I signed up to the Honinbo Main Title Tournament 2020 because some of my other correspondence games were starting to wind down. I was either resigning losing games or my opponents were doing the same for instance (and other games are near the end or timed out etc.)
Anyway I was thinking, I could probably take on 7 or 8 new games - it might give me a chance to test out an opening (I played sanrensei for instance in a lot of my games in the Meijin 2020 tournament round one for instance).
However round two of the Minigren tournament also started at basically** the same time without any notification at all. The Honinbo 2020 round 1 started at about “April 7, 2020 5:00 AM” while Minigren Round 2 started at “April 7, 2020 5:24 PM”. So in one day I got about 17 or 18 new games when I was expecting 7,8 or 9.
**(well 12 hours apart - but in correspondence game terms :))
This also happened with the Meijinn 2020 and Meijinn 2019 although it wasn’t quite as bad. For instance one game in the 2019 round 2 started at “February 18, 2020 1:43 PM” and round 1 2020 started at “February 9, 2020 6:00 PM”.
My question is can we either notify participants when round 2 of a tournament is about to start in the same way people are notified about posts in a group?
Since these are big OGS tournaments specifically, which take about a year or so to finish a round it’s not really feasible or practical to monitor when the next round of a tournament is going to start for a whole year.
It’d be great if a notification is sent like the start of a new tournament or if they can even be staggered by a week or two so it isn’t overwhelming with twice the number of games you were expecting to start.
Or let me know what you think either, people of the fourm?
The new round starts automatically when the last game in the previous round ends, so there is no way to know in advance when this will happen.
For more control about when new he’s start, I recommend to create individual challenges on the play page. This way you have full control over when and how many games start.
Isn’t there instances though (I’ll look for the threads**) where the last game in a round is actually artificially ended. What I mean is, maybe there’s only one game left in a round and they’re on vacation for weeks, or maybe have left the site etc.
In that case in principle one could know in advance that the round is going to happen.
So I think we can rule out staggering as an option. Then instead can we automatically send a notification that a new round of a tournament is starting in the same way one is sent for the start of a tournament?
Or what about a notification saying “There are only x games left in a round of this tournament”, where x is a suitable number given the size of the tournament. x=5 might be reasonable if there are hundreds of people in the tournament, while x=1 might be fair if there’s only 10.
It would in principle give you an idea that the round is nearly over in a correspondence tournament, although of course there could still be a lot of moves left to be played out in those games.
I’m just suggesting ideas and I do appreciate the feedback. To be fair though, the advice is essentially
“If you have played in an OGS title tournament in the last couple of years, don’t join a new one if you’re not comfortable with the possibility of getting twice as many games as you’re signing up for - a new round of that tournament from last year could start any minute”.
Edit: ** I guess this one was a polite ask to finish the game. I’m not entirely sure how the games mentioned in this thread were resolved but it seemed like paused games holding up a tournament where players may have left.
Every correspondence tournament with more than 1 round has this problem.
Fast players end their games months before slow players and there’s nothing we can do about it after the tournament has started.
I had the same problem a few times and then I realised that subscribing many tournaments can be dangerous and tricky.
I also started a thread on this topic and discovered that there where tournament way longer and slower than mines.
The only way I figured out to keep that under control is to check them frequently: once in a week or so I scroll the list in my profile and open them one by one to see how it goes.
It’s actually necessary only for those where I ended all my games and am waiting for the next round though.
Now I have only one tournament active so I’m fine, but it took years to get rid of all of them. And they were only a handful!
Being notified for tournaments that never end would be very annoying for me.
What about having a counter for how many games of this round are still running?
The number could be displayed behind the tournament’s name on the home/profile page. So the player wouldn’t have to open every tournament page manually, but could get a quick overview on one page.
