Overall XP declines?

[Meeplelowda]

There was no specified duration for the tournament. It ended when it ended.

Yes, BGA could revamp their tournaments to put no limits. How did that site handle someone who just stopped playing? That doesn't even have to be malicious. Maybe they get sick and can't play for weeks or months.

But we've learned from experience that there are malicious players who join BGA and looks for ways to sabotage games. We already had a person who would enter 100s of tournaments and then not play. They had to revamp the screening process for tournaments just to address the edge case that player was exploiting. And there's that Catan player who is trapping people in games. Probably other examples I haven't seen.

[FrankJones]

There are so many problems here at BGA with abandoned games, players being expelled, etc. This is all relatively new to me. On the various sites I played on back in the day, people didn't quit. They finished the games. And this was on sites where the only penalty for quitting or forfeiting on time was losing the game. No Karma penalty, no additional Elo penalty.

Were they TB or RT games? Cause I've tried to get some of my RL board gaming friends to play on here, and the biggest problem when it doesn't take is that they just don't check in with the website and basically forget they joined the game. Obviously after that happens I just figure online gaming is not for them and leave them to their life, but I'd be surprised if people still weren't doing that "back in the day". Of course, that's a problem purely for TB games. I'm guessing there were TB games, based on your description of tournaments in your other post, but just curious anyway. I don't feel like forgetting that you signed up for an online game would be a problem that's more prevalent now than back then. I suppose it could be, because if you're talking decades ago, internet wasn't necessarily something everyone was on all the time, so maybe only people who were on the internet regularly enough even joined games in the first place, and therefore didn't forget? But seems a bit of a stretch to me. Anyway, just speculating.

The two main sites I used were only turn-based games.

People could (and often did) play games outside the scheduled tournaments, which could be played in semi-real time if both players were at the computer and wanted to. These were always the equivalent of what we call "friendly" games here.

And there was no Elo. The prestige came from winning tournaments, and seeing a high win% for a game. (The win% actually made sense, unlike the weird way it's calculated here.

[tbhp]

And the "most time left on clock" method is almost as silly as the expulsion rule.

Well the time on your clock is something in your control, your subscription date is not.

Still not great, but if the game has to end, seems like any other alternative would be silly as well.

Why would this not come into play in a 2-player game? Both players could be playing at a reasonable pace, only to have one of them lose and be eliminated because of having too much overall time elapse but being the slightly slower player.

The game duration is the sum of both players times, so it's impossible for the game to end without the slower player being out of time.

[tbhp]

Many years ago, I played regularly on a site where tournaments were by far the main way people played. For every game, the system auto-generated at least 2 tournaments a week: 1 "fast" (24 hours per move) and one "slow" (48 hours per move). Each player's clock was frozen for 48 hours during whichever 2 days that player selected as his or her "weekend". Major holidays also froze the clock.

Each round grouped players into sections of 4 or 5, round robin, play 2 games against each opponent, the best in each round advanced. If multiple players tied, they all advance, and then in round 2, players were group again randomly. Eventually there would be one final round, and the winner ... wins the tournament.

There was no specified duration for the tournament. It ended when it ended.

It worked fine, and rarely did people complain about it. Because the tournaments were so frequent, it wasn't so crucial that the tournaments had some sort of arbitrary duration limit to each round or the overall tournament.

You seem to be talking about 2 players tournaments. Those tournaments have no issue on BGA (at least not the specific ones brought up in this thread). The issue is "what to do when a game is multiplayer and it seems like the game will never end because someone stopped playing". Your example doesn't seem to address this issue.

I don't feel like forgetting that you signed up for an online game would be a problem that's more prevalent now than back then. I suppose it could be, because if you're talking decades ago, internet wasn't necessarily something everyone was on all the time, so maybe only people who were on the internet regularly enough even joined games in the first place, and therefore didn't forget?

I suppose it's a combination of things. These days there are so many things to do on the internet, it's probably easier for people to forget about things and not keep track of everything they plan to do. It seems that this has also led to people being less committed in general. Back then when you started a game with someone, you might have seen it as a contract that you must fulfill and pay respect to. These days it seems like people hide behind anonymity and don't think about the actual people on the other side of the screen, so in their mind it's fine for them to just stop playing, or concede or kick out or any other bad behavior that has been commonly criticized here.

But I also feel like FrankJones is exaggerating, because they seem to have an imagined view of tournaments on here that is worse than how it actually is. Tournaments usually proceed without any hiccups. Yes sometimes people go out of time, but usually the games still end normally as long as nobody kicks out. And players who seem to just stop playing forever are a fairly rare occurrence.

[RazorOz]

Do you have an idea for an alternative solution? It seems clear that rewarding the player with the highest score would also be bad (if someone is temporarily leading but knows they will lose in the next round, they can guarantee victory by simply stopping play until time expires). It also seems clear that punishing both players would be bad, since someone who knows they will lose can also stall the game.

