I didn’t say that the judges should rank games they had not played. I was talking about the underlying assumptions behind the method. Here is another quote from the article:
Surely it must make a difference whether the IFcomp organizers assume the above or if they assume the opposite. If they just follow the method blindly, they will be using the same assumptions.
I am quite sure the basic Condorcet method described in the article favours games which are played more.
Take a look at the section " Pairwise counting and matrices". If you first take a look at the first matrix, which corresponds to one ballot. Here all possible pairs are considered since the voter apparently ranked them all.
But what if the voter didn’t play “game D”?
How will the organizer then fill out the matrix?
If you then use the above-mentioned assumption (“Usually, when a voter does not give a full list of preferences they are assumed, for the purpose of the count, to prefer the candidates they have ranked over all other candidates.”), you are still putting ones in the right most column (the D column, which contains a “1” whenever game D lost a comparison) even though game D might be the best of the 4 games.
It would be more fair (but still problematic) if all the numbers in column D were set to zero, since we do not know if game D is better or worse than the others. But still, if a medium game gets played a lot, it will get a lot of “ones” in the corresponding matrix row, whereas a very good game, which is played very little will get very few “ones” in their matrix row. Since the winner is simply found as the game with most “points” in their row after summing the matrices, it can be concluded that the Condorcet method favours games which have many votes.
If anyone can propose how to fill out a ballot matrix in a fair way, when game D hasn’t been played and keeping in mind that perhaps most players didn’t play game D, I would be very interested.
Please also consider that on most ballots, most of the games hasn’t been played, i.e. also consider games E, F, G etc. which have not been played either.
Sorry if the above is confusing to read.
But to sum up:
How do you fill out the ballot matrix (not the sum matrix) shown in the section “Pairwise counting and matrices” of the Wikipedia article, if game D hasn’t been played? You must do it in a way, which doesn’t favor games which gets played a lot AND please consider that there might be several games the judge hasn’t played (game E, F, G etc).