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).