Currently, resigning from a tournament automatically resigns you from all games in that tournament.
Should it?
In my opinion, it should not. I imagine the main use case for resigning from a tournament is to avoid getting more games in subsequent rounds. Players may realize they don’t have time for more games, but still be willing to finish ongoing games. And, if they’re winning (some of) those games, it’s bad for the rating system for the players to be automatically resigned from them.
What do you think resigning from a tournament should do to ongoing games?
If a player resigns from a tournament, the system should:
Resign them from any ongoing games in the tournament (status quo)
Leave their ongoing games alone
0voters
Please share why, too, especially if you can educate me on why the status quo makes sense!
There’s just no reason it should take any other action on their behalf. Anyone can easily resign from the individual games if that’s what makes sense for them. And they should look carefully at each game in case they are winning some.
A tournament generally has several rounds. So a player may want to resign from the tournament in order not to start the next round, but may still want to finish games of the current round.
There is protection of rank from mass timeout in correspondence. Anything that sounds like “resign all games” is going against idea of such protection.
Looks like almost everyone agrees that forcing resignations in individual games (status quo) isn’t great (94% against it right now). I’ll leave the poll open for a bit anyway.
Looking at the implementation, I think it’d be possible to change to not resign automatically from games; perhaps a bit fiddly to give users the choice, but certainly somehow doable as well.
Although this point suggests the convenience would be a bad idea:
Also, it’s extra interface, but not extra functionality (since players still can resign from games).
New poll:
Assume for this poll that tournaments change to NOT force game resignations when a player resigns from a tournament. Should such a player have an easy way to resign from all ongoing games in that tournament?
No. Better if players resign from games individually.
Yes. Interface should make it easy to resign from all games in a tournament.
0voters
EDIT: You might choose “no” if you don’t mind having the option, but you think it’s unimportant / low priority. (Too late to change the poll.)
I am fine with either, but I voted on “option to resign all games” in case anyone was relying on the “legacy” behavior, and I feel like the interface will not be much more complicated than it is currently.
A particular situation where resigning from all tournament games would be useful is when you didn’t realise you were part of a tournament which, a year later, randomly decided to start a new round
You might resign from the tournament and all games (could be 7 or 8) without playing at all
Yeah, I’m surprised “No. Better if players resign from games individually” isn’t winning by a landslide like the first poll did. It is winning almost 3:1, which is good, but not like the absolute domination of the first poll
It would be better to implement “I’m starting to hate Correspondence” button. It would annul all ongoing Correspondence games and will ban you from accepting any correspondence game for a month.
BTW, I thought of a downside of changing the behaviour, which I thought I’d share, in case it influences opinions.
The status quo (auto-resign from all games in the tournament) is cleaner from a tournament management perspective:
New rounds are never blocked on players that have resigned from the tournament.
At the end of a game, points are never awarded to a player that has already resigned from the tournament.
Changing the behaviour so that resigning from a tournament does NOT auto-resign games in the tournament allows in-between state in the tournament, where rounds and/or tournament completion might be blocked on games where players have resigned from a tournament.
If the resigned-from-tournament player wins another tournament game, they can be awarded more tournament points, and/or eliminate their opponent (even though they have just eliminated themselves).
Disconnecting the games entirely from the tournament would certainly be awkward, because that’d break the historical record.
Treating the game “as if” won by their opponent for the sake of tournament points/elimination might be hard to implement efficiently/consistently across tournament kinds.
Starting the next round while the games are ongoing would be unfair to not-resigned opponents, who would get more simultaneous games than they had signed up for.
IMO, it’d be okay to do nothing special here. “Resign from tournament” would eliminate the player from future rounds, but not resign them from ongoing tournament games; the next round would wait for their games to end, and they might receive tournament points from those and/or eliminate opponents. In essence, the “resign from tournament” button wouldn’t have any practical effects until the completion of the current round.
But there is awkwardness.
Not sure if this changes anyone’s vote for the original poll (I’m not going to change my vote (yet!), but I do see benefits to the status quo that I was missing before).
It can still be the case that the player resigning has already won some and lost some games, affected the round robin scores, before resigning from the tournament and half say of their games for example.
I think the problem of “players outside of a tournament can prolong a round” is already a problem: disqualified players are allowed to continue their games.
So I think what you’ve pointed out is a good consideration, but I don’t think it should block the change, and we can hope the “prolonged round” bug gets fixed in the future
