This is a cross post from the tournaments forum threadid=25197 (with slight edits), the issue is players who allow their ratings to drop massively and then enter banded tournaments for lower rated players, SeraphimVulture suggested that I post it here too so what do poeple think?
The problem is caused by a dip in rating not automatically being reflected by a dip in form, because of the timeouts system. Maybe there should be a ratchet system. Tournament entry is based on the last 30 days rule, but if you have ever been more than 400 points higher (except if the peak was a provisional rating) than the top end of a band then the dip in your rating doesn't reflect a dip in form and so you can't enter those ones. This would rule people who allow their rating to nose dive that badly out of banded tournaments entirely until their rating has recovered to a more realistic level and hopefully encourage people to be more careful about the number of games they are in (yes I know I did that recently - I'm trying to balanced not keeping my opponents waiting for resignations and a ratings collapse), or the irritating habit some players seem to have of stopping playing in the games they are going to lose, getting their rating unrealistically high and then resigning all their lost games at once so their rating crashes down again and denying their opponents the correct ratings reward. Russ could make exceptions for people when there's an acceptable reason for the drop in rating (Medical problems etc.).