My team didn't really stand a chance in it, and I doubt if I played with the same people that we would have a chance in any of these, but it was still the most fun i have had all week somehow. Shitwizard proclaiming a "Fresh mid" every round, and non stop laughter as we were walked over by steveC and grape.

I would definitely buy a ticket to get rolled again if it'd be that much fun for me.

the random # between 1 and 5 is pretty dumb imo, whoever wins should just win that week's prize.

My team was half my shitty open team and half IM+ people Munch and I know (because our pocket bailed even though we told him we were gonna be starting at 9), and we got Street Hoops as our match. It was cool to play against a team obviously better than half of us but as it wore on, the thrill of being on some sort of even footing against better players wore off hard.

I know that I'd like to play again, but I don't think we'd fare as well as we did tonight since we can't exactly summon 3 good dudes EVERY Friday we want to play so we don't get completely shitslapped if we get another team clearly miles above our coordination/DM level.

If you keep it 16, double elimination would be nice. It's rough drawing an Invite team right off the bat and playing for 10 min and then getting eliminated and the show's over. If it goes up to 32 teams, which you may have to do because of all the interest, I guess single elim. will have to work for time's sake.

you need to figure out a way so FnF isn't just b4nny's weekly donation fund

i had tons of fun this time around, but once you introduce prizes, teams are gonna turn it into friday night scrims. not really sure how you could motivate people to pugteam though

How about people on the winning team of the previous week can't play the next week.

Also I really enjoyed it, but the problem I see is what is the ultimate goal of FnF? Is it supposed to be a tournament that people can try their best to win at, or is it supposed to be a for-fun, relaxed atmosphere tournament.

If its more about trying than anything (which i guess the prize pool indicates) then it really eliminates all the lower-than-main/invite players from having a chance. Because of this, it should probably be kept 16 teams because if you get eliminated first round, odds are you probably weren't going to win it anyways. You can always pug scrim other teams that lost too if you just want to play, but i feel like 3-4 games is pretty taxing already since its more than most people scrim in one night.

Can't you make it so each team trades you 6 craft hats for entry (1 for each person) and the top two teams get the winnings (1/3 to 2nd, 2/3's to winner)? I don't think the prizes need to be that amazing, at least at first. Having something to win is a cool enough incentive. The raffle idea isn't the greatest IMO.

As far as making it so b4nny's team doesn't win every week, maybe make it so you draft teams? I don't really know how that would work properly but some sort of draft system with a pool of people seems like it could make every game interesting.

If only the winner gets prizes, then random seeds for single elim is fine. you need to beat the next best team to win no matter what so who cares what round it is.

Well run and good show.

Only criticism is definitely making sure this doesn't turn into any invite team's private donation fund. Its a weird line to walk because in theory we'd love to see extra invite action, but having the same team rolling over and over will kill participation and viewership.

My solution would either be the UGC strat of simply limiting the invite players a team can have (2 maybe?) or limiting how often they can participate (every 3rd week is invite week). I know that's kind of a weird distinction to make, but I feel even IM/Open vs Main can make some interesting shows, especially with pug teams, where as the gap into higher invite is just too much.

Pretty sure this was done with the pug.na tourney with Medic captains.

Just wanted to say that fatigue was definitely a thing. And I'm the kind of person who plays a lot of TF2. Maybe a Bo3 would feel more worthwhile if there were prizes...I dunno.

Also this just crossed my mind but in the preseason I think people were enthusiastic about showing up but in the regular season people will be playing 3-5 nights per week and already competing in 2 matches so maybe FnF will have to fill some other niche besides just straight up competition between teams that sign up to try to fight for the prizes.

you could portion out the prize money for different "awards" other than first place. like money to best performance from an open team, best pug team, best play on stream, etc. this does throw some randomness via seeding and what match you stream in though

So we don't have the same teams coming up every friday, maybe make each week different? Sometimes they'll be standard matches, but say every other week has a strange rule. Something like, No Stock Weapons, Full time sniper/spy, payload maps, etc etc. Not all at once obviously, but little rules every once in awhile to spice the game up, something you wouldn't see in every other stream, and streams going on durring the event. Not every top team can adapt to the changes in rules, so we won't see the same two teams every single week, which would make the event lose its appeal quickly.

Just knowing that iT was in it pretty much just made it all just another pug for my team. I definitely feel like FnF would lose a lot of steam, and fast, because teams wouldn't feel like it was worth their time because of the huge skill gap.

just imo

Thank God my body rebelled against me and prevented me from playing sports at a semi-professional level so I'll never have to play against good people.

This would make it super interesting to watch and pretty damn enticing to play. Spectators get to see crazy shit, players get to not always get sharted on by iT.

http://puu.sh/4HPKQ.jpg

Made by yours truly.

If enough teams/players sign up maybe you can do it like the 1 night cups the euros do with different levels of brackets (highest to lowest) ... but thinking about that it would mean either loads of prizes or just prizes for the highest bracket.

The best solution would probably be to run a second tournament at the same time. You could either put the bottom half of your seeds in it, or everyone who lost their first match as a sort of consolation cup.

It might be too much work for you to run two at the same time, so another thing you could do it run a 32 slot tournament but give the top 8-10 teams a bye first round so you only need ~22 teams. That way the first round matches will be closer, the teams who will be playing all night don't have to play the extra round, and you don't really have a hard min teams needed/max you can accept.

