Time and time again I've seen low-rated players get paired against and resign on move 1 against high-rated players. This enables low-rated players to quickly get paired against people who they can defeat, at the cost of making it difficult for everyone else to catch the tournament leaders (who score a full 4 points for each premature resignation!).
By "premature" I mean resigning in equal positions with equal time. It seems to me that Arena may benefit from a "delay" such that players don't get multiple pairings in the same minute.
Low-rated people probably won't beat the highest-rated players anyway, so isn't it faster if they resign?
Yes, but they only resign quickly against highest-rated players. So ratings directly influence game results.
With the Arena format, there is an incentive for anyone to not do their best to fight on in a difficult but playable position, but resign quickly in order to get more games in.
Being paired with a much stronger player is a subset of this.
I can't see a solution to this except making sure that everyone plays the same number of games. e.g. Not pairing anyone until all games from that round are complete, and also counting all the last round game results towards the total. (I believe at the moment games that are still going when the tournament time is over don't even count towards the score.)
I'm not suggesting that a perfect solution exists; however, it's possible to weaken the incentive in any of numerous ways:
1. Rather than ensuring that all players have the same number of rounds, delay some pairings. So in a 5 0 event, if a player finishes a game faster than 5 minutes, don't give them another pairing until 5 minutes elapse. This would give players equal opportunity to get pairings at the same time.
2. Change scoring for quick wins and quick losses? This gets messy but maybe there's a way to make it work.
Interestingly, I face the exact opposite problem. I'm not a strong player, and many times strong players (~500 points above me) resign against me immediately in Arena tournaments.
Most likely they want avoid the cringe of massive blunders, but also maybe weaker players tend to lock up positions against stronger ones just in an effort to last longer, which may be annoying to some as well.
I'd rather lose a game handily against a strong player and learn something, rather than be handed 2 points in a tournament I'm not going to win anyway.
Interesting, although these problems aren't necessarily opposites. Either way, a player is resigning in the first minute of a game in order to play a different opponent.
Perhaps a strong player who just lost a game isn't afraid to resign against you, since their "hot streak" is already over. Which makes me think...
Maybe the simplest solution is to redefine "hot streak" such that players who prematurely resign can't immediately get on a hot streak. Hmm...
What you propose makes no sense, the best feature of the tournament is that sand has quick pairings
Interesting idea.
Although there exist strong players against whom I have a 100% win record over 7-8 games (yay?), so I'd think that they're just resigning irrespective of streak state.
I'm surprised people resign easily against much weaker players because that would have a big rating hit for them.
On the other hand they'd have to think chances of winning that game are very good. Since starting or keeping a winning streak is important, a game you're very likely to win should be worth sticking with.
Maybe they don't care about ratings and tournament points and just want interesting games?
Or possibly they're not really resigning as such, but have actually quit the tournament, and you just got awarded the win. A lot of people do seem to leave the tournaments early from what I've seen.
