Hi. As is known, tournament settings can be changed at any time even while the tournament is ongoing. Sadly, this is abused very often.
-> People can end their tournament at any time to rig the result.
-> People can change amount of leaders in teambattles as well, also rigging.
-> People can shorten the remaining tournament time without warning. Kind of a bad surprise when you thought you could play for long and rack up many points.
-> People can disable chat so that nobody can complain. People can also mess with the "No Berserk" and "No Arena streak" feature.
And it gets worse, since you now don't see tournament creators anymore, you can't track and report them to get their tournament creation rights revoked.
This easy-to-abuse customization should be limited a lot.
-> Tourney time can only be prolonged, not reduced.
-> Tourney can only be aborted when there's less than, say, 10 people and noone playing. So people can still remove inactive tournaments but not rig active ones.
-> Amount of leaders should not be changed.
-> En-/disabling chat, no berserk, no streak should not be changed at all and should stay the way it was set before the tournament started.
It's a correct point
There are very legitimate reasons to change all these settings:
- You're in a tournament with your friends (or stream chat) and you decide to do something else, e.g. because of low number of entries or because the pizza delivery came early. Then you want to shorten the tournament time. For the same reasons you may want to abort.
- If suddenly five more people show up for your team tournament, you want to increase the number of leaders. Or if a team only has two players because two others had to go decrease it.
- Maybe you started a youth tournament with chat on and a troll showed up spamming obscenities in the chat. You want to disable chat then.
- Suddenly, a bunch of low-level players enter your tournament (say you have 10 people in 1800-2000 and then 8 in 900-1000). You want to disable streak and enable berserks (and ask all higher-level players to berserk) then to ensure same fairness.
So there are totally legitimate reasons to change tournament settings after the tournament started, and it's a marvelous feature!
#1 assumes that you're entering somebody's tournament at random and that person is malicious. This should be very rare, and the fix would be to establish trust into the tournament creator. In which scenario are you even entering tournaments of people you don't trust?
All of these bullet points are far-fetched because
A) you could just pause while everyone else can still play.
B) That would benefit your team rather than other teams. Tie yourself down to the number of leaders that you think is fair. Changing amount of leaders can be manipulative in either directions.
C) That's what page mod powers are for: Hosts can hand out timeouts as well. Although this gets abused as well.
D) If you don't want berserk/streak to create a more otb-like tournament framework, then remove them from the beginning? Not when you suddenly feel like it?
I'm not writing this without reasons - I experienced a few kids so immature to rig the tournaments they created, and it's just one of many cases I'm sure.
Also check out this
www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZgyVadkgmI - check out 28:00 how Thibault emphasizes that for every feature, you must pay huge attention for how it gets misused - but this was somehow missed for in-duration tournament changes.
PS. I know a good amount of Rapid arenas that are without berserk to make sure that people don't turn it into a Blitz arena, but you know that from the beginning, you're not surprised about it.
Again, can you give even a single example of where this feature ever got misused? How about two or three?
In my experience, most user-created tournaments are for tight communities, with a coach, streamer, or club leader organizing it. If you can't trust these community leaders, there's something wrong with the whole setup, and you should probably go to another community.
Some larger tournaments like the Quarantäne-Liga have a quasi-professional management and are not likely to change the rules. If they do change the rules, they usually have formal appeal processes.
There is a simple solution for you: Play official tournaments, quasi-professional tournaments, or tournaments from organizations you trust, and don't play tournaments by random people. If you play tournaments from random people, only play rated large tournaments, where this behavior would be very unlikely.
The problem you describe is vanishingly small in the first place; I'd estimate that 95%+ of the changes after tournament start are made in good faith. The proposed changes would have detrimental effects that far outweigh an individual players sensibilities because a tournament ended earlier than expected.
Thumbs down for being super dismissive.
The perceived size of the problem doesn't negate the fact that it is a problem.
Any "official or quasi-professional" tournament would not be affected by my suggestions in any way. So I don't see the detriment.
I'm not going to dig for examples due to public shaming and since you can take my word that I brought this up for good reasons.
I also brought up the problem of anonymity TWICE, there are teambattles showing up in
lichess.org/tournament where I can't see the creator, so I can't go like "nah, I don't like them, I don't play this". And besides, if the tournament itself is attractive, it can be played happily if said room for abuse doesn't exist.
Btw another point I forgot is that people suddenly also change from rating to casual or vice versa. I was surprised once that a game was suddenly rated and I lost it. Hooray!
I'm gonna cite Nameless's feedback on this, which I agree with
> What is there to be fixed
> When you join tournaments made by users, you need to be sure they are someone you know or trust
> If you don't want to EVER be involved in a tournament where the creator decides to bomb his tournament for no reason, then just play in lichess official ones
Things would be just half as bad without anonymity. Why was that introduced in the first place? It just lets users get away with bombing a tournament.
I've been told a trick on Discord that allows to bypass anonymity, so anyone abusing edit features can be reported. That's good at least.
