Proposal for guidelines for reporting incomplete games

[Ricky B]

If this is adopted then two situations that might occur have come to mind and will need to be addressed.....

a) Players don't discuss this at the start of a game that then does not reach the guideline limit and one player wish's to report the and the other does not.
b) Games where a players opponent disappears before the guideline limit.

...I have had opponents disappear or surrender after the first few turns of campaigns but it would be farcical to report these as victories (although plenty do). ...

It is interesting that several people have already indicated that they are opposed, but have not provided reasons. If players are thinking it will be a serious inconvenience not to report games when less than 25% of turns are played, then this is presumably because they are doing it regularly. Until some counter arguments are presented, I find it hard to see how anyone could convince themselves that the current approach is fair and reasonable, unless it was working to their benefit. 

John

...

I am curious why nearly 70% of players who responded to the poll either "don't care" or "don't think we should introduce a guideline?" 

John and Mike - I did some digging. Unfortunately, it isn't easy to pull solid numbers together, but I still wanted a feel for this issue. In particular, for John, you note that plenty report games with only a few turns played, and I really wanted to understand how prevalent this may be, as my feeling in part drove my vote but for which I had no numbers, which I already explained in response to Mike's comment above.

So I simply reviewed the 2020 ladder focusing on the top scores for the year. Out of the leaders in the top 7 or so positions, only 2 players had a significant number of campaign games played. Of those 2, one noted how many turns were played for quite of few of his campaigns. 2 would may failed a 25% guideline as they completed in around 25 turns. However, they were legit FWWC reports. The game ended with early termination due to the score. If we have a guideline, it should account for the early termination feature in FWWC. Otherwise, this player's campaigns went past the limit.

The other player had a fairly small number of games, and the campaigns were against different players. I can't tell if his reports were for just a few turns or not, but if he demoralized all of his 5 campaign opponents in just a few turns, consistently, then it may be an issue. But I discount that.

John, maybe in your totals there were some campaigns that you surrendered and your opponent reported. I didn't look, but for you I also discount your surrendering quickly in general, although that is purely guesswork.

I figure if anyone below the top 10 reported quickly abandoned campaigns, they could not have had more than 1-2 games reported that way.

I did another check and looked at the last few games released, back to Moscow '42. There are so few campaign reports, I didn't see a deluge anyway, although I had no way of checking older games, hence the ladder analysis.

Anyway, back to my main point here, I don't see plenty that do report games after a few turns, I suggest it is very rare. And more so, looking at the votes, those that voted against don't seem to have been involved in reporting these type of games.

I will say in the distant past, before most involved here were on the Blitz, we had a player that only reported campaigns, and all against the same 2 "friends". He had game against them every month or so and all were major wins. We couldn't prove he was padding things, but it sure seemed that way. Anyway, we watched it but that was it. And I haven't seen anything like that otherwise.

Rick