Edited James Winward-Stuart (Feb. 18, 2015 02:43:14 PM)
Originally posted by George FitzGerald:Good point - perhaps what we're seeing is the best of a set of bad options. But I've used WER too often to trust that that's what's going on without some deeper investigation - and if the deeper investigation does reveal that it was an error on the part of WER, what should we do then?
Sometimes what ends up happening is that your decision tree can only end up
with one illogical outcome such as giving a player a 2nd bye, because no
other path through the decision tree works to create pairings.
Jordan BakerIf the goal is to keep tournaments identical, then keeping to WER's bug-of-the-day rather than the rules seems to me a bad approach. Perhaps we could follow a protocol like “try unpairing and automatically repairing once to see if it was a one-off error, but otherwise stick with what WER gives” but that seems awkward - and it's still hard to explain to players when the situation is an obvious bug (the case here isn't necessarily a bug, but our approach to WER doing odd things has to account for the fact that it is unstable, buggy software, that sometimes does do things that are unambiguously wrong).
It may be better to say that tournament operations should be handled by how WER spits out data, or, put another way, the behavior of WER at any given moment is proper procedure, independent of any documentation. If it rounds a tiebreaker incorrectly, or it double-byes a player, or pairs a player against the same person twice in two consecutive rounds, or pairs a player down when a pair-down was not required, you still go by what WER says, as doing otherwise means that two identical tournaments in different regions are running a standard (the term, not the format) WPN tournament differently, because one “caught” something while the other didn't.
Jordan BakerI can't think of any legal reasons why a player should receive more than one bye, given that such an event is (pending an update on the Magic Swiss Algorithm) not permissible in the Swiss pairing system and hence not allowed by the MTR.
note that there are random reasons why a player could receive more than one bye in a 100%-standard Swiss Magic tournament
Edited James Winward-Stuart (Feb. 18, 2015 03:47:44 PM)
Edited Matthew Johnson (Feb. 19, 2015 08:14:00 AM)
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