Conorach wrote:Suggestions and comments:
- As first time tournament participants, it was a little unclear as to what to expect, but the info on the forum, and the participation of the more experienced players helped us a lot.
- Timing wise it did take a good 5 hours from start to finish, including a long break time. I don't think that's something that can easily be prevented, but it's good to know for those that join to expect such long period of playing.
- Commitment: Of course this is an online, unpaid, no-stakes event. Therefore it is to be expected that people either sign up late, or cancel. Be a good participant and try your best to plan according to the requirements and make it on time to the tournament and help everything to run smoothly.
Wishlist: More of this
With different ranges of tournament brackets perhaps, or different formats, but overall, I love this game and I'd like to play more tournaments
Always good to get feedback from lower rated participants in these sort of things. I'm glad to here you didn't have too many initial barriers to entry during the process, but if you have more concrete examples of what you were unsure about when you started, let me know.
For the time aspect, I would say that the tournament ran about as long as you'd expect. A FAF match should be expected to last around 25 minutes on average, and when you include inherent time waste with setting up lobbies, bathroom breaks, food, etc, you can likely push that up to 30 minutes. This means that tournaments on FAF will usually hover around this time length. The only time I've been able to minimize it is through creating no definite brackets and instead having several broken up brackets. Which I guess addresses your later comment about having different rating range brackets in each tournament.
The major problem with that system is that it essentially forces the TD to create everything 30 minutes before the tournament begins, because, well, you saw why. People just don't really sign up/don't show up/whatever and you don't find out until the tournament is supposed to begin. This means you could have to drastically shift the brackets so that one doesn't have 2 players and another has 8. So it can be a major hassle, but it's probably the only real way to consistently get lower rated brackets going.
It's often a "chicken or the egg" argument regarding tournaments: do lower rated players not participate because all tournaments are stomps against them or do they not participate because they just don't want to. From personal experience, I can say that it seems to be a fusion of the two options.
Regardless, always glad to see new faces in tournaments!