I’ve ran a fair few tournaments on kaillera before. And theres 2 ways of doing it. Like people have said 1 day tournament and tournament over a period of time.
1 Day tournaments are the most successful. Get everyone in an irc channel, find a nice server and play the games. There short and quick. But since its at a specific time, your numbers will most likely low.
Bigger tournaments taking place over several weeks attract much bigger numbers, as people more or less get to pick the times they play. Now thats fine, but people lose interest, they forget about it, and the tournament admins need to spend alot of time hunting people down.
Now obviously we would all prefer a big 1 day tournament, but it aint gonna happen, not yet. I got high hopes for my CE ranking battles, hopefully with the prospect of scoring points it will encourage people to more players to play and return for the next one. So if you want a true tournament where you can really see who is the best, then its gotta be over a period of time.
I’m been experimenting with other tournaments i ran and helped out in and the fastest format so far i’d say for a big extended tournament is no doubt is straight single elimination. But this is flawed, as its not uncommon for some of the best players to meet early on.
Then theres double elimination this helps with that problem. But people forget they are in losers bracket and people get confused unless there told who to play. This works but it needs constant attention.
Then last theres the round robin format. Everyone plays everyone in thier group, which sounds like a lot of matches, but i think this quite possibly the best format, as long as its managed properly. I reccomend against proper seeding of every player, but just put 1 top player in each group and randomise the rest. Otherwise its too easy just to predict who exactly is gonna win. Then you take the top 1 or 2 players from each group and send em into single/double elim or woteva.
Now what i like about the round robin is that its much easier to set a time limit on it. What you can do is say put 2 week limit on it. At the end of 2 weeks, regardless of how many games have been played the top 1 or 2 players go through. This should make people play. You can’t do this with the elimination rounds as who do kick. Both? the guy who didn’t get contact? how do you know whos lying? etc etc. And by the time you get the knockout rounds with the round robin, you should only the people left in it that are actually reliable and want to play thier matches.
Just my 2 cents