Option to have game plays to conclusion regardless is what is needed. It will be a better method on most games, it also stops what often happens where a player knows they've lost so times someone out at the end to save their skin, so you get less timeouts to begin with.

It's the easiest solution, puts the choice then on the tournament creator, and the coding for it already exists.

[FrankJones]

You seem to be talking about 2 players tournaments. Those tournaments have no issue on BGA (at least not the specific ones brought up in this thread). The issue is "what to do when a game is multiplayer and it seems like the game will never end because someone stopped playing". Your example doesn't seem to address this issue.

Yes, in those days, thematic strategy games such as Terraforming Mars, Wingspan, etc, weren't much of a thing yet, and these sites primarily featured well-known abstract strategy and stone-placing games. I don't even know whether the site had functionality for 3+ player games. So, that avoided a lot of the difficult problems inherent to 3+ player games.

But I also feel like FrankJones is exaggerating, because they seem to have an imagined view of tournaments on here that is worse than how it actually is. Tournaments usually proceed without any hiccups. Yes sometimes people go out of time, but usually the games still end normally as long as nobody kicks out. And players who seem to just stop playing forever are a fairly rare occurrence.

I've never played any tournaments here, so, I'm not exaggerating; rather, I just don't have any experience in knowing how often these issues occur. Often enough for threads to periodically appear in which extensive discussion occurs.

I wouldn't want to play in a tournament that has even the possibility of either one of the annoying issues occur.

Besides, BGA has two ways to demonstrate one's skills, and those two are sufficient for me: Arena, and the overall Elo leaderboards.

[GTSchemer]

Do you have an idea for an alternative solution? It seems clear that rewarding the player with the highest score would also be bad (if someone is temporarily leading but knows they will lose in the next round, they can guarantee victory by simply stopping play until time expires). It also seems clear that punishing both players would be bad, since someone who knows they will lose can also stall the game.

Option to have game plays to conclusion regardless is what is needed. It will be a better method on most games, it also stops what often happens where a player knows they've lost so times someone out at the end to save their skin, so you get less timeouts to begin with.

It's the easiest solution, puts the choice then on the tournament creator, and the coding for it already exists.

This may be a silly question, but how would that handle the situation of someone simply refusing to play (or getting sick and not logging on)? I assume letting someone hold a tournament hostage if they decided not to play would be very bad.

[tbhp]

Option to have game plays to conclusion regardless is what is needed. It will be a better method on most games, it also stops what often happens where a player knows they've lost so times someone out at the end to save their skin, so you get less timeouts to begin with.

Unless there is absolutely zero interaction between players, the sudden absence of a player can lead to fairness issues too. Say you planned your next move based on what you thought another player would do, then it turns out this player is skipped, now you are left disadvantaged because of something you couldn't have guessed (well sometimes there are things we can't guess when playing games, but a player unexpectedly leaving shouldn't be one of them).

Even just on a philosophical level, it doesn't feel right that a game would abandon players along the way. Imagine an important sports competition in the real world and someone just drops out of a game for no reason. You can decide to put it with it, but it's far from the ideal event everyone imagined, and it would leave a sour taste for the winner if it turns out that for example their final game had to conclude with one player absent.

Maybe the situation is different just for Heat specifically, because in real life car races regularly have players dropping out because of accidents. It's seen as an inherent part of the sport, so I guess this is a pretty unique situation where players leaving a game may actually feel thematically fitting. But for most games, that's not a thing. You expect the game to end with who it started with.

[tbhp]

I've never played any tournaments here, so, I'm not exaggerating; rather, I just don't have any experience in knowing how often these issues occur. Often enough for threads to periodically appear in which extensive discussion occurs.

I wouldn't want to play in a tournament that has even the possibility of either one of the annoying issues occur.

Besides, BGA has two ways to demonstrate one's skills, and those two are sufficient for me: Arena, and the overall Elo leaderboards.

Yes, that's what I meant. Your view comes off as "exaggerated" even though it's obviously not intentional, it comes from what you have heard and you are probably overestimating the occurrence of what is described.

Like, we don't actually know if it was less common for players to stop playing in the tournaments you mention from the other site. It's just that since those tournaments didn't have multiplayer, it was unlikely that you'd hear about any complaints. Timeouts probably still happened, apparently at a very low rate, but then again the rate is pretty low on BGA too.

Although obviously I agree one time is already one time too many. Though unlike you, I'm too invested in tournaments to choose not to play them because sometimes they have issues.

[Meeplelowda]

This may be a silly question, but how would that handle the situation of someone simply refusing to play (or getting sick and not logging on)? I assume letting someone hold a tournament hostage if they decided not to play would be very bad.

It is very bad (and I mentioned above this has very much been an issue before), so I'm also curious about the answer to your not silly question.