Board Game Arena

I am starting a new 4 Player Mega Game Tournament (https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=258838). If things go well, I would like to make it a regular open event.

BarbarianMiller wrote: ↑20 December 2023, 05:19 I am starting a new 4 Player Mega Game Tournament (https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=258838). If things go well, I would like to make it a regular open event.

Just a comment for future reference. Your tournament is a "groups stage" tournament with both stages being Swiss Style, and the players pairing policy is set (for both stage 1 and stage 2) as "Try to prevent same players to be opponents twice", which is the default.

In my opinion, it's almost alwyas better to use the other setting, namely "Don't try to prevent same players to be opponents twice". Generally there are two reasons:

1. The "Try to prevent same players to be opponents twice" setting has a serious bug which arises in certain scenarios: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=56504

2. Even if that bug is not triggered, it's undesirable to prevent repeat opponents, unless there is a very large number of entrants. For example, suppose there are 16 entrants in the tournament, 4 players in each match, and 5 rounds or "steps" (i.e. everyone playing 5 matches). So by round 4 you've already seen 9 of the other players, there are only 6 remaining to choose from. And suppose your current ranking is 2nd out of 16. Well, the whole philosophy of Swiss system is, you should face players whose standing is the same as yours (or as close to it as possible), but chances are that of the other top players, you've already faced at least one. Let's say you've already faced the player in 3rd place. So the matchmaker places you against the players in 1st, 4th, and 5th. But then the lucky player in 3rd, gets a particularly easy round, perhaps going up against the players ranked 6th, 7th, and 8th, but more likely that player has already faced at least one of those, so maybe it turns out that the player in 3rd is matched against the players ranked 7th, 8th, and 11th. Well, that's hardly fair when you in 2nd have a much tougher match (against the top players by current standing), while the player in 3rd has an easier round against the middle of the field. And that's just round 4; in round 5 the matchups will be even more distorted. It's much better to play with the "Don't try to prevent same players to be opponents twice" option, so that in each round, the current top 4 are playing each other, and so on, even if it means that you occasionally see the same opponent twice.

Thanks for the comment Matthew - I will keep that in mind for the future. Not sure if this tournament will get enough people anyway.

Link to document with information about ongoing tournaments: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing