WW gave up a 1-in-4 chance of an expenses-paid trip to the US finals over the point counter? Wha?
I'm also confused. I have zero desire to argue about what should / shouldn't happen, but I am very curious to know what did happen. The tournament rules state this:
Games must be played with randomly selected cards, no veto mode, identical starting hands, and with the official point counter enabled unless all players agree otherwise.
I'm not seeing what's unclear about this as it relates to the point counter. Was somebody trying to use an extension point counter that created a problem?
Let me see if I can summarize the issue of the point counter in a neutral manner. (Disclaimer: I use the point counter extension.)
Isotropic's built-in point counter gives you just the minimum information a point counter can give you: the points each player had at the beginning of the current turn. The point counter extension existed first and gives you more information: the current points of each player, along with the current deck contents of each player. The tracking of deck contents is a side effect of tracking points, since you need that information to calculate the value of fairgrounds, silk road, etc.
The point counter extension makes point information available in two ways. One is that it can be seen at any time, by either player, by typing "!status" into the chat box. The other is that the current points information is shown next to the chat box, for the player running the extension.
The point counter extension makes deck content information available in two ways, also. Similar to points information, it can be seen by typing "!details" into the chat box. A few months ago, that was the only way to see it. Somewhat more recently, I believe on
April 1st with the release of version 5.1 of the extension, the deck contents information started to display next to the supply. While I can't speak for other users of the extension, I didn't pay much attention to the deck content information until this UI change. However, all the information provided by the UI change was previously available by typing "!details".
Since there's no visible change to people who don't use the extension, initially only users of the extension were aware of the UI change. I believe that changed with
this post in the Isotropic Discussion forum, so that's why it's becoming a hot topic now.
Opinions on the point counter extension are mixed. As
theory summarized:
Consider yourself on notice that the unofficial "point counter extension" can count much more than points. Some think this is cheating, some think this is unethical, some think this is both, some think this is neither.
Actually going over the pro and con arguments is a different discussion, and there are reasonable arguments on both sides. I suspect the issue here was that the tournament rules did not address the point counter extension, just the official isotropic point counter.