Proposal Dropping Out and Activity Losses in Official Tournaments

[ABR]

As the title implies, this is a suggestion and not an announcement.

For clarity, this is how we currently handle dropping out of tournaments. For additional clarity, I am proposing this solely for official tournaments, and not for individual circuits.

I am writing this thread because I believe we should punish dropping out more strictly and activity losses in some form. They have the same result as throwing a game - giving the opponent a free win in some form. There is a different level of intent, though, and thus the punishment should be less severe in comparison. My proposal would be to have a scaling level of infraction points based on the amount of repeat offenses and the time frame they occurred within. For example, here is one way we could set it up.

First offense - 0 pt infraction, x months

Second offense- 1 or 2 pt infraction, y months

Third offense - 2 pt infraction or tourban, z months

These numbers are flexible. I just wanted to show an example of how we could increase the punishment for repeat offenders, and offer a 0 pt infraction as a way to warn people before punishing first timers. Starting with a 0 pt infraction covers cases where people are either incredibly new to tournaments or have an irl circumstance arise. We could make it so your infractions "reset" after every 6 months, year, etc. We could also count multiple classic cup activity losses / dropouts as one instance, because they're concurrent and it falls in line with dropping out of the tournament as a whole. We could treat coinflips as activity losses for both. We could start applying this for r2 onward because we're still able to substitute in r1. Again, details can be worked out later but I'd love to hear feedback on what specifics people have in mind.

 

[Ewin]

I disagree with this proposal. For one thing, the "xyz" months would have to be fairly long due to the spacing between officials. This leads to some problems, as dropping out of 2 tournaments in, say, a single year due to irl problems isn't unrealistic, as even minor events can take precedent over a tour. Even something like "my dog died and I need a couple weeks off to shake it off" is a legitimate excuse; we are not getting paid to play this game and real life events should and usually do take priority.

Besides that, you end up punishing new players. New players might change their mind about joining the tour scene, they might get nervous, they might lose interest. These things happen. These players dropping out is already pretty easily solved by the substitution system, and one could even argue that it's beneficial to veteran players who happen to miss signups that these dropouts exist. Last OST saw a slew of well known players get subbed in later on, 3 of which were trophy holders. Punishing dropouts = less subs = less chances to play.

Who really benefits from punishing them anyways? Do we really get stronger pools because of their absence, or do we just punish people who will drop out regardless of punishments? I think you're realistically trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist. The current punishments for dropouts are fair, as players that far in to a tournament violently disrupt it by leaving, and team tournaments have had punishments in place for that behavior for ages.

The current rulings for dropping out of official tournaments should stay as is.

 

[Perry]

While I think this would be a good policy in theory, it wouldn't get too much traction in practice as currently outlined. I can list three points here:

** control: keeping track of potential users that fell under the three scenarios ABR outlined would be a huge hassle. For OST r2 only, we are talking about 256+ pairings - I think I'd say around 100 of those pairings would either get decided on flip, act loss or giving wins: and to make matters worse, most of these guys that will potentially get warned are people that only got on Smogon to join the tour and will probably never come back. They are not the problem.
** severity: while I can agree that the act of giving wins has skyrocket in recent years, a tournament-ban over 3 activity losses seems pretty harsh to me: they are not tempering with the tournaments integrity or cheating, they just don't feel like playing. I'd rather if people dropped out rather than play in a half-assed manner just to avoid being barred altogether from playing just about every other tournament on the site, which would be bound to happen.
** hobby: in the end, Pokémon is a hobby to us all (unless you also work for Nintendo, and if you do: please take my resume). It should not take precedence over real-life issues and obligations, and forcing people to choose between a Pokemon series and maybe an unexpected irl issue shouldn't be encouraged.

