All tournament games are tagged as “ranked” in the system. I don’t think the frontend should be ignoring the tag just because they’re non-standard board sizes (frontend shouldn’t second-guess the backend).
Note that “ranked” doesn’t necessarily mean “affects ratings”. It means that (a) participants are expected to follow the rules of ranked games and (b) the rating system is allowed to look at it.
I see two reasonable options:
- Backend could stay as-is. Then, in the future, if the rating system gets smart enough to do something with non-standard board sizes, we could back-populate using this treasure-trove of ranked game data.
- Backend could change to start tagging them as “unranked”, even though all participants are expected to follow the same rules as ranked games.
I’m inclined to stick with the status quo (option #1), even though it’s a bit unintuitive that ratings aren’t affected. I think it’s important that participants know they’re expected to follow the rules of ranked games, and it’s nice to think the ratings system would have the option of using the data in the future.
Regarding komi, tournaments with non-standard board sizes are presumably not turning on handicap (since the system doesn’t know what to do with “automatic handicap” for non-standard board sizes). So, they’ll be even games, resulting in komi of 7±0.5, just like standard board sizes. (If they’re using automatic handicap, then maybe there’d be some 1 stone games with komi of 0/0.5? Those are the only two options, anyway.)