Hello!

What is the correct process in WER when dropping a player from a tournament (between swiss rounds)? As far as I know, WER offers two possible ways:

a) From “Players” tab - select the player in the list and press the “Drop” button.

b) From “Rounds” tab - select the match the player was playing and enter the match result with the “Drop” checkbox checked.

I would think that both methods are equivalent. However, something “strange” happened the last Saturday, while I was judging a 4-round tournament:

Player A dropped after losing in the 3rd round and this was entered into WER through method b) (i.e. from “Rounds” tab). After all results had been entered into WER, player B decided to drop as well and method a) was used to reflect this. This seemed to have an impact on final standings. When the standing were printed (“Print Standings by Rank, select ”All" players), player A was still part of the standings and player B was not in the standings at all. Moreover, after reporting the tournament to the server, the TO received an automated e-mail response stating that the tournament is invalidated with a message reading “There are not enough players for the event”.

I will point the TO to the WPN support (to report the event manually?). Still, I would like to know some recommendation on this. Should we use just the method b) when dropping a player from a tournament? I think that (semi-)official WER manuals and walkthroughs should reflect it. Or is it a bug?

How many players total were in the event? How many other people had become dropped earlier in the event, and what methods were used to drop them?

I would like to try and replicate this to see if this is reproducible, and if so try and determine how best to work around or handle this situation. Please update the forum or PM me any other details.

**For the record, I am not officially involved with WER in any way; I'm just trying to build up a solid database of problems and resolutions for knowledge sharing purposes. I keep trying to break WER in as many different ways as time permits :)

This is a common problem and has been reported by many judges and organizers around the world. Dropping a player using the Results Entry tab can have odd outcomes if you try to drop both players or in cases such as the one described in the original post. As with so many of the bugs in WER, the outcome cannot be reproduced 100% of the time. But, it happens often enough that many users of WER consider it a known issue and are vigilant to double check pairings and the active players list whenever both players in a match are dropping.

I haven't use WER for almost a month. But in the past, I did similar what
Milan Majercik mentioned and there is no problem for me.

I rather have problem when uncheck dropped player from Result Entry tab and
realize that it won't re-enter. (this happen to me many time and I figure
it out to re-enter player from Player tab is much more reliable.

I would suggest if you could, try to re-check dropped player from Player
tab before pairing next round.

Smith

I haven't use WER for almost a month. But in the past, I did similar what
Milan Majercik mentioned and there is no problem for me.

I rather have problem when uncheck dropped player from Result Entry tab and
realize that it won't re-enter. (this happen to me many time and I figure
it out to re-enter player from Player tab is much more reliable.

I would suggest if you could, try to re-check dropped player from Player
tab before pairing next round.

Smith

Greetings…

I have had this problem in the past. Luckily myself and the rest of my staff, being aware of this issue, tend to double-check the standings and pairings.

I have found, in my experience, that the best work around is that when both players want to drop (either simultaneously or separately), that you insure that neither player is dropped from the round tab, then enter the result, then drop both players via the players tab.

Hope this helps.
Until that time…

Well, I experienced a realy big problem with dropping a player from the players tab:

In the recent PTQ at one point the WER decided not only to drop that player - but also delete him from the participation. Meaning the 236 player PTQ had in the end only 206 players that were enrolled. The matches were still there, but clicking on the match produced an error message. I don't know what would have happenend if had to reenroll a player but luckily it wasn't necessary (I didn't tried because I didn't wanted to completly crash the event).

I'm unable to reproduce that bug at the moment but I consider this a serious issue.

So check after dropping a player that:
a) he is dropped
b) the total number of players is still correct.

Martin: yes, this looks similar to my problem. Perhaps some new bug in WER.

Recommendation to everyone: for the time being, do not use the “Drop” button on the “Players” tab in WER, if possible. Hopefully, there will be some info from WER development soon…

Same in last Spanish PTQ; I dropped three players in round two and they ended deleted from the tournament (+ error message when looking at their matches). Next rounds I used the round tab to drop them.

Since dropping players at same time that introducing results ends in unexpected outcomes (WER sometimes drops wrong player) that is what I did:
1) Introduce all results.
2) Introduce drops in round tab.

I think it would be good idea for any scorekeeper who dropped a player in a recent tournament to check again the events. This bug may have caused some of the dropped players to be completely removed from the event and the players would then probably receive NO PLANESWALKER POINTS for the event. Any such discrepancies must be reported and fixed. Or, hopefully, the players will find out themselves and appeal via the PWP website.

Going to contribute another data point - the SoCal PTQ that we ran yesterday had WER problems that we thought arose from players the SK was trying to drop and then un-drop. WER's subsequent behavior and errors sound a lot like what you guys are describing here. I'll try to contact our SK and have him make a more comprehensive post here.