Board Game Arena

BananaHarambe wrote: ↑26 September 2025, 00:15 There appears to be literally 0 restrictions on tournaments other than the drop down menus and logical player counts for table size, minimum players for group stage.

To see how absurd this is I tested the limits of how far in advance I can create a tournament start date. The year 2064 is allowed, 39 years from now. I tried the year 3025, 1000 years from now, but that wasn't allowed. The year 2225 is allowed, 200 years from now.

I can create a tournament 73,063 days in advance and have it open for registration. Why aren't there any normal limits on this? No idea.

This violates best practices for the semantic validation of user input:

Minimum and maximum value range check for numerical parameters and dates, minimum and maximum length check for strings.

Basically, if there is no valid use case for a certain date range, it simply shouldn't be allowed.

Source: Open Worldwide Application Security Project Input Validation Cheat Sheet

BananaHarambe wrote: ↑26 September 2025, 00:15 There appears to be literally 0 restrictions on tournaments other than the drop down menus and logical player counts for table size, minimum players for group stage.

To see how absurd this is I tested the limits of how far in advance I can create a tournament start date. The year 2064 is allowed, 39 years from now. I tried the year 3025, 1000 years from now, but that wasn't allowed. The year 2225 is allowed, 200 years from now.

I can create a tournament 73,063 days in advance and have it open for registration. Why aren't there any normal limits on this? No idea.

Why should there be limits on this? It's silly, but pretty trivial, more of a roll your eyes kind of thing than a real problem. I don't see why you'd need to go out of your way to ban it.

matthias7 wrote: ↑23 September 2025, 03:17

Mathew5000 wrote: ↑22 September 2025, 04:08 There are 42 of us still actively competing in tournament 157664, which started 973 days ago, on January 22, 2023.

After the current round there are three rounds remaining, so the tournament should go into 2026 but won't see its third anniversary.

Each player who makes it to the finish will have played 40 games of Catan. At 30 days max duration per game, the tournament could have gone 3 years and 4 months but I guess enough rounds completed in under 30 days that we've saved a few months.

The main reason I asked was out of curiosity to see if tournaments really take 1+ years to complete so thanks for answering. I entered tournaments to see how good I am and wouldn't want to wait 3 years for an answer. You all must really love playing Catan to stick around so long.

A tournament is just a single event, I wouldn't put much stock in it. If you want an idea of how good you are rating is usually a much better indicator. The sample size is much larger.

Send me an invite for your tournament in 2225. I'll have to check whether I'm free that day, though.

Mathew5000 wrote: ↑26 September 2025, 04:17 Send me an invite for your tournament in 2225. I'll have to check whether I'm free that day, though.

Here you go: https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=437901

I never opened it because I felt 200 years was a bit too far away you know. I'm not confident that any of us will still be alive at that point.

However, I did make a real tournament that starts in 2064 that is legitimate. It is a 40 year anniversary tournament for the BGA release. I can play it from my future nursing home or have my son or potential future grandchild take over for me. The terms and conditions for the tournament will require players signing up to list an executor to take over the tournament or their account. You must be 100 Elo to sign up, sorry no invites, serious players only

For others, why should there be a reasonable limit for tournament creation and signups? Because BGA users as a whole cannot be trusted to properly read the details of what they sign up for and cannot be trusted to maintain their commitment to BGA in general or tournaments over a long period of time. A 4p tournament with signups 8 months in advance is a terrible idea because players will sign up, forget about it, stop playing on BGA, then BGA has no way to kick them out of tournaments so inactive accounts linger in the tournaments and spoil it for players that actually want to play. Why make a tournament that will have a higher amount of inactive players? Since BGA doesn't do anything to kick inactive players out of tournaments it makes sense for tournament creators to be careful how they create and schedule tournaments to avoid it.

Tournaments should generally be made 1-6 weeks in advance or at least registration should start 1-6 weeks in advance maximum in my opinion. This is plenty of time to grow tournament size while minimizing signed up players leaving BGA. This is for general tournament creation, but there are some exceptions for highly organized tournament series like world championships that have scheduled tournaments and an invitation structure. These can be created in advance, but players can't sign up for them anyways since they are usually invite only.