simuls no longer allowed?

someone told me playing simuls is no longer allowed??? i can't even find it in the news article. i won't play them anymore if it's not allowed. can someone plz post a link or sth? btw the league organization is edit SB horrible. some mod here told many days ago that simuls are basically a grey area, but the chess.com support told me it's a viable strategy. If my trophies from today doesn't count im edited SB 

Hi, 

Simuls will be changing hopefully in next few days for the new leagues next week, so anything earned at the moment won't be taken away but no news out yet so you haven't missed anything. 

https://www.chess.com/leagues

And they hope everyone is checking the small print every other hour? I def don't wanna trick the system, but the communication is rly bad. They shouldnt change things in the middle of the competition and every participant should get atleast an e-mail message or chess.com message. That would be fair play from the organization. They should have taken more time and have things set in stone before starting a contest with 50k pricepool. Thx martin, thx guys, i know u are doing rly well in the forums, but sth in the organization is quite disfunctionial.

Large rating decreases are one side effect of playing rated simuls, and it was always the intent that simuls should be unrated. Large rating decreases can be seen as sandbagging and can result in account closures.  So it really shouldn't be a big surprise they are not allowed.

Dude... Are u kidding me? Shall i show u the official email from chess.com support. I told them everything that is kinda dubious about simuls in league contest and they answered back it's a viable strategy. If U don't even aknwoldge that chess.com [removed -- MS] and Not pretty much all good Crystal league players it's rly sad. I even was proactive and asked stuff to never make sth wrong... Rly getting angry right now.

I asked staff in the first week and was told that rated simuls were never supposed to be allowed. Apparently not every staff member was aware and this week it was specifically called out and the decision was made to both add the additional rules and start a process to technically disallow it..

Yes, it probably should have been handled much earlier. It's being handled now.

That's fine for me. Just wanna make sure i don't lose points from today, cause i just did as i was told from official side. And it still would be important to send every participant a message to give them a chance to react to the rule changes. I was lucky that i found out. Communication would be an important point to work on (not only with the members, even more so for the stuff ).

How many people. Didn't level up because of this?

This absolutely. Also why not just disallow the simultaneous games function on chess.com for league players. This seems obvious. And you're absolutely right about communication. People weren't trying to game the system if they were playing by what they thought was the rules. People are still doing it because they don't know. If rated simuls are by nature considered sandbagging because they result automatically in rating loss (which I'm not sure I'm totally with) why allow rated simul games to occur on the site you guys code? 

"It should be obvious" isn't an answer quite frankly. It sounds like a displacement of responsibility. It's not obvious if you see other players doing it, it's not explicitly stated as being against the rules, and some staff members themselves don't see it as obvious because they're calling it a viable strategy. That doesn't ring as obvious to me. It rings of staff trying to not take responsibility for not clarifying the rules sooner.

Also it's not a big surprise to anyone here that it's against the rules. The big surprise is how it's being handled. It wasn't against the rules really, because people did it, succeeded and made it into higher weeks. If for any reason you didn't keep up with them, you're out. You're not able to retroactively fix that because it wasn't explicitly stated in the rules and staff told people they could do that. 

People are doing it to this moment because they still don't know and if we go out against them by following the rules we lose out and they'll go to the next round because straight up I won't report them and risk getting them losing their points or getting their account banned.  A message should be sent out to all league players. Easy fix. Only when the message goes out should you start applying the new rules.

Also can people still do it for this week? Will you be penalized? Will people who don't know be penalized? If they aren't penalized then shouldn't everyone be allowed to do it for the rest of this week?

Meanwhile even when you report people for direct sandbagging, nothing happens.

By throwing games, do they mean playing one game after another?

All of these are good points.

"Throwing a game" means to lose on purpose.

By lowering your rating you'll be paired against easier opponents.

Isn’t that just sandbagging 

If someone resigns 100 games in a row, every day, for 1 year, and you report them 10 times...

... they get a warning and they're allowed to keep doing it.

Maybe with leagues they'll be more strict. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Pretty sure January fair play account closing is going to multiply 

Yeah, the first three things on their list are a bit redundant "throwing games, lowering your rating, sandbagging" are pretty much the same.

But I guess they're trying to cover every little detail. Like someone might say they weren't sandbagging, they were using a system of playing at full strength for 1 hour, then at half strength for 1 hour to conserve their energy... some dumb excuse like this that superficially makes sense.

Thanks for explanation