[bluecalm]

There is something TD's call TCR and they use it to ban players from tournaments.
Today I encountered this tryign to play in one tournament.
As I don't run from tournametns and I think I didn't finish about 3 of them during almost 10 years of playing on BBO there must be some kind of mistake there. I also almost never play open tournaments and I can't recall one case of not finishing them this year.
Could you please check the algorithm or give some more info on that ? It's pretty annoying to be randomly banned and not to know the reason.

One thing I can think of are tm's which we often don't finish (when people start leaving you might be stuck in them for half an hour or something if TD is not responsive) but I hope they don't count to that, also I finish at least 90% of my tm's and I leave from them before everybody else decide to probably less than 5%.
It would truly suck if those influence tournaments play.

[paulg]

The Tournament Completion Ratio is generated from the number of tournaments you complete. If you do not regularly play tournaments, then you do not complete them and your TCR will be low or non-existent.

You need 10+ completed tourneys in the past 60 days, robot tourneys included.

You are not the first to be frustrated by this - http://www.bridgebas...ompletion-stat/

[Bbradley62]

It actually appears that BlueCalm has completed all 30 tournaments that he has played in the past 60 days, so hopefully a staff member will look at his specific case and give him a specific answer.

[diana_eva]

Team matches are not counted as tournaments. Bluecalm played and completed a lot of team matches, but only 6 or 7 tourneys. So he doesn't have a tourney completion rate yet.

The tourney completion rate is a restriction that tourney hosts can use when they create tournaments. They can choose that only people with a completion rate higher than xx% are able to join their tourney. It's not quite accurate to say they use it to ban people, it's just a filter like language, country, friends etc. Most tournaments do not use this filter.

[bluecalm]

Quote

The Tournament Completion Ratio is generated from the number of tournaments you complete. If you do not regularly play tournaments, then you do not complete them and your TCR will be low or non-existent.

Thank you for this explanation.
I would like to express my disappointment by this idea. If you want to create a tool to help TD's with people who used to not complete tournaments there must be better way. I don't play many tournaments I am certainly not going to play with robots etc. On the other hand I have an account on bbo forever, I complete almost everything I play and I played tons of hands, I am a member of many private clubs for tourneys and there never were any complaints, I have my name in the profile and I play with people with similar characteristics. If a tool causes TD's to not accept me even if they didn't see me before in their tourneys there is something very wrong with that.

Quote

It actually appears that BlueCalm has completed all 30 tournaments that he has played in the past 60 days

I might be wrong on that as 60 is a lot of days but I doubt I played 30 open tournaments during that period unless you count tm's. That might be the case though, it just seems unlikely to me (I have bad memory for such things though).

Quote

So he doesn't have a tourney completion rate yet.

Is it really that bad idea to assume people are good customers till they screw up instead of having them earn the right to play ? Especially people who have accounts forever and played thousands of hands in other forms of bridge.
If more TD's start using this TCR thing then I will not be able to get TCR because I don't have TCR yet which is basically situation which came up today.
Another thing is that I wanted to play with someone who completes much more tournaments and probably have TCR established. You could take that into account too.

Also here is what you said in the other thread:

Quote

There are free tourneys hosted by BBO without any restriction - anyone can play these to get a completion rate. Look for the Express tourneys, they are free, fast, short and run every 5 minutes or so. Completing 10 of these cannot be very hard.

I don't play open tournaments, I prefer other forms of bridge. It's not hard to complete 10 tournaments but why would I ever do that if they are not my favourite form of bridge ?
On the other hand sometimes people are usually play with are not online or someone I know invites me to play in a tournament. It really ruin the experience if we can't play because some random ratio someone thought would be good idea to restrict people on.
It tilts me to read that quote. If it's so easy to achieve then people you want out will easily achieve it too but honest, well behaving players will be restricted.

[diana_eva]

 bluecalm, on 2012-September-16, 13:09, said:

Is it really that bad idea to assume people are good customers till they screw up instead of having them earn the right to play ? Especially people who have accounts forever and played thousands of hands in other forms of bridge.
If more TD's start using this TCR thing then I will not be able to get TCR because I don't have TCR yet which is basically situation which came up today.
Another thing is that I wanted to play with someone who completes much more tournaments and probably have TCR established. You could take that into account too.

There are house tourneys without any restriction that allow people to get a completion rate fast. Play a few Free Express tournaments until you have enough for the software.to compute a completion rate Those are fast, frequent and short tournaments (only 6 boards), but you need to use the web version to register.

[nigel_k]

There have been threads on this before and the justification from BBO has never been any good. Given the level of annoyance to long term, well behaved members, you'd think this would be a priority.

If you have played in (say) 20+ tournaments with a 100% completion rate, then your TCR should just stay at 100 even if you on log in only once a month, provided you complete any tournament you enter. Add a requirement for the account to be created six months ago or longer if that is needed. Not hard to code at all.

[bluecalm]

Quote

There are house tourneys without any restriction that allow people to get a completion rate fast. Play a few Free Express tournaments until you have enough for the software.to compute a completion rate Those are fast, frequent and short tournaments (only 6 boards), but you need to use the web version to register.

I don't want to play those. It's not a video game, there is social aspect to bridge and sometimes there is an opportunity to play with someone you rarely have chance to play with. It's not like I will be able to stop time, waste 6-8 hours playing with random people and then jump back in time to be able to play with someone I wanted to and who is rarely available.
Even if that would be possible it still won't save the day if the other person play rarely.

