Obligatory fchamp reference

http://i.imgur.com/OlA7H2Z.jpg

DAMNIT CJ

where yo curley mustache at?

This sounds like a great idea, I would definitely play in this. Could be lots of fun, especially because of the chance to play with players outside of your own division. I pocketed a drunk Hildreth once, and it was the funniest pug I've ever played, and I learned a little bit. I could see this system facilitating that, as well as giving some teams a chance to practice seriously.

I would like to play with better players on my team and the other team, instead of open vs open.
I feel like whenever someone with experience on my team calls plays I learn a lot.

I think I need to clarify something. This would not be forced pug or captain's mode. Players can make a pug team if they'd like or get their 6 player team to enter. I was referring to playing AGAINST stronger players, not with. With that said, if you'd like to play with better players, you'll have to approach them yourselves and ask them to play with you in one of the tournaments.

The only thing I would suggest is if a couple of Invite teams show up, is have the option available to run it with normally banned unlocks for the purposes of testing them in a live match environment. I'm not exactly sure what could be offered as incentive since Invite teams get free Premium, but I have faith in the Kalkincoin.

sounds like an awesome idea. i'd love to see something like this

last to spec is med

i would totally be down for this if it was on weekends, but i can't play during that planned time slot :(

since when is killing the nice guy who comes up with good ideas ;)

great idea though -- i assume this would not be affiliated with ESEA? Maybe it can be affiliated with TFTV and