It’s getting late. You’re not in contention anymore, and your buddies have just finished their matches and you’re finally ready to go get some food and commiserate about all the bad beats. So, you pack up your stuff and out the door you go.

News flash: You are a jerk.

Wait, what? Wasn’t the whole point of Swiss that you could play as many rounds as you wanted, then stop playing? Well, yes … but … you didn’t tell us you were leaving. Therefore:

1) You got paired against somebody. That somebody probably paid some real money to, you know, play Magic. Especially later in the day, not in contention, these people are still in because they want to meet some new people and play some Magic. Sitting around doing nothing for an hour is pretty close to the opposite of this.

2) Even worse, that somebody got to sit there for 10 minutes, just in case you were running late rather than not showing up at all.

3) A judge had to verify that you were missing and handle the result for your opponent, eating up limited floor resources that could be used answering questions faster.

4) Tardiness is a penalty, which needs to be registered. So that judge had to fill out the penalty on the result slip, and the scorekeeper had to register it in the system (which would, at best, be non-zero work that disrupts doing other result entry, but even worse, the current penalty filing interface is … um … let’s go with mind-blowingly awful, so the impact here is a really serious hit of time). More cost to limited resources.

This is all trivially avoidable. Just tell us you’re dropping. If you haven’t turned in your slip yet, mark your drop on the result slip, that’s what the drop column is for (to be fair, you probably figured this part out). If you have, though, come up to the main stage by the scorekeeper – there’s always a drop list or some other way to register a late drop, as long as we haven’t paired the next round. Just don’t wait until the last second to do this, come drop as soon as you know you want to leave.

If it turns out you didn’t know until the last second, and we already had to pair the round, please have the courtesy to find your pairing and go concede to your opponent and mark the drop. Still bad that they don’t get to play (hence, not waiting until the last second), but it only takes a minute and it saves them the ten-minute wait and saves the staff all of the administrative overhead.

Technically speaking, with the change to Planeswalker Points and the fact that losses don’t count against you, there are no real consequences (yet … crossing my fingers that this will change someday) to not doing this besides the abstract hit of a penalty in the system.

Except that you’re a colossal jerk.

Don’t be that jerk.