MI, I see this behavior in managers and leaders quite often, instead of accepting the fault, and/or mistake, you make excuses and try and pass the blame on to other people, i've also been guilty of it myself, I don't expect you to take this on board and honestly don't care if you do, I still respect you for everything you've done for the community, everyone makes mistakes we're only human
I(for one), totally understand there are ways to avoid the Tournament system faults, hence why I am a Tournaments Moderator, and I have added players in after the Tournament has began before just like you suggested, it's only happened a few times though, but in those cases it was more like we had 7 players, and needed 1 more, or we had 14-15 players and needed an extra few, and that's back when people were more active.
As you said, I would never start a Tournament with 9 players, I would always kick the last player to join.
That isn't even the problem here, the problem is how XanKriegor managed to get 3rd place in a 9 player Tournament, without winning a single game, claiming more points in the Tournaments standings than for example Senator, who at least won a game lol.
Please correct me if I am wrong:
Xan gets 2 free rounds - Could you please tell me if this counts as a win or not? (I can't find information about this anywhere)
Xan loses to VoK
Xan automatically gets 3rd place(and because it's more than 8 players Tournament, he receives 20 points), minus the 5 points he lost against VoK, 15 points, if he got 5+5 for the 2 free wins, he got a total of 25 points, for just being lucky, if not he still receives 15 points more than the 0 points Senator earned for winning 5 then losing 5.
This is why the Tournaments system is flawed, not because of anything you said in your entire post, and that's why I said pass the blame because you still haven't even admitted that there is a problem lol.
I don't know how to code Tournament systems, it's something i've never researched(yet), I am coming to you, who I consider an expert in coding asking if you can update the system in some way to prevent this from happening, please
P.S. - I must add, yes this flaw can be avoided by not starting with 9 players lol, but that's why it's a flaw, because it CAN happen
And well look, it did