I won't mention names because I don't want to be the one to bring people into this, thought I'm sure names will be brought up soon enough. But anyways the first example of what happened went like this; "player A" had about 5 losses or so, "player B" had many more losses. If player A loses any more, he will be out of the top 5. They played each other. Player B wins. Player A asks player B to LIE and report it as a win for player A because at this point player B is too far behind in the tournament, and player A wants to try to stay in top 5 so he can get some money.
This strikes me as nothing wrong, if a round robin format is ever sensible. I can't see a way to escape this possibility. I mean, they could play the match and B could throw it any way. You can never stop a thrown match. We aren't sponsored.
The lying is nonsense really, though. If it were found results were misrepresented, that's fraudulence and a breach of integrity and we shouldn't stand for it, as no organized tournament institution would.
What we know in bracket format is that a thrown match can never do a player good because he still will not beat the players that are willing and able to beat him (the principle of outcomes determined by skill), and he won't advance. It impacts common sense that a player could profit from not beating a player, but he only 'did better', he didn't actually pick up money. As said, there's no way you can prevent this. A match can be thrown.
The second goes like this. There is player S, player W, and player M. Player M is a very special guest who has traveled from a country far far away, and works hard for his legitimate wins... Player S is in 3rd, and player M and W can either get 1st or 2nd, based on the yet to happen match between S and W. If player S and player W would play, and player S won, player M would have gotten 1st place. So player S and player W devise a plan to ensure player M doesn't win. Player S and W decide to not even play, and decide to LIE and report it as a win for player W anyways, thus eliminating any possibility for player M to win 1st place.
This is a problem with the tournament procedure. That's it. If S and/or W can profit beyond M without competing with M, the scoring system is flawed. S and W revealed this fact about the scoring system, for which any observer thinking about the future looking at the question of how to develop a scoring system can be thankful.
While I don't see the truth of this
second point clearly at all: somehow I doubt that this problem is as inescapable for Round Robins as the first mentioned scenario.
Again, the misrepresentation is really bogus. A match has to be played, or officially recorded as a concession at least (if we want to allow that - one point that may be made is that we want all matches to actually be played, ideally, you know, to watch them and teach something to spectators). But if they had just doctored the outcome by having W win, I don't see anything to stop this. Inherent truths are things we have to change ourselves to deal with, we can't rage to change them.
And that is how the simplicity of this appears to me. Anything else is a debate about whether events are about winning or about demonstrating something else in play.
I've assumed the normative goal is winning, but the rules are supposed to support that and if they don't, following them and later patching them is the only methodology I can support categorically.
If lying and misrepresenting were proved to have occurred, I would think ostracizing those players would be a matter of course. But it's just so odd to think that would happen...
To the larger question of playing out matches... I like that idea. However, I don't think any penalty beyond the 'shame' of "having played like garb" could reasonably be thrown on any player, for doing that and
only that, from the perspective of the blind rules. If X throws a match to Y, X will get some blame for playing like garb, and unless the match is thrown cunningly everyone will "know" what happened... but the tournament setup should be, because it has to be, because it's the only thing that can be, what stops this 'trick' from actually putting the appropriate dispensation of
justice winnings rankings in the finalists' hands.