I had a good time. Only issues I had were the people I played with not understanding that it was a pretty strict timelimit for ffw's (thanks Cloud). Either way we played one and lost and that's about what I expected with the bracket. I will continue to register on whatever Friday night I can get 6 in.

you could also experiment with doing a semi-round robin instead of single elimination. maybe instead of every team playing every other team, teams could play 3 matches and based on how well they do they get a certain number of points. winners would still go on to playing other teams (ie if you win 2 the final match you would play would be against another 2-0 team, 1-1 teams play 1-1 teams).

the scoring per match might be tricky though. 5-0 could mean 5 pts for the winners, 0 pts for the losers. 5-3 or 5-4 would be 4 pts for the winners and 3 pts for the losers. and a 5-2 or 5-1 would mean 3 pts for the winners and 1 pt for the loser. i dont know actually this seems pretty convoluted now that i think about it. just a thought.

I'm glad a lot of people have spoken up, it makes my job a lot easier. I wanna start off by saying something that I think is the basis for most complaints.

This is the first time in years that teams have been forced to play outside their skill bracket. I'm talking about invite vs open type skill differential. When I started playing SC2, I was diamond a few months in. It literally tooks me a year to ever make it past round 2 in any tournament that had money prizes just because I always played against better player. Obviously, I kept playing tourneys and nowadays I'm usually surprised if I don't get past r3. What I'm trying to say is that, when prizes are on the line and people want to win, you're gonna get raped. Whenever I played against someone that was GM, I was always excited to really see how I scaled up because I always believed I could pull off an upset.

With that said, I'm not going to change the main tournament so it's easier for lower level teams. The best idea I've seen so far is the consolation tournament which I'm heavily considering. Ok, now onto actual post.

-Do double elim

Lol no 5 hour tournament

I really against the idea of an entry fee. I don't like limiting the people interested as well the fact that this would make the tournament less enjoyable for lower level teams as they are practically donating hats to get 5-0'ed. Also, the reason I'm pretty dead set on monetary prizes is that not everyone likes/wants hats.

Answered your on question, I can't possibly watch every single match.

This tournament should be whatever you want it to be. Want to try really hard and use your real team? Go for it. You wanna have fun and throw together a pug team? Nobody is stopping you. I can't force teams to not try. There was an idea where use fun setups and shit like that such as sniper/spy or no stock weapons. I honestly hate that shit. I truly feel the most fun variation of TF2 is 6v6 and you're playing your hardest. That's what I love to play and that's what I love to watch.

-Invite/b4nny whine

God damn it makes me so angry. I really have never gotten this game's mindset when playing up the ladder. It's just so absolutely pathetic. If I had the chance to play iT, I would relish the opportunity to beat them and then talk shit for the rest of my life (http://play.esea.net/index.php?s=stats&d=match&id=1384426). lolool but seroiusly, How can so many people cry so hard about playing main+ teams? You're not paying for this, it's free. Don't want banny to win, beat him. Polt wins every NA competition always but I've never once seen an sc2 player say "Fuck this, no point in playing, polt will just win". That type of player has quit long ago. I'm just so sick of this general losing whine and how I have to hear it every season with OMG THIS TEAM HAS 3 EX-INVITE PLAYERS, KILLING MOVE THEM UP.

I'm not going to ban banny from playing. Not stop people from winning 2 weeks in a row and I'm sure as fuck not gonna do draft mode (besides the impossible number of people). People can play with who they want and how they want. I could probably rant about this forever but I'll stop here.

Summary

-I will implement consolation tourney
-Double elim will take another 1.5-2 hours so #nope.
-Proceeding with raffle/items idea but might change it in the future.
-Not making this tournament any easier for the sake of making it easier.

I honestly don't mind playing against teams/players that are objectively better than me most of the time, just as long as there isn't some kind of entry fee to get fucked upon then I'll probably keep playing in it. I think the consolation tournament would be a good idea though. After losing our first match most of us were still in the mood to play more tf2.

I was one of the captains in the pug.na tourney and I don't think I was playing medic? But this idea could potentially work as a way to not have 5-0's during the first matches. You get 16 players to sign up as captains, and then a little before 9 have them join a mumble or irc with killing and have killing distribute a spreadsheet to the captains and have them pick off in a 1,1,1....2 fashion and do a snake style picking process. You're going to need at least 80 players and 16 captains for this to work, and need 16 medics within that 96 player pool. Only problem with this is some players might not play with their friends/teammates, but the teams will be much more even in terms of matches.

I don't recommend adding prizes either, at least cash prizes. Maybe some other prizes like a tf.tv subscription or something?

edit: add a special colored name/background for the winners of that week, enigma ;)))

Thanks for the tourny, Killing, and for casting, djc n ruwin.

Had a good time. Most matchups were pretty good after round 1. Was a nice opportunity to scrim b4nny since we normally stop playing before they even start.

Agreed with your summary. Buy-ins and double elim are a nope. Consolation for lower teams is cool. If ya want better competition come back next week an improved player with a better team and try harder.

The best players in any game put a lot of time into improving their skills and deserve to be compensated for doing so. If people want to try hard and participate in tournaments to win prizes nobody should stop them from doing so. It's no different than any other esport, or in professional sports you could draw parallels to golf or anything else.

As long as teams are coming out, participating, and having fun then keep doing it Killing. You go gurl.

Best way to do this kind of system would be (2x your score) - (their score), round negatives up to zero. so a 5-0 would be 10 for the winners, 0 for the losers, and a 5-4 would be 6 for the winners, 3 for the losers. 2-1 would be 3 for the winners, 0 for the losers, etc.

While double elimination doesn't seem the way to go it, it does seem pretty lame for a team to get eliminated early just because of bad seeding. Just do a swiss-system tournament up to 3-4 rounds. There won't necessarily be a first place team if you do 3 rounds, but you can give a prize to all of the undefeated teams and maybe a key or so to the X-1 teams to keep things interesting. The nice thing about this is that you don't have to cap the limit to 16 teams.