I believe I may be able to give a couple of helpful suggestions. As I said before, we in South America have the desire to someday have Evo qualifiers as well. I also said that we have some experience running gaming tourneys and other gaming events. Since we started doing it from different paths, we also look at it a little bit differently and maybe a couple of our ideas can have some value to you as well. I know your ideas are valuable to us.
Warning: THIS IS A LONG POST POST AIMED AT TOURNAMENT ORGANIZERS
1 - About wasted time in pools:
1.1 Example:
We recently ran a 320 people Winning Eleven tournament in Brazil. Mind you that the first round was composed by groups of four people, round robin, and 2 players from each group qualified for the second round. Mind you that each game takes a little more than 20 minutes, and more than 40 at the eliminatory rounds, because people play home and away games to define the qualified winner.
So, as you can see, it is a tourney that demands good logistics.
Yet, we could not only have everyone ready to play at the exact time they were supposed to play, but we were also able to inform them at which exact time of the day they would be playing the game. I will try to explain how we do it. Please excuse my poor English.
1.2 Solutions applied:
We know that each game takes about 20 minutes to be played. We throw in a big margin of safety of 50%. So we have some time to spare for the time in which people will be changing controllers or seating on getting in and out of their seats, and a little more so we can control unpredictable variables that may or may not happen. Having several different plans of contingency is something really important for events, but I do not want to digress.
So our spots for each game that will be played are half an hour which. Maybe for MvC2, for instance, they would be 4 or 5 minutes each.
Each group, that resembles your pools, will have 4 players, all playing each other, for a total of 6 full games, or 3 hours in a single TV. Since we will run the tournament for 15 hours a day , we know that each TV will be able to manage 5 pools during the day. The 8 am pool, the 11 am pool, the 2 pm pool, the 5 pm pool, and the 8 pm pool. The pools will be over by 11 pm, still with a little margin of safety for the unpredictable.
Since we have 16 Tvs running, we know that pools 1 through 16 will all start at 8 am. We also know that pools 17 to 32 will all start at 11 pm. And the same happens for all other pools.
Now, at the moment of registration, the players are randomly assigned to a pool number. With pre-registration, we can even guarantee to assign them away from people of the same city or friends. They are then informed that they have to present themselves to the staff member who controls the flux of people to the pool seating area 15 minutes before the scheduled time for their pools. The pools area of sitting is exclusive for whoever will be playing in those pools, so what happens is that they present themselves 15 minutes ahead of the time in which they will be playing for sure.
1.3 Disqualifications:
Now comes the most important thing. The players are scheduled to appear 15 minutes in advance of the real time they will be playing. So, if player A pool starts at 8 am, he will be scheduled to appear at 7:45 am. If he does not appear until 8 pm sharp, he is already eliminated. There is no flexibility, and the only exceptions will be made by advanced communication to the man who controls the flux into the pools sitting area, like a big urge to go to the bathroom or just being sick.
So the pools all happens in the scheduled times. They are usually over with half an hour to spare, and everything works fine.
1.4 Perfect scheduling:
More than that, however, we can also schedule sharply the games for the next rounds. Before the tournament starts, we have already mapped exactly which pools will send 2 players from each part of the single elimination bracket. So, when 2 guys are classified from pool A, we can already tell them that one of them will be playing the next day at 8 am on TV 7 and the other will be playing at 9 am on TV 9, for instance, just like we did with the pools. With this format, we can keep doing this until the finals.
1.5 Benefits:
The biggest benefit is that everybody knows for sure at which time they will be playing, so it is not necessary to call anyone with microphones those are there just for general announcements and commentaries. Since everybody knows with precision at which exact time they will be playing and everybody is required to be there 15 minutes early, there are no excuses to be late. Since there are no excuses to be late, we can disqualify people without much complaints, or at least without reasonable complaints. Since we can disqualify people that are late, all pools are either finished on time or even early because we have a bye from a late player. And the margin of safety helps us dealing with possible equipment malfunctions as well.
Basically, we know for sure exactly at which time each pool will begin, and exactly at which maximum time all pools will be finished.
2 - About unexpected high number of entrants:
2.1 Margin of safety:
Some tourneys here are capped. For uncapped tourneys like Evo, we have 25% more TVs and consoles than expected. So, in this tourney, we could run up to 400 people in pools. The final result for qualified players is not much different. We are already working with a 256-man single elimination model with 96 byes after round 1, so we would just cut the number of byes by 40. It is still possible to know exactly who will be playing at which exact time, and this is still covered by our margins of safety. For the elimination brackets, we also have a full margin of safety in hours that will be more than enough for bigger brackets just in case.
2.2 Avoiding the problem entirely:
But for some events, in different regions or for new games, it may be hard to estimate an accurate number of entrants, even with margin. In most Winning Eleven tourneys we simply avoid the problems by closing the registrations a week before the event. For some tourneys, we can even e-mail everybody at which time they will be playing after registrations are over, and we can also plan the brackets very carefully to put people from the same cities as far as possible from each other.
2.3 Qualifiers for byes fulfillment:
If this is out of the question, what we did before for fighting game tournaments are last-minute qualifiers. So we have some time scheduled for the late entrants. Those late entrants will face each other before the main tournament in single elimination. The winners will fulfill the available byes. The losers are already out. We make this pretty clear before they pay for their late registration.
So now we are covered against wasting any time at any stage of the tournament, and we are also pretty much covered against turnouts much bigger than the organizers best estimates.
3 - CONCLUSIONS:
If you read this so far, past my poor domain of the language, it may seem that it is too much trouble just to solve time allocation. But, in spite of my poor communication skills, the suggestions above are easy to implement. With them youll have happier customers that will never be late for the tourneys because they know exactly when they are supposed to play, and I mean down to the minute information for each round. They also are happier and more secure during the event because they also know exactly when is their free time in which they can do whatever they want without worrying about the tournament. They can spend most of the day in the city, if that is what they like, without a problem. The tournament never runs late, and until today we never had a need to speed-up any part of any of our tourneys. We never finished a tourney extremely late. We never had too many disqualifications, and we never had grave complaints about disqualified players for being late.
More important, these are simply methods. There is no need for more equipment or resources of any kind, except for a supervisor to each TV, of course.
Of course they are events, and even the best contingency plans can not deal with all the possible variables. Maybe some day we will have some big problems, but this format has been working well for a few years now. You need to do some math while planning the tourney, but all tourney organizers do that anyways, and the results seems to be pretty good.
I hope this was not a waste of time for whoever had the patience to read it and I hope some of the suggestions above can be helpful for tourney organizers. If not, hey, at least Im practicing my writing.
PS: I do agree that less featured games can save a lot of time. I worked a few years as an event organizer and in many situations less is more in the field, since it becomes a lot easier to concentrate on the core tasks that brings satisfaction to customers.
Edit - For some reason my post makes the screen weird, with a roll bar at the bottom of my monitor. Maybe this is because I copied and pasted it from MSWord. If anybody can help me to correct it I will do it. Thank you.
It didn’t stop marvel, did it? That and VF5 DOES have more characters, so the more characters you add the harder the game is to balanace. Trying to keep a series balanced perfectly while adding new characters is fighting a losing battle. I admire making a game as balaced as possible, but still.
