Proposal: changing time limits and #of advancing people during a competition

[Dene]

Might I suggest for future competitions, if changes are made to the schedule, all competitors should be informed via e-mail, social media or whatever.

 

[ComputerGuy365]

I totally agree.

Like you said, It's just like changing the rules during the game.

For instance:

That's like saying during a game of monopoly, the goal is to become bankrupt. Even though you already earned a ton of money from your properties, your work is just thrown away.

The cutoffs should not be changed at all during a comp.

 

[tseitsei]

I totally agree.


That's like saying during a game of monopoly, the goal is to become bankrupt. Even though you already earned a ton of money from your properties, your work is just thrown away.

No. No it's not.
That would be the same as saying that "The goal is to solve the puzzle as slow as possible. Slowest one wins."

But yeah I agree that it is irritating when the cutoff gets changed and you can't reach it anymore. And I think this should be avoided if possible.
However I think that delegates should have an option to do this as their final resort.
For example if we have a venue that says that we need to be out of the venue at 6pm sharp and the competition is dragging behind the schedule badly. Obviously something has to be done and the possibilities I can come up with are:
a) leave out some events/rounds
b) stricter cutoffs to remaining events

Now obviously neither of these solutions is good but I think that delegates need to have this(these) options as their LAST RESORT! Again I don't say this should be done frequently BUT I think sometimes it could be absolutely necessary...

 

[Ninja Storm]

The cutoffs should not be changed at all during a comp.

Statements like that make it very obvious that you haven't been a part of an organizing team.

Cutoffs at competitions should properly reflect the amount of time an event will take versus the amount of time willing to be used on a specific event. In ideal circumstances, the cutoffs would be perfect and would allow for perfect clarity between organizers and competitors.

However, this isn't always the case. Sometimes more people than expected show up. Sometimes someone promising to scramble breaks their hand before the competition. Sometimes organizers are too lenient and make unreasonable cutoffs. There are lots of ways to have cutoffs change during a competition.

While it's not ideal to change cutoffs, sometimes it has to happen to have the majority of the competition run as smoothly as possible. I had to drop cutoffs significantly during a competition I organized, and I felt bad about that. I really wanted everyone to be able to compete, but sometimes you have to sacrifice some people's solves to ensure that a majority of competitors get to compete. Yes this is biased for faster solvers, but that's how competitions work. Faster people are more likely to finish all their times.

Cutoffs should be changed at competitions only when absolutely necessary. Competition organizers should make lenient schedules with slightly stricter cutoffs, ensuring a high likelihood of running on time. However, what competitions should be like and what competitions are actually like do not always overlap, and this causes cutoff changes.

 

[Ranzha]

Cutoffs should be changed at competitions only when absolutely necessary. Competition organizers should make lenient schedules with slightly stricter cutoffs, ensuring a high likelihood of running on time. However, what competitions should be like and what competitions are actually like do not always overlap, and this causes cutoff changes.

I agree with this so much.
We're trying to do this for BASC 5, with the intention of tightening up the schedule (according to our expected time calculator) as soon as reg closes to try fitting in another FMC attempt.

Do many organisers use a system like the CubingUSA expected time calculator when generating a schedule?