Board Game Arena

Hello,

Current BGA Round Robin Tournaments system has a few flows, outlined below.

I was wondering who I can talk about to ask them to possibly implement the fixes?

Details:

1) Colors are assigned randomly.

For games like Hive and Chess this means that in a group of 5 players one player can play 4 games with white and another 4 games with black. Both in Hive and Chess there is a serious white player advantage, so in tournaments with equal player strength this may be a significant problem.

Possible solutions include:

-- Make the system attempt to assign equal number of white/black colors to each player. So in a group of 5 players each player would play 2 games with black and 2 games with white.
-- Add "2 games with swap colors between players" option to round robin tournaments. So each player would play 2 games with each opponent, one with black and one with white. To prevent mirroring (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_ ... eous_games) games should be played consecutively.

2) Unclear who wins tie breaks.

Looks like the current implementation of tie breaks is also random?

For chess round robin tournaments, usually the so called Berger score is used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonneborn ... rger_score

https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=122658 This is an example of a tournament that would have resulted differently if Berger score was used. Compare to the correct implementation: https://swisssystem.org/Tournament/Rati ... c6dee494f2

Possible solution here is to implement the Berger score as another tournament option.

So, if anyone could point me to someone who can fix these issues it would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Fixed time limits being the default for tournaments is just wrong IMO.

I am playing in a tournament right now, where 10% people (14/115) have withdrawn. Lots of people are frustrated, and about half of my games have timed out. Quite often in the last few moves of the game.
It would be better to not automatically timeout the tables, only do this if a player pushes the button. Push the tables into an 'overtime' mode or something, and start a new round.

It's a harsh, harsh truth.

The games are timing out with different results too. Some give, 1,2,3,4 placements, others give 1,1,1,4.

Players should be auto kicked from tournaments when timing out. And be refused to join tournaments in the future. Isn't there 1 player abusing the system that just joins tournaments to timeout?

I agree with you. At the same time time controls are a whole different topic, but at least for most Hive tournaments (that I'm most concerned about) they are not as annoying as the issues outlines above.