The new calculation for a player's tourny entry rating has gone some way to addressing the issues with banded tournies, but it's also introduced or worsened another problem, in that now, people are entering banded tournies at their skill level, but with current ratings hundreds of points below the tournament banding.
Now, part of the point of a banded tourny is to play players of a similar skill level, but, surely, the other point of it should be to play players of a similar rating. This means not allowing players of a 1400 skill level to enter banded tournies if their current rating is around 1000 or even less.
This mismatch of skill against rating could have been caused legitimately (loss by timeout by accident or whatever) or deliberately (choosing to resign 100s of games) but, for whatever reason, it's not then fair for people in that situation to enter banded tournies.
Why isn't it fair? Well because, when these folk then play people expecting to be playing similarly-rated folk, and win, then it skewes the opponents rating downwards. A common defence to this seems to be "it's only rating points", which is, of course, literally true, but then you could say that about the entire rating system, so it's hardly valid.
Anyway to get to the point (finally) I propose that entry into a banded tournament is restricted to those with a current (actual) rating that is within 3* the banding. I.E if a tourny is banded 1200-1250, then that's a 50 point banding, the current rating of the entrant should be no lower than 150 points below 1200, (and no higher than 1400 though I believe the current tourny rating sees to that.) If a tourny was banded 1400-1425, the lower limit would be 1325, that being 3 * 25 less than 1400.
I believe that introducing this one extra banded tourny entrance criteria would finally produce banded tournaments that have people in them who are approximately within the banding, and haven't manipulated their rating for whatever reason.
Cheers.
While it bothers me a little to be restricted to 1175-1200 tourneys when my real playing strength is around 1100, the same would apply to any entrant in the tournament whose rating fluctuates, so I don't feel disadvantaged once I apply logical reasoning. I'm still meeting the same opponents as I did before. I don't agree that any more tweaks are necessary.