But I think TDs should still act on this, and actions such as:

** start treating given wins the same as byes for Classic and Slam: you would only get points if you win the following round. These 2 tournaments are usually the most affected by wins given, as you are awarded points for winning and any point gotten without playing will surely affect the standings really hard, even more after hitting the 2 points per win-rounds. This could help mitigate the effects in the long run.
** for OST, start to infract people before the Top-32 rounds. After the third or fourth round, you've definitely cut of the players that don't care about Smogon - as I mentioned above - and you're seeing faces that care about tournaments (or are just lucky i guess). You'd actually starting to infract users that are known: the "demographics" for this issue.

Its a cool proposal but I see more cons than pros for its implementation right now

 

[Eo Ut Mortus]

To be clear, there is a concrete problem we're trying to solve, and that's people earning an excessive amount of points from activity wins. This issue was raised in McMeghan's seeding post, and while seeding itself was ultimately rejected, the impetus behind the proposal was sound, and we wanted to address it. We don't want to be draconian for no reason; it just so happens that exercising leniency frequently finds itself at odds with maintaining the integrity and competitiveness of a tournament.

After some thought, I think a more forgiving solution would be signup deprioritization. Instead of a tourban, as was proposed in the original solution, players who drop out of enough official tournaments in a given timeframe would be pushed to the end of the signup/substitute list for a number of subsequent official tours. This accomplishes our original goal, which is deterring dropouts. It's not excessively punitive, because these players will likely still have opportunity to participate in tours. It's not unfair, because other players would have normally been excluded from these tournaments under the current ruleset. And it serves the community as good as, if not better, than the original solution, under which these slots would've been given to byes.

 

[Bughouse]

Is this not already (somewhat) the policy?

https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/dropping-out-of-tournaments.3641725/#post-7907589

What's different about what the OP wants and the policy described in the previous post linked above?

 

[Isa]

After some thought, I think a more forgiving solution would be signup deprioritization. Instead of a tourban, as was proposed in the original solution, players who drop out of enough official tournaments in a given timeframe would be pushed to the end of the signup/substitute list for a number of subsequent official tours. This accomplishes our original goal, which is deterring dropouts. It's not excessively punitive, because these players will likely still have opportunity to participate in tours. It's not unfair, because other players would have normally been excluded from these tournaments under the current ruleset. And it serves the community as good as, if not better, than the original solution, under which these slots would've been given to byes.

how would this policy be upheld by the various hosts? would hosts be asked to check a list published by tournament directors or would a technical solution similar to the current one for tourbanned people be put in place?

we've already seen that not even tournament directors hosting the most coveted tournament on this site are checking what users are allowed to play and not until after the fact, as per this spl, so what gives you the faith that others would manage to track a presumably much more extensive list?

 

[HANTSUKI]

Ok, I was too lazy to write anything up because get backer told me to write something that didn't sound like a shitpost when I could just say the truth in a few words :angery:, so now I don't have anything to do at 8am so:

Firstly, seems like the "problem" is that many people are getting points by activity wins. Ok.

So, does this problem hurt our community more than the chance of losing some players in the tournament scenario? This will make new players not play for not understanding the rules yet/being afraid of not playing anymore because they might just be busy or forget to play for not having the habit of checking their Smogon's VMs/PMs at all. It also may take out some good and experienced tournament players from the signups because like if you didn't drop school/work to play, you may just get busier than you thought you would be because that's how things work. Who knows if you'll end up struggling at some stuff on school or you're assigned to something you weren't at work that fucks up your schedule? Or hell, you might just not want to play that tournament anymore and it's nothing wrong with that. Just take the corona break as an example. How many people didn't signup in tournaments just for not having anything to do at first? Then you actually get new stuff to do and just drop that random tournament of a tier you don't actually play/don't like too much.

Then you could say it's a case by case analysis, but why should we have the obligation to tell about our life to strangers on internet just to be able to be part of our hobby? Maybe I just have something simple like school/work stuff, but maybe I have something that I don't wanna talk about to a bunch of strangers. Prolly just a few would want to say something like "hey my family is imploding" or "I'm on a depression phase atm that I don't wanna do anything". Not saying anything would cause a punishment for sure. So I do ask: is a punishment for those people really necessary? Should we be punishing people on their hobbies for not wanting to share their problems with strangers or just having something more important to take care of?

This game is a hobby, not an e-sport. We shouldn't be putting players in awkward positions and we also shouldn't be giving extra work to the people who are hosting stuff and making things happen. (and I don't wanna see people talking about tourneys with prizes that we are having nowadays, those prizes are just symbolic, no one can live from that so it's still a hobby in those cases rofl)

People are being lucky to get extra points from that? Well, that's the nature of the format we have (and the game but that's the cartridge mechs, right?). Pairings in solo tournaments are just luck based, there's no other way to think about them. Even if you punish people for dropping out...stuff like "hey, I got a top dog on this tournament r1 and got 0 points when I could go to r5 or something if I got less experienced players" still happen. That's where seeding would be useful, but again...this is just a hobby. It would be too much work to make a seed system for not accomplishing too much.

Also we are people and not robots, so we constantly are having mood swings. Sometimes we are just not in the right mindset to play games and we still do. This makes things luck based even in a seeding system. Who knows if your opp will be in their best mindset for the game? You can be lucky that they just want to click X asap or do dumb mistakes. If it was not a hobby, people would actually do real prep on their minds, not only teams, for every game. We all know this is impossible to apply to most part of the people. We have to schedule the games when we don't even know how we will be in the future lol.

Having a really competitive tournament is cool, but there are some lines we don't need to cross if it's not an actual e-sport. In the end of the day we are just playing an unnoficial game to have some fun and that is luck based as fuck. So I don't think we should be making more difficult to players actually joining tournaments and take part on our beloved hobby.

Sooooo nothing should be done here. I even dislike the punishment that already exist, but not saying to delete it or anything. We all know that the game is luck based and we even try to minimize those effects in some way, but I don't think it's worth on this case. It kinda hurts the integrity of the tournaments to have some players getting lucky points for activity calls, but it's not a real problem for now. No need to give more work to the hosts and no need to risk the chance of some people not joining the tournaments because they're afraid of getting too many infractions or something. Just let people change their minds after joining a tourney, they are not here by obligation at all. It prolly doesn't even solve the integrity thing, because some people might end up actually playing when they wanted to quit, but do lazy plays just to get things done and not be punished. Whoa, I might really deserve my points now after beating a player that just wanted to be doing other stuff!!!111 also not talking about some players that drop their first tournaments and never come back again, so you'll make the host spend more energy on cases that prolly will not even matter.

You'll only need to do something about the dropouts if we have a massive popular demand for it which seems not to be the case on the thread so far (and I understand the purpose is to actually check the popular demand here, just saying it anyway). If people are not demanding it, so they're having fun as it is and that's the important part.

tl;dr pairings on solo tourneys are luck based, nothing to be done here. Let people be. Go work on banning Kyurem from OU I'm tired of getting frozen :angery:

is it good now Luigi?

 

[Void]

I think punishing activity losses is v iffy. There are certainly times someone who has absolutely no intention to play loses on activity, but you also get instances where people miss times due to circumstances out of their control, and an activity fishing opponent can easily claim that they are unable to reschedule and take the win. In this case, the fact that they took a free loss is already enough of a punishment, and adding an infraction/other penalty on top of that would just be silly.

Maybe a distinction can be made between act losses where the perpetrator clearly made no attempt to schedule whatsoever and ones where they simply missed a time, but that might be a bit of a stretch. I'd rather not do anything about activity losses than do something if it comes down to it though.

 

[Perry]

How do you guys feel about Eo's proposal?

I do think this route is better than the one outlined on OP, but I still see an issue with it. From my experience hosting individual tours, I just think this would be hardly effective: all players that sign up (or got "Quit" by the bracketmaker) eventually get to play the tournament in the end because (unfortunately) a lot of players that join Smogon's individuals post "in" and never come back and have to be subbed out OR other players quitting r1.

I'm by no means opposed to the implementation of Eo's proposal, as you did mention this is easily programmable through the bracketmaker so it's a win/win scenario regardless for the TD team and the host. I'm just worried about this being an obsolete policy later on and the need to deal with this problem arises again.