Tournament Organization: Witchcraft and Logistics
Sept 26, 2016 14:40:13 GMT 1
mysticjuicer and LK4O4 like this
Post by flagrantangles on Sept 26, 2016 14:40:13 GMT 1
Hello everyone!
I'm apparently quite dedicated to enabling others. It's my one true gift to this world if you don't count my inebriated tarot readings.
Anyway, we are experiencing a dearth of tournaments at the moment and we should look to rectify this at the moment. I'm personally quite tempted to undertake such an endeavor, but I realized that I have never done this before so I don't want to create a situation.
As far as I understand it, we have a couple of different tournament structures:
Swiss and Round Robin are both good for playing many matches but can get a bit tense when you have to start assigning tiebreakers to determine ranking. Swiss and Round Robin also run into some scheduling timing issues since you're necessarily playing more rounds and this is necessarily going to require more coordination between players and the TO. Furthermore, Swiss tournaments sometimes run for a predetermined number of rounds and then Cut to Top X and this seems to create more drama than it's worth. I have personally not been all that bothered by it, but it's good to bear in mind, especially since you're going to have to fiddle with tiebreakers for this.
Single Elimination and Double Elimination are good for being pretty straightforward to run and I think are mostly the standard. Single Elimination tends to be the go-to format for single-day tournaments since it takes the least amount of time to run.
Additional considerations include whether the tournament going to be a single-day shindig or a multi-week/longform event? Furthermore, how will you, as a TO, keep track of the tournament's progression/bracket? Challonge has been a pretty common tool for this.
Finally, there are a myriad of rules and variations used in Yomi tournaments and I think it would be useful to mention these:
Edit Additions:
Seeding - Provided I understand seeding correctly, I believe that seeding is meant to separate out top players in a given game so that they don't meet super early in bracket so as to preserve hype. This seems more important in larger communities and tournaments than ours, but, if you seed your tournament, it's best to state that.
I'm using the #SirlinDisapproves to indicate which formats are looked upon unfavorably by David Sirlin. As it currently stands, I'm using this hashtag to be both informative and a little bit light-hearted.
TO Notes:
LK4O4: The most important thing is just getting matches played at all. Send out messages, follow up with unresponsive players, and allow eager players to play their matches early if they can manage it. If everyone finishes their matches early, send out conversations for the next round early. Get matches played, get them played as soon as you can, and keep players playing matches.
Double-Elimination makes this very difficult, since winner's bracket will always be sitting on their hands waiting for loser's bracket, but do the best you can.
The following people have run tournaments and I suspect they would have relevant input to provide: cloudcuckoocountry mysticjuicer Bomber678 and LK4O4
I'm apparently quite dedicated to enabling others. It's my one true gift to this world if you don't count my inebriated tarot readings.
Anyway, we are experiencing a dearth of tournaments at the moment and we should look to rectify this at the moment. I'm personally quite tempted to undertake such an endeavor, but I realized that I have never done this before so I don't want to create a situation.
As far as I understand it, we have a couple of different tournament structures:
- Swiss - Only reliably determines best player.
- Round Robin
- Single Elimination
- Double Elimination - Only reliably determines 1st and 2nd best player.
Swiss and Round Robin are both good for playing many matches but can get a bit tense when you have to start assigning tiebreakers to determine ranking. Swiss and Round Robin also run into some scheduling timing issues since you're necessarily playing more rounds and this is necessarily going to require more coordination between players and the TO. Furthermore, Swiss tournaments sometimes run for a predetermined number of rounds and then Cut to Top X and this seems to create more drama than it's worth. I have personally not been all that bothered by it, but it's good to bear in mind, especially since you're going to have to fiddle with tiebreakers for this.
Single Elimination and Double Elimination are good for being pretty straightforward to run and I think are mostly the standard. Single Elimination tends to be the go-to format for single-day tournaments since it takes the least amount of time to run.
Additional considerations include whether the tournament going to be a single-day shindig or a multi-week/longform event? Furthermore, how will you, as a TO, keep track of the tournament's progression/bracket? Challonge has been a pretty common tool for this.
Finally, there are a myriad of rules and variations used in Yomi tournaments and I think it would be useful to mention these:
- Timer: Determine what kind of timer (Slow, Medium, Fast) to be used during your tournament. Medium is, by far, the most common of the options, though Fast sometimes sees use during 1-day tournaments to help keep things moving along at a decent clip. However, bear in mind that Fast Timer is very restrictive to certain characters (Gloria, Persephone, Quince).
- Match Length: Determine how many rounds a single match is comprised of. Best of 5 is the typical stands though Best of 7 isn't uncommon. Best of 3 also sees some use in shorter tournaments.
- Character Selection:
Double Blind/Counterpick - Opening round is typically always Double Blind. The standard for most tournaments after the first round is to force the winner to remain as their character and allow the loser to counterpick into another characters so as to help increase their odds of winning.- Character Restrictions
- Character Stables: Each player has a select number of characters they may play during their tournament sets. These are decided before the tournament begins and do not change. I have typically only ever seen stables of 3 or 4. The number of characters is typically equivalent to the much of wins you need for the round. The most common way of handling stables is that once you've lost with a character, they are temporarily removed from your roster and now you must win your remaining characters. However, there is an ongoing tournament wherein the winning characters is removed instead.
- Double-Blind Pick: LK4O4 is running a tournament of this flavor and every round is a double blind pick for each player which allows you to switch characters every round if you so choose. #SirlinDisapproves
- Character Bans: Sometimes people want to see some different matchups so they restrict the characters you're allowed to play in tournament. This was most recently seen in mysticjuicer's 19XX tournament where DeGrey, Geiger, Troq, and Zane were banned. #SirlinDisapproves
- Character Lock: To my knowledge, there have not been many of these tournaments run, but it's a format wherein you will play only a single character over the course of the entire tournament. I'm not certain if the character was decided beforehand or if it was decided at the onset of your first match.
Edit Additions:
Seeding - Provided I understand seeding correctly, I believe that seeding is meant to separate out top players in a given game so that they don't meet super early in bracket so as to preserve hype. This seems more important in larger communities and tournaments than ours, but, if you seed your tournament, it's best to state that.
I'm using the #SirlinDisapproves to indicate which formats are looked upon unfavorably by David Sirlin. As it currently stands, I'm using this hashtag to be both informative and a little bit light-hearted.
TO Notes:
LK4O4: The most important thing is just getting matches played at all. Send out messages, follow up with unresponsive players, and allow eager players to play their matches early if they can manage it. If everyone finishes their matches early, send out conversations for the next round early. Get matches played, get them played as soon as you can, and keep players playing matches.
Double-Elimination makes this very difficult, since winner's bracket will always be sitting on their hands waiting for loser's bracket, but do the best you can.
The following people have run tournaments and I suspect they would have relevant input to provide: cloudcuckoocountry mysticjuicer Bomber678 and LK4O4