Fellow judges

When Toby explains the reasons of eliminating FtFOA he states that:

“We’re down an infraction this time – Failure to Follow Official Announcements has been removed. This came about because we realized that the infraction was almost always confined to two situations – someone breaking venue rules, and someone messing up an announced sealed registration process.”

Under my experience, one of the main reasons to aplly FtFOA in the past was for not hearing the official announcement of end of round. I think this isn't covered by the IPG anymore (neither by Toby's article), but I wanted to ask for sure. Not following that announcement can delay the tournament quite a bit, specially if judges don't apply end of round procescure efficently.

Thanks for the replies :)

Joaquin

I have never heard of a judge giving that penalty for what you are
describing. I don't think that was the proper application of the penalty,
so there isn't a need to find a place for it.
Yes, we want players to stop playing when they are supposed to, but it
seems like a stretch to try to apply this infraction to that situation.
(Also, since Toby didn't mention it, I'm guessing it didn't need to be
covered)

I've never run into players who knowingly ignored an end of round announcement. It's always that they didn't hear the announcement, and I'm not sure we should infract for that (players might be hard of hearing, or the room is very loud, or whatever). This is why we are vigilant about sending judges to open tables. I've never even considered using that infraction for players who didn't hear the end of round announcement, nor have I heard of anyone doing so (until now!). Maybe I've just been missing out, but it also seems to be a relatively rare problem at Comp REL.

Shawn
It would be awesome if you could describe why it is a stretch.

From old IPG 3.5
“A player fails to follow an instruction given to a broad audience he or she is included in. Most often these are
registration instructions, safety instructions, or venue rules. Instructions given directly to an individual and not
followed are penalized as Unsporting Conduct — Major. ”

“Most often” leave quite a room for other issues, and the first sentence of the definition applies completely. I have actually seen this situation in large and small tournaments, specially when players are just to focused on the match they are playing.

Still, I'm more than willing to be wrong on this, and learn form that, so please reply :)

If a player does not hear the official end of round announcement, it's not
their fault. Punishing a player for something they couldn't prevent and
literally had no control over is poor customer service.

Kevin Binswanger

Ok then, my mistake… Thanks for the opportunity to learn a little more ;)

Thank you!

A player who hears the end of round called and continues to play without regard to the announcement is something we CAN penalize - severely. As Josh said, it's pretty rare.

More common reasons for not hearing and continuing to play:
-Focus on the game
-Noisy venue
-Announcement wasn't loud enough

None of those are things we would want to penalize.

On a related note, in my experience it had been common to issue FtFOA to players who failed to write their names on their decklists before submitting them, after it had been clearly announced (usually more than once) that they should do so. It seems that this approach is no longer supported by policy, which I think is unfortunate.

I think issuing a penalty in this situation is appropriate, as having to use judge resources to track down one or more errant anonymous decklists is a waste of manpower which causes minor disruption to the decklist verification process in the early rounds. It seems to me that the philosophy of penalties applies here: we educate the player about the importance of heeding official announcements in the interest of ensuring the smooth running of the tournament, and we issue a warning to re-enforce that education.

I do not think issuing a warning is excessive, for these reasons: first, the infraction can be easily avoided if players simply heed the announcement; second, for the majority of players this will happen at most once, making the upgrade path a minimal concern–indeed, in my experience I have never had to issue a second FtFOA to a player during the same event.

I'd be interested in hearing the perspectives of other judges on this matter.

Honestly, I don't see it being as that large a deal. Since most events verify the collection of every decklist to the master list of all players, it's a relatively straightforward byproduct of this process to discover who the player is. In fact, most times, you set aside the “No Name” decklists and then identify those names you haven't crossed off; process of elimination takes care of this. It's typically one or two, who aren't generally difficult to track down in most events. And most of the time, it's usually an “oops” situation where the player may have been rushing himself to get ready for the event while decklists were being collected. There's very little advantage to gain here, and the disruption is really not that significant.

A verbal reminder to the player once you've discovered who they are should be sufficient. I can't ever see this being a situation where it matters that the reminder is tracked as a Warning, or where this ever needs to be upgraded as repeat behavior. (Aside from the occasional times where you might exasperatedly say “Again?” to a player.)

I have seen, exacly one time, a pair of players knowingly go past the end of round and keep playing. It happened in a PTQ.

I brought them immediately into turns and helped them finish the match. I said nothing else at that time. After I collected their match slip and brought it up to the SK, I went back to the table to talk to them - they were still packing up.

I built up the suspense of their upcoming penalty, because I wanted to make sure they understaood that we don't like intentional breaches of rules. When I was satisfied that they were expecting disaster, I told them they were getting a Warning for USC - Minor, for an intentional action that disrupted the flow of the tourney and could affect lots of people, and that I hoped they would play by the rules in the future.

The look of relief on their faces, combined with the “Thanks for not giving us a Major GL”, told me that they understood completely. Never had any trouble from those two again, and both apologized profusely.

Sometimes you can convince them that a Warning is actually a GOOD penalty!

Eric Shukan
Woburn, MA USA

Robert: I've seen that application of FtFOA as well, and one of the textbook example for FtFOA was something very similar in sealed pool registration. You (and others) were not incorrect in applying it that way. It was just draconian.

Most scenarios played out like this: “You were in a hurry to get your deck registration sheet in on time to meet an expectation, and in doing so did not meet this other expectation that was much easier. Here's a penalty for you, even though you were prioritizing what you thought was the more important expectation.”

That seemed like a really bad reason to penalize someone.

As Brian pointed out, handling a missing name is a lot easier than a messed-up registration sheet.

When I am collecting sealed decklists I always check the name first thing. If its blank I will quickly hand it back to the player. It's a pain to check if its only written on one side, but its worth it to not have to chase people down later.

For end of round, its good to do a quick sweep of the tables you are watching to make sure all of them actually started tracking turns and then pick one to sit on. I like having fewer infractions to administer!

Originally posted by Evan Cherry:

Most scenarios played out like this: “You were in a hurry to get your deck registration sheet in on time to meet an expectation, and in doing so did not meet this other expectation that was much easier. Here's a penalty for you, even though you were prioritizing what you thought was the more important expectation.”

That seemed like a really bad reason to penalize someone.

In this situation I agree.
But do you think the same when one seat the players by name and the HJ gives 5 minutes to a final check, before collecting the lists?

Originally posted by Jorge Rua:

Evan Cherry
Most scenarios played out like this: “You were in a hurry to get your deck registration sheet in on time to meet an expectation, and in doing so did not meet this other expectation that was much easier. Here's a penalty for you, even though you were prioritizing what you thought was the more important expectation.”

That seemed like a really bad reason to penalize someone.

In this situation I agree.
But do you think the same when one seat the players by name and the HJ gives 5 minutes to a final check, before collecting the lists?

It would depend on whether I officially announced “make sure your name is on it and that the your decklist/sheet contains X cards.” If so, and the name wasn't on it, we're back in the same realm:

“Why isn't your name on your list?”
“I was counting the cards or making changes.”

Or they didn't hear it (no penalty), or ignored it (can't give FTFOA anymore).

It's annoying, yes, but as Brian has pointed out, finding names for decklists is much easier to fix than the cards on the list. Minimally disruptive, especially if the judge collecting lists is vigilant and asks for a name before picking it up. No penalty, request to put name on it in future.

Aside- 5 minutes is a lot for a final check. Saying 1 and using 2 minutes should be plenty.