Edmon wrote: ↑Wed Dec 01, 2021 7:18 pm
Perhaps I am not explaining this very well.
You are asking for us to remove and punish people who don't play, before they have even played. How is that possible?
I don't think Dzidek is asking for banning a player before he could even play. I think he means that now we've played 3 rounds, we have a rather clear view of active and inactive players, and that the "cleaning" can be done.
To put some pressure upon no-showers and game-breakers (and give hope to the other ones), you could set a rule where after X no-shows among the 12 rounds (X=2 ? 3 ?), a player is automatically banned. You could also consider that for the games that are not finished at the end of the 21 days, if a player has been inactive during more than X straight days (10 ?), this is also considered as a no-show.
Finally, there would be a way to fix (or at least improve) the game-breaker problem: if a game
has begun but is not finished at the end of the 21 days, replace the inactive player by an AI and let the active player finish the game within the 7 inter-round days. Of course this is not perfect (and I don't know if it is technically feasible), but that would greatly improve the problem of players who just stop playing after a few turns when they see they're losing, preventing the other player from gaining points.
As you said Edmon, this is an "unknown tournament", and because of that there are some issues that can't be totally fixed. I totally accept that (and I think all my precedent comments speak for me).
However, this is Slitherine (and not us) who decided to name this tournament "World Championship Tournament", and not "small LAN tournament between friends in a garage". So, we would all like to see more efforts/reactivity from Slitherine to fix what can be fixed. 2 rounds (= 2 months) have been necessary to fix the main obvious issue (penalty for early winning). I'm sure Slitherine can do better. Several propositions have been made by players to fix (or at least improve) the problem of players who start playing and then stop.