I guess, I feel sorry for demars for the unnecessary stress this situation caused. Changing the default lineup just to ensure that the other manager might still accept the game challenge shortly before tip-off is far from an optimal solution. That said, there probably isn’t an optimal solution to this situation anyway, unless it becomes automated on the BB side (hopefully in the future).
It can be counted as unnecessary stress, yes... It's a downside of "all-manual league" such as HGL.
Luckily though, we didn't face an awkward situation of him not figuring out this "best of the worst options"-solution of setting a new default lineup and then losing match - then we would've been in a tricky situation.
(Now it's kind of a no brainer which resulted "a free ticket" for demars to Second Round of Playoffs, so at least end result was something he had hoped to achieve).
We could reach such situation in the future though if similar kind of situation gets repeated, so that's why clear penalties would likely be the easiest "solution" to this; but again we'll return to the same problem that I mentioned about, that it's not ideal at all that one would have to login daily at certain time to see if someone has or hasn´t broken the rules.
Anyway, as mentioned, it was as brilliant solution (setting new default lineup) from demars as possible in this situation, and serves as a good example of "best of the worst options"-solution for rest of us for the future (should similar kind of situation occur again).HGL becoming official part of BB, and therefore becoming "an automated" league would of course solve many problems (while of course in practice any control over any development aspects of the league would be lost simultaneously), but as it seems new owners have not recently been extremely communicative in terms of how they're going to develop BB in the future (reading some threads gives me idea they are going to make big changes to BB in future?), I would't go all in to say HGL will become official part of BB.
I think it’s unfortunate that this has come up in our small HG community, where I would hope for completely open and fair communication between everyone. Of course, real life sometimes intervenes and takes priority over everything else. At the moment, cthulhu hasn’t logged in for 10 days, which is unusual for a manager who has always been active, so I truly hope there isn’t a serious real-life situation behind this.
I agree that the organization of play-off games is a discussion we should continue, in order to hear ideas from other managers and perhaps find a balanced solution that works, or even conclude that the current system already works best.
As you have described in detail, this situation is certainly not as straightforward as it would be in a perfect world. I definitely support a minimalistic rules approach for the HGL, however, in this case, the manager who did everything right had to suffer due to the actions, or rather the lack of action, of another manager.
It is indeed a balancing act, and there are multiple sides/points in all this that are not perfect. It is what we're going to have to deal with though, but that's not to say I wouldn't want to hear ideas on how to possibly improve on some things. I do that kind of pondering quite a lot myself (in terms of development ideas), but often times I end up with similar kind of results as what I described in earlier message (how the current rule of Playoff match organizing goes), which is more or less "things are complicated when you think of them thoroughly, and often times no perfect/simple solution that always works optimally in every situation can be found".
It is definitely my wish as well that we keep on communicating in completely open and fair manner, and just like you said, I just hope it's not something serious real world issue that has caused cthulhu not logging in recently.