I don’t believe so. It being a final table and thus the outcome only affecting those left is important. I assume from what you say that it was a Swiss tournament or similar? In that case I would say it’s collusion.
Not a good reason to reject draws, of course
It was a McMahon tournament (which is the most popular system in European go tournaments), but for the top group (4d+ in this case) that’s quite similar to a Swiss tournament.
[McMahon system tournament - Wikipedia]
I can see how this is related to go: in French, it is called “le match de la honte” 
Do we know when the new code allowing draws will go live on the production server?
By the way, if the developers need help with testing on a test server, I’m available.
Draws should be working on beta.online-go.com as of today; not sure we need testers, but if you wanted to try it out, feel free. Not sure when it’ll deploy to production, but soon-ish™ I think?
(Note: small boards still have fractional komi by default (and for all ranked games), precluding draws, until the small board handicap and komi proposal starts landing. Might also be soon-ish™.)
Just cross-linking the official announcement here
FTR, what we should have ended up with for elimination tournaments is that players in a drawn game move forward to the next round, just like winners. Only players that lose a game are eliminated. IOW, same behaviour as “tie by moderator decision”.
(Of course, they might up matched against different opponents if there are other competitors remaining.)
Let me know if some other behaviour is observed in practice, and I can look into what’s going wrong.
Is the implication that if it’s the final then there is a further final?
Yes. More details:
I like this solution.
When is the inaugural new zealand rules double elimination tournament?
So I take from this that if a player in the winners bracket plays against a player in the loser’s bracket in the final and loses, the tournaments still ends even though they’re both uneliminated and in the loser’s bracket?
Not that I’m complaining about the great progress which has been made, of course, just wanting to clarify this point, as your description seems to imply this is still an issue.
For a complete description we need to know how the mysterious points are assigned too!
Correct. The winner of the first tier is (still) eliminated after one loss if/when the winner of the second tier beats them. (It’s not clear to me whether there’s consensus that this behaviour should change… but IIUC, the behaviour you’re suggesting is: if first tier player loses, they drop to the second tier, resulting in more rounds until one of them loses a second time. Certainly it’s logically consistent…)
BTW, for handling draws, I didn’t end up making a change to the elimination tournament logic at all, just audited it— as suggested up-thread, it was already behaving this way for “Tie by Moderator Decision”.
Which points? I don’t think elimination tournaments have points, but IIRC, for other tournaments: 1 point for a win, 0.5 points for a draw, 0 points for a loss (plus some number of starting points in McMahon tournaments, according to the McMahon bars).
I also support the idea of playing a “second final”, if the player from the first tier has lost in the “first final”. I think this would be more consistent with the concept that you are eliminated if and only if you lose two games.
Based on my audit, I don’t think it’d be too hard to implement. But it’d be good to have a separate thread with a clear proposal to confirm there’s no opposition, or to understand the opposition if there is some. (I doubt everyone interested in double-elimination tournaments is tracking this Jigo thread…)
Can someone (not me!) volunteer to write that up and drive it? (If there seems to be consensus, I can put it on my to-do list.)
There are points reported by the API that I suspect are actually used to determine the 3 trophy positions especially when there are exotic situations like disqualifications in the final rounds. Maybe you can confirm this?
I’ve created a new discussion thread about this proposed DE tournament change: