Interesting.
It could make the prolonged round problem worse. Not a new problem, as you say, but more common.
One implementation strategy could be to solve prolonged rounds by disqualification first, then come back and use the same approach for resign-from-tournament. I’ll have a think about what to do there.
Interesting that this is in fact a backdoor way to “resign” instead of “canceling” at the beginning of the game: link.
Seems like it still gets annulled, but that’s kind of weird, right?
When a player withdraws from a tournament, can’t the system scratch them from the tournament, more or less as if they never participated?
If they’re playing an elimination game, their opponent will directly progress to the next round, even though the game itself will continue outside the context of the tournament.
Then the tournament won’t have to wait for them finishing their games.
I suppose it may be a bit complicated to handle the withdrawer’s already finished games in an ongoing Swiss tournament/round or MacMahon tournament/round. Perhaps those games can also be changed to byes for their opponents?
I suppose the most unlucky participants would be those who were already eliminated by the withdrawer in previous rounds.
It would certainly be super annoying to be having to wait for a round to start that is being held up by a game where someone already eliminated is playing someone who already resigned!