I am going to be changing my tune on judge obligations, at
least a little bit. Previously I was wedded to the idea that limiting
obligations resulted in lessening the overall pref value of a tournament. I
think I managed to demonstrate this mathematically, but I learned since then
that it doesn’t matter. Even if the lessening is pretty clear, in a word,
nobody seems to care about it. What some people do care about is limiting their
rounds and spreading their obligation and scouting. Also there is the issue of
Backwoods High School for the Children of the Mentally Inert running 6 teams
over three days, with different inexperienced parent judges each day. BHSCMI,
by splitting the obligation at a tournament that theoretically doesn’t split
obligations, but where the software does allow splitting, pretty much soaks up
everybody’s strikes. I mean, they’ll have 6 judges, all prime targets for striking.
And they’re just one school. The math doesn't work.
From this, to me, the conclusion is clear. If you want to
give the users what they want, giving them, in certain situations, partial
obligations makes sense. It doesn’t make sense at relatively small events with
a limited pool, for a variety of self-evident reasons, but at a big event with
a biggish field of a hundred or more, and the resulting pool of judges, it does
make sense. I’m thinking here of Rather Large Bronx, for one. Then I’m thinking
Princeton. We’ve used the Tiggers a few times now for introducing new
practices, and it’s gone well. They make a good test clinic. Their attendees
are a mix of veterans and noobs, the former of which won’t be a problem and the
latter of which, well, we’ll see. At a tournament like Ridge, though, where we
get pretty creative making sure the prefs are decent, any limitation of those
prefs, like per-student obligations, would be seriously and noticeably harmful
to the teams. Plus aside from the potential attendance of BHSCMI, there’s no
real call for it.
Anyhow, I’m going to rewrite my documentation on this at
some point in the near future. I’ll keep you posted.
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