aesche wrote: ↑06 October 2020, 16:16
An issue that remains is that the order of wins&losses still can be manipulated by giving up games that look like a loss, before the ones that are a win are ended.
Ah, I hadn't considered that (I play too many things at 4p where you often can't resign). This does create a small issue where players could exploit this a bit to rank up and impact their elo a bit by ordering their wins/losses. I think it's probably alright to not worry too much about this though, since I suspect it's pretty tough to exploit this small edge to any substantive gains.
RicardoRix wrote: ↑06 October 2020, 17:00
Sounds great on the whole, but I'm not sure about the rule above.
Firstly it seems a bit mean to cancel games mid-game. I'm also not sure why it exists, the other time keeping methods seem to suffice,
And also might this rule potentially might be abused, by starting as many games as possible near the dead-line against unsuspecting victims knowing they are unlikely to finish and simply make all your moves as quickly as possible.
You don't really want to introduce players have to manage the decision of, 'is there enough time to finish this game' thought before starting.
The reason this rule exists is so that players cannot purposefully stall out a lost game at the end of the season just so it won't count. Now admittedly this was a much bigger issue when someone could stall out dozens of games, whereas now the other rules do seem to keep it at just one game where someone could realistically do this. And truthfully it is possible to do this to some extent in a real time game if you start your final game just at the right time before the end of the season (still really tough to pull off in real time though).
I do agree it does seem a bit dangerous though to allow players to start games so near the end of the season such that they might not be able to complete them. Warnings may need to go up near the end of the season so players realize the potential risks of joining a turn based arena game and not completing it on time (and for some of the longer games like Terra Mystica this could well need to be put out a month or more before the end of the season).
I'm curious if some other idea could be developed to avoid this situation. It's not clear to me there is any other good answer though. (This is part of why I still do feel turn based arena potentially should be scrapped, an expansion of the tournament based system just makes more sense for turn based competitions. Most of the architecture around arena only makes much sense from a real time perspective)