I suggest you rethink your attitude. It ruins the experience for long term, well behave members (as nigel_k said) and for people who don't play much. There are better ways to achieve a goal of excluding bad apple kind of players. I would be happy to suggest some but first I would like to understand the kind of problems it causes and realize that your suggestion of "just play 10 fast tourneys" sounds a bit arrogant if you are on the other side of this TCR thing and just had your social/bridge opportunity ruined by this idea.

[diana_eva]

I didn't mean to sound arrogant at all. I was trying to explain that there is no real danger that all TDs will start using this restriction, and prevent newcomers or players who rarely play tourneys from ever achieving a completion rate, because we have tournaments that allow anyone to build a completion rate if they want to play restricted tournaments.

For what is worth I've been on the side of the non-TCR issue myself, since I mostly play robot tournaments, and when we first introduced this filter robot tournaments did not count towards computing TCRs.

Your suggestions are welcome and well heard. I'm merely explaining how this works - decisions of tweaking current algorithm belong to the management.

[bluecalm]

Quote

because we have tournaments that allow anyone to build a completion rate if they want to play restricted tournaments.

There is certain kind of players:
-long time members
-people who value their time and don't want to waste it on activities they don't enjoy
-people who due to other commitments can't choose their playing time freely (in order to play in other tournaments)

Those are the kind of people most valuable to BBO as they are most likely (or already had) spent money on BBO. Those are people you don't really want to get discouraged and I am sure the management will get that.
What happened today is you annoyed me (someone who already spent some money on BBO and is most likely to spend it on any new services you introduce) and someone who is in the group I described. In other words: your most valuable customers. In response we get: "if you waste 6-8 hours every 2 months on activity you don't really enjoy the annoyance will go away".

Quote

decisions of tweaking current algorithm belong to the management.

Can we have someone responsible for that in this thread then ?
It doesn't take much intellectual effort to see at least some quick fixes to this TCR thing so discussing real solutions is pointless now as the problem is somewhere else. We first need to have someone responsible for that to realize mistake they made and committing them to fixing that.

[Bbradley62]

Some of the tournament Details specify:

Restrictions: exclude runners

Does this restriction mean "apply a minimum TCR"?

[barmar]

If you have a complaint, shouldn't it be with these tournament hosts who use this restriction, not with BBO? Most BBO-operated tourneys are not restricted. The only exception is that one Express Automated Fun tourney each hour has a TCR 80% restriction.

I just looked at the current and recent tourneys, and I don't think I saw any with a TCR restriction except for the EAF tournament that was in progress. So it doesn't seem like this should be a common problem.

[Bbradley62]

 Bbradley62, on 2012-September-16, 16:24, said:

Some of the tournament Details specify:

Restrictions: exclude runners

Does this restriction mean "apply a minimum TCR"?

ok... it appears the "exclude runners" is code for "apply a minimum TCR". I wonder how many of the tournament directors think "exclude runners" is actually "exclude players who have proven themselves to be runners" and not "exclude players who haven't proven themselves to be non-runners".

[Bbradley62]

 barmar, on 2012-September-16, 19:11, said:

Most BBO-operated tourneys are not restricted.

Unfortunately, it appears that all BBO-operated tourneys are individuals, and OP was very specific about wanting to play in a pairs tournament with a specific partner.

[barmar]

 Bbradley62, on 2012-September-16, 19:45, said:

Unfortunately, it appears that all BBO-operated tourneys are individuals, and OP was very specific about wanting to play in a pairs tournament with a specific partner.

BBO operates all the ACBL tourneys, which include pairs tourneys.

[RunemPard]

I do think that something should be done. Players who have not proven themselves should not play in TCRs, but, once they prove that they do play in tournaments and stay they should not lose their TCR unless they drop under the requirement. I host tournies when I have time, and had no idea that the TCR works like this. I will not use it in the future unless it is changed.

It is a good tool for a host to use also...so that is a shame.

[barmar]

That's a good point. If tourney hosts don't understand how it works correctly, they may be excluding reasonable players without realizing it.

[Zelandakh]

Would it really be hard to include a mandatory flag when setting a TCR for "Exclude players with no TCR"? This would also enable greater flexibility for TDs. This seems like such an obvious improvement that I am surprised it has not been done before given the repeated complaints about TCR tournaments. The idea that the best fix is for players to compete in tournaments that they do not want to (every month!) just in order to have a chance of playing in the odd tournament where they would like to is not only ridiculous but also somewhat insulting. This is not some Asian MMO grinder! What next? a micro-transaction store that allows you to buy a new TCR using BBO$?! Heck, why not create a new pay-to-post Expert forum at the same time?

[bluecalm]

As to this TCR, I think something along the lines "reputation points" would be better.
Say you start at 0 with new account and you need 5 to enter TCR restricted tourneys.
Now add a point for every month the account is registered and something for every tournament finished. Same for TM's (but maybe with lower weigh). You could also add some for spending money on BBO services as it sound natural that people who do that are less likely to quit. Then add some penalties for unfinished tournaments, something moderate for 1st offence, bigger for 2nd offence etc. Say those cancel after x month of normal play.
You could adjust what's needed to enter the tourney. If the problem of new accounts is really that big then it could be set to higher reputation.

One more thing is that it would be nice if new account could play with a player with high reputation but the responsibility for eventual running would be on that high reputation player.
I don't play many open tournaments and I was bitten by this TCR thing just once but it really seem like terrible idea terribly implemented which just discourages normal players who don't play that much.

[amethyst]

But how do you get to play in 10 games if you are not allowed to play in them bec you have no completion rate?