Board Game Arena

As an interim fix. I do think tournament organisers should have the ability to manually change the game outcome for skipped tables.

Whilst some tables have grey areas, others are clear instances of players gaming the system. In a current cartographers tournament I'm in the final two tables of a big multi stage, with 3 advancing out of 6 to the final table. At 95% complete, a player who was clearly going to be eliminated (in 5th place, absolute best outcome 4th) chose to skip the player who was in 3rd at the time. Myself and another player who were in 1st/2nd place with no possibility of finishing worse than top 2 are now faced with a random 3 out of 5 drawing.

There is no reason for the player who skipped to have done this other than to give themselves a chance of progressing instead of being eliminated. I have no qualms at all about calling it cheating,.

In cases like this the tournament organiser should have the ability to reverse the random drawing (and boot the cheating player in the process)

I suspect to allow a tournament organiser to change the result of a game post-game would actually be much harder to implement, than simply to give tournament organisers the option to not allow skipping (or just not allow skipping in tournaments for anyone). Either way, skipping in tournaments has been a contentious issue for some time, it's currently the 11th most voted for suggestion, originally raised about 4 years ago, but is yet to be even acknowledged by BGA admin. BGA don't seem especially interested in improving the tournament experience.

Which is a shame, as it's probably the only part of BGA that I actively dislike and makes me reconsider renewing my subscription each year.

I've hosted IRL nights on occasions, and it's the one part that's clearly missing here for me. Someone cheats to win, they get a warning. They do the a second time and they're temporarily banned. Third strike and a ban is permanent. And that's a lenient approach as I know some nights have a one-strike and you're gone mentality.

Cheating is very hard online due to the coding of moves. Outside of collusion between players it's almost impossible. But the act of skipping in tournaments to potentially avoid being eliminated is about a close to cheating on BGA as you can get outside of collusion. It's a shame that admin don't perceive it as much (if they did they'd surely do something about the option as it stands)