Agreed. It reminds of a situation from the Oware tournament in MSO 2003. A player timed out after having captured 24 beans (half of the total number). The medal distribution depended on the outcome, so the arbiter let the players in the tournament vote, and it was decided to call it a draw.
Unfortunately, this rule affects Littlegolem Champions League (LCL), of course. Not only players' rating.
The game I was talking about is part of UK League.
(I really hope that gpallis will not read this topic!)
As some of you know, the 1st and the second players of EACH League are promoted to Golden ♔ Semifinals .
Now, gpallis could:
A- score a goal, winning 4-1. So, he'd have 59 points like Black cat, and he might have better "SON". Perhaps.
B- NOT score a goal. And waiting for Glasgow to finish his vacation days. (THIS could be the last one!). Gpallis would so win 5-0, and he'd be sure of 2nd place!
What would you do in this situation?
I think that it's time to change this strange rule. In my opinion, if player A times out in extra-time, Player B should win 4-1. Do you agree?
On considering option A, he should obviously calculate the final SON assuming his opponent will lose the other games on time. :-)
But yes, I agree that a player who times out in extra-time should lose 1-4 and not 0-5.
A common problem, also in other LG games, is that those who play fast are punished for completing games against players who play fast for a while and then disappear, whereas the slow players win against those players on time. I think it would be fair if the following rule was invoked: If a player times out in a certain fraction of his games in a tournament, none of his games count in the tournament.
2) That's a difficult question FatPhil. Perhaps some unfair rating exchanges is something we have to live with, while promotions/demotions in tournaments is something that could be made more or less fair in a simple manner. But it could be an idea to look into it.
Even if it might be the sensible thing to do, you could not really 'unwind' the ratings - think about what happened afterwards, that player might have had a lot more games played in between with the changed rating, and given rating points to other opponents, they could have played with that new rating too, and so on. you would have to undo potentially hundreds of games and players. And what if games are dependent on starting rating (like handicap given in Go)? there is no way to make a handicap-4 game a handicap-3 game after its played.
Regarding the original point: I think it is just an oversight in the code - it probably reads player timed out - consider a win, without even looking at the game played and any special point ratings associated with it.
We'll see if Richard feels like correcting this minor bug.
Unfortunately, the technique with waiting around applies even without that special situation - if you are losing a game against one of these 'slow players', you might just keep playing instead of resigning, hoping they time out. There is nothing to be done against that...
Of course, Aganju. There is nothing wrong, if you keep on playing games that you are losing. You can always hope that your opponent - stronger or weaker, fast or slow - will time out.
But the case I exposed before is quite different. For gpallis, in this moment, keeping the ball around his men is probably better than scoring a goal and end the match.
There is a difference between a design flaw, which we are discussing, and a bug. The former is a deficiency in the specs (whether the SPECs are actually SPECifified or merely understood by whoever commissions the program, who may also be the programmer). The latter is a discrepancy between the spec and the actual operation of the code.
About Tasmanian's original point: if, in a live chess round-robin tournament, a player forfeits before completing 50% of the seeded games, his results won't be considered in the final standings (the games actually played will be rated). I'm not sure which rules are used in ICCF's tournaments.
Little Golem