Last Monday, during the Finals of MPDC 24.04, there was a conflict between the two remaining players. After the Top 4 matches ended, one of the players requested a 20 minute break to take care of something work-related. The other player was unwilling to do so and believed that he should have been awarded a free win since his opponent would be unavailable to start the match within 10 minutes of the previous round ending. When the first player returned from his break, the second player was still online but refused to play out the match at that time.
I was unavailable at the time of the conflict, and didn't find out about it until the incident was over. After mulling it over, I emailed the two parties and requested that they reschedule a time to play out the match. The second player was unwilling to do so. On that basis, I went ahead and declared the final match a tie and shared the prizes among them.
Yesterday, I learned that one of the players wrote about the incident over at his blog. You can read his account here. I went ahead and posted a brief summary of what happened over at PDCmagic in response, and decided that since it was being discussed in the community, it made sense to go ahead and address it here as well.
Just for clarity, the rules do state that if a player is not present to begin his or her match within 10 minutes of the pairing announcement, that player forfeits the match. Generally, this has only been enforced when a player is actually offline at that time. Even then, sometimes the first player decides to wait it out a bit longer to see if his or her opponent ever shows up. In other instances, when a player lets me or his opponent know that he or she will be delayed, this has not been an issue. Similarly, from what I've heard from other players, there seems to be a consensus that there is nothing wrong if two players agree beforehand to delay the start of their match, especially if it's during the Finals when no other players are affected.
Probably what needs to happen is that the rules be clarified and specifically spell out under what circumstances a player may request a delay and the maximum amount of time that delay may take.
What do you think?
PS - Let me remind you that I am still in the midst of my 40 days without Magic, which means contacting me on Twitter or expecting me to know what's going on in the community may not be the best approach. That 40 days will end on Sunday, April 13th, which means I've got less than three weeks to go. Overall I'm feeling pretty good about the whole situation. But, I don't want to be that guy who stops taking his meds halfway through the prescription just because he's feeling better.
No delay at all unless both finalists agree with it and the host, and it should be max 3 days delay and keeping the host informed, otherwise prizes would be forfeited.
ReplyDeleteEvent starts with swiss then ends with finals, it's a non stop marathon if you have to play it till the end, some play on nighttime, others at dailight and maybe at work, the event is worldwide so making everyone happy with it is difficult. Still we're all thankful to our host commitment that it's here. We're here for fun indeed, and fun starts when the game begins, starting it on time being the mainstream rule.
Main and most important thing is the fact that we're able to discuss it alltogether with respect so we all know what to do when and if it happens again in the future.
That's how I see the rules change if they have to be.
Adressing this post was kind of necessary and mandatory so thanks for explaining us your host' perspective.
oh I forgot: delay may only come in as emergency situation, whatever it is.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your thoughts.
ReplyDelete