signed up for" argument is interesting. One could argue that nobody signed up to wait weeks for somebody to never show up. People sign up to actually play, not wait for a clock to run out.

I set up my tournaments without kicking, because some people are just trigger happy and even gain an advantage by kicking others who are in the lead, but a little delayed. For that I'm "rewarded" with annoyed players and two tournament games (incl. a months long Terraforming Mars one), where players haven't logged into BGA for more than 40 days. I sincerely hope, they're okay. Yet, I do not want them to further mess up my tournaments.

[Rukus McUallas]

Interesting observation. One of the games just ended by timeout. The inactive player was removed from the tournament. So maybe there is already a mechanism to remove inactive players.

[RazorOz]

The abuse is that in your suggestion the organizer is given the power to decide which out of time players get eliminated from the tournament, instead of it being an automatic feature that people agreed on when they signed up for the tournament, or a choice that is given to the players themselves.

When you play a competition, everything that happens to you can only be the result of either pre-established rules or the actions of the people playing against you. If external forces can decide what happen to you, that's the definition of abuse and corruption. It's not fair to the players if the rules can change any moment after the tournament has started. They need to be decided beforehand. So for this reason, giving an organizer certain powers that apply after the tournament has started is totally useless. Their role is to determine how the tournament will work. Once it starts, their role is over and they become a spectator.

Plus, like I said at the beginning of the thread, if I have a game set up against someone, I don't want the game to be suddenly cancelled because the organizer decided to remove that player from the tournament. It should be the player's choice to decide if they want to face the opponent or not. So your suggestion is not only unfair for the players who get removed, it also disrespects the other player's choice in the matter and affects the quality of their experience in the tournament.

...

The gaming world may not be a good example of how to do things right. If you look at the sporting world, anyone can register to a tournament as long as they have the necessary qualifications for it. It's not like the organizers can look at a specific player and refuse them for individualized reasons.

And then if there are some competitions where this is not the case, those would be considered private competitions, as in the organizers get to invite the players they want. You can't ask to be able to do that as an organizer, and at the same time deny that your tournament fits the "private" label. That's what a private tournament is by definition.

Organisers of anything are pretty much always expected to make judgement calls like this, it's part of being an organiser. Besides it would only be an option anyway, would be then be up to players if they want to play or not. It's already de-facto how it can work anyway, just with many more steps added. When I run big open tournaments there will invariably be lots of DM's in the early rounds either asking can they time someone out, or you get where people don't want to be the one to time a player out, thus lots of messages have to get exchanged/posted explaining it was a decision from the organiser. If the organiser had the power it would make the process a lot easier. This is especially true, because most of the time I will defend the players side, it's only if the game is in danger of not completing will I intervene.

The problem often is people want perfect world solutions that work for every scenario, it's why nothing gets done, because people want solutions that work for every edge case, rather than things that would broadly make tournaments work better. For example take the idea about if you can exclude players at a whim, that it's now a private tournament. Most these issues would be solved if the karma system was fit for purpose, it's ridiculous you can timeout every tournament game and have your karma pretty much unaffected. And at the other end karma can be just as meaningless, because someone can be at 50% because they just got -50% for some mod infraction. I can pretty much tell 95% of the time if someone isn't going to play to tournament criteria, ie. to the speed required, but currently there's nothing I can do about it, short of go all private, which I used to do, but it's so tedious to do at scale, so it's put up with a few obviously slow players, but it really shouldn't have to be that way.

It's a bit like the topic here, obviously deleted accounts should be kicked out of tournaments, but they aren't the only ones, along the same principle tournaments shouldn't keep resitting players in Swiss who get timed out every round, it should be capped at like 2-3 timeouts and you're out, if you were completely inactive you should be out, and again these players are both taking opportunities away from others in many cases, and also destabilising entire tournaments.