1. 150-500 (500 maybe too much for smaller tournaments, any cash/key prizepool will attract people) Euros is always a good budget for nicher type of games. Keys can also be a substitute.
2. Open and Invite should be seperate groups for sake of newer players (you're trying to attract and grow the scene)
3. Standard ruleset following one of the leagues, could be more leniant with weapon bans or something of the sort, make it a tad more casual or easy to follow.

not really experienced or knowledgeable on the other two questions so i'll just leave it at that

I feel like replying somewhat seriously and in-depth, so I shall.

I think this all comes down to the question of: What are we trying to accomplish as a community?

Do we want more stuff for us to play in? Do we want it to be a viable career for the best players? Do we want the community to be larger?

I don't think any of these have a clear 'Yes' answer.

To address the first: I personally don't enjoy playing tournaments that often, it's really intense, and it can be hours and hours of playing. They're fun every once in a while, but I wouldn't say that myself or many that I know would want to play weeklies.
In contrast, I actually really enjoy the concept of a season because it allows for someone, like myself, who works a normal 9-5 to play in the evening and do something rewarding with a really flexible level of commitment, from a match-only team to scrimming every night.

Do we want it to be a viable career path? To be frank, it's really no skin off my back whether anyone makes money playing the game I like. Maybe this is a selfish attitude, but life isn't really all about money, and if the top guys want to figure out a way to make money playing, that's more on them than on me/anyone in the community, I think.

Do we want the community to grow? Again, I don't really care that much. I think this community is pretty good as is, the size of the community doesn't really change the core of what I enjoy about the game. I wouldn't mind if the community grew or shrunk.

You may disagree with my opinions, but I think it seems like if we want to accomplish something as a community, that thing should be overwhelmingly popular, like RGL changes for example.

I think if you want to run tournaments, you should do it, because you want to.

i agree with everything in your post, but i feel like it's important to add onto this last bit that you should know what you're doing before you start a tournament because if you don't, it'll be a disaster and nobody will have a good time. plan the important stuff out, then whatever you feel like you can wing and have fun with, do whatever with that.

run tournaments, but don't rush tournaments.

my pee pee goes boing boing boing

if you want tournaments to really matter, the community should use them as a circuit to gain points for an eventual LAN

but that won't happen because we cut people/kill teams every single season

I was thinking about the possibility of tournament circuits about a month ago too but ultimately you cannot plan anything in this community beyond three months out.

Not that I can really fault players for not wanting to stick together if they don't like their team. They don't exactly gain anything other than clout if they stay together and do well.

if ur goal is to grow the scene i don't think single-div tournaments will do anything for that, and honestly i dont think cups will do that much for it in general
probably the only way to grow the community through cups would be to work with a pub community or newbie mixes or something to host a newbies-only cup with experienced coaches and a small prize pool (something like 12 keys for the winning team). i think the current newbie mix format is probably more effective and more sustainable than that though

the biggest hurdles for regular community cups will be awareness and oversaturation, not prize pool or format decisions

Having worked on a few weekend cups both good (DreamHack/Lockdown Throwdown) and bad (Essentials Monthlies) there are a range of lessons I've picked up so I hope that these answers are helpful. Also speaking for myself only, not Essentials as a whole.

1. Right now any prize pool should try to reflect the effort teams would normally put into their respective leagues. I think in the range of $200-300 would be reasonable for smaller tournaments not relying on external sponsors, can be higher with signup fees but that comes with its own considerations.

2. Most of the tournaments I've been involved with has featured separate Invite and Open brackets, where the top teams from Open qualify for a playoffs with the Invite teams. This is mainly for two reasons:

• A) Matches in the invite bracket can be casted for good stream content for the audience and potential sponsors
  
• B) Takes the best players out of the open pool, making matches a bit fairer

Note: You could also use the rationale in point B to create a Newbie only group to take the lower skilled players out of the main tournament if you so wish.

3. Mirroring regional league formats tends to go over easiest, but I recommend that you do timelimit 30 with a 10-15 min golden cap if needed. Doing so gives you a strong estimate for the longest a single map/match can take.

4. Ask around. It isn't particularly difficult to get something decent with a few friends and someone learning the basics of producing (Camera Binds, When to switch POVs, Casting Essentials, etc.). Most of the more experienced people involved with producing or casting tend to be quite keen if they are free.

5. There are a range of systems (both through tournament systems or externally) that allow signup fees, I believe both Challonge and ChallengerMode both offer it but I cannot say for certain.

I'll finish this with some advice, the existence of leagues makes frequent weekend/2-day tournaments not particularly viable, as people will get burned out or uninterested fairly quickly. Its tough work making yourself stick out from the crowd and there's a lot to think about when it comes to organising. I wish you the best of luck if you decide to go ahead with it.

So im not sure if by growing the scene you mean attracting pub players to sign up for a competitive tournament or just trying to get lower div people more involved in the scene.

We hosted a german TF2 cup twice now ( about 72 people played ) and it usually got the german scene quite active for the next 2 weeks or so. It was a pug like cup where 12 captains could draft their team. In the first cup there werent any limits other than the draft order. In the second cup we copied the frenchies by assigning values to the players and setting a budget for the captains.

Obviously youve got a way bigger playerbase in NA (no language barrier) so you could have a cup like this in a bigger format. Its a lovely way to get the lower div people in contact with the higher div ones. Im sure a lot of the new players learnt quite a lot in our cups and some even stayed around in the pug community.

About the casting situation: We just had people from the community doing something we called "community cast". Basically 2-3 people chilling around talking a bit about the game, hyping up plays and whatnot. Depending on what you are trying to achieve this chill type of a cast can also be quite entertaining.

Our prize pool was completely funded by donations cause nobobdy in EU is really willing to pay to enter a cup. Ive heard its different in NA though.

I love what you are trying to do. Good luck!

4. I'd say if you're putting a tournament together you should expect to do at least part of the job of moderating/organising players yourself. It's one of the positions that's just less likely to get quality volunteers.

Make contact with casting orgs with enough time and im sure you'll get the coverage volunteers you need - you do really need a separate producer for much more watchable broadcast even if you're doing a more casual stream. I'd recommend placing potentially streamed games on servers you control as it's absolutely exhausting to produce and plan the upcoming games at the same time for a full day's worth of games

I think everyone else who replied still plays, so I wanted to respond as someone who every 6 months thinks about getting back into it in some capacity but wants to play weekends:

This really just sounds like it'll end up being ranked lobbies where you pay to do weekend pugscrims at the low div, without offering more than you get out of a regular season on the high end. Like arcadia said, most people working 9-5 like the current game schedule, and I don't think there's a huge population of people looking to play more sweaty games on the weekend, too.

As someone who'd probably prefer weekends, I'd figure out how the discord/irc people are doing it now rather than pay $10 to get stomped by the people going for money while I'm trying to relearn the game, or just play lobbies.

Other than that, finding teammates who are reliable is kind of a nightmare if none of your friends still play or you're new. More tournaments doesn't address with the (imo) largest barrier to entry if you're trying to play seriously, and I don't think any competition for money is going to be able to. Otoh, if you do randomized/assigned teams so that everyone can sign-up individually, it defeats the point of it being a paid tournament at the top level since you're not going to be watching notable teams.

People already mentioned splitting it into different groups, but idk why. At that point, you're running two tournaments per weekend and giving them the same name. You're better off focusing on a smaller subset of the players and catering to them, rather than trying to unify everyone under one tourny/pug/6s system.