Board Game Arena

What is a good tournament mode on bga for memoir?

I prefer not to be overwhelmed with games when I enter a tournament, so no round robin.

Single elimination is nice? But gives a big opportunity for chance.

Swiss seems nice in theory, but the implementation on bga is broken: once you become first, you’re always matched up to the lowest player, so you’re just about guaranteed to stay first. See also: https://boardgamearena.com/bug?id=123293

Any other systems that work well?

I understand Swiss is broken if you tell the "machine" not to match previous players.
If you go for true Swiss, I think that should work.

The Swiss format is broken for another reason: The tiebreakers are terrible. Opponents points is out of one's control. So is opponents average ELO. A recent tournament (https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=282950) had multiple players going 5-0, ended based on tiebreaker opponents points within 1/2 a point for the 1st and 2nd place players. Is that luck or skill? Further, if an opponent you played in an early round happens to drop out mid tournament (again completely out of your control) that makes it even harder to win the tiebreaker. A much better tiebreaker is medal differential like round robin uses. I don't know if this can possibly be re-configured for Memoir '44 or it's a BGA thing.

To answer your question, for me either single elimination or round robin work well. But I agree round robin can be too many concurrent games. If you prefer swiss, maybe if you make it a longer tournament with many rounds then the tiebreaker won't even come into play.

That still does not solve the biggest problem with the current Swiss implementation where the highest player is always matched against the lowest point player.
That seems like a serious bug, and I’m pretty sure it doesn’t help if you enable the avoidance of earlier matched players.

The tiebreaker sucks, that is for sure, but with this matchup it’s already grossly unfair before we get to the tiebreaker

Jeronimon wrote: ↑05 August 2024, 10:57 I understand Swiss is broken if you tell the "machine" not to match previous players.
If you go for true Swiss, I think that should work.

Nope, the setting to prevent same matches does not help with this.

https://boardgamearena.com/tournament?id=268828