Tournament Drop-outs

One of the major problems you will face with tournaments is when a team doesn't play its matches, either through inactivity or withdrawing themselves from the group.

It is always good to specify, in your tournament description, the rules by which you will decide to force forfeits, e.g. "if no games are played in a weekly round by the corresponding Saturday, unplayed games will be randomly forfeited". As a corollary to this, it is essential that you tell people to PM you with their whereabouts, so that if one player is keen to play but the other is absent, the absent coach has the forfeit recorded against them. You might also consider this rule: "Where no excuse is otherwise known, games will be forfeited by the team with the lowest TR" - otherwise lowly teams might disappear for a while in the hopes of gaining a win in absentia.

To force a forfeit, look at the games in your tournament. Each of the games able to be played will have a little B in a brown circle next to it, indicating that both teams are blocked from playing any other games. Click on this B symbol, and the Forfeit Tournament Game page will come up. If you know which one will forfeit, choose that team. If you want to choose randomly, go to the #fumbbl Afternet IRC channel and type in "bb d6". If BowlBot shows a 1, 2 or 3, force a forfeit on the first team; if it's 4, 5 or 6, the second team.

Sometimes a team withdraws altogether, which can be especially damaging if done early in a round-robin league season. You have several choices:

• Curse the offending coach's bloodline
• Force forfeits against the absent team for every round until the end of the tournament
• Replace the team with another one (new!)
• Delete the competition and start over

Forcing forfeits for the rest of the season gives an unfair advantage to the coaches who already played the withdrawn team, especially since the reason a coach resigns is usually because their team has been beaten horribly!

Due to popular demand, the wonderful Christer has recently added the ability to substitute a team in a running tournament (everyone cheer his name!). There is a Replace Team link now after the Delete and Configure links below the tournament info text. It's pretty self-explanatory from there. Be warned, however, that you should make sure to replace an outgoing team with one that is as close as possible to its predecessor's TR and ST, as well as not including too many nasty skills like stat increases or Piling On - the other group members might not appreciate it.

If you are thinking that replacing a team would be too unbalancing, keep in mind that restarting a tournament has several difficulties. First, the players might not like it, because they might prefer playing fewer games. Second, the players who have already played and won games would be ticked off that their wins don't count. Third, the players who haven't played as many games would be ticked off that they restart the season with a lower TR/ST than teams who have had more chances to earn SPPs and gold. If you do decide to restart, it would be prudent to impose a rule like "every team must drop players, rerolls, gold or coaches/cheerleaders so that they restart with TR 100 or less". Again, this might not be popular with some, but at least it would be fair. You should also allow participating coaches to resubmit new rookie teams to replace their old ones - in fact, this should be encouraged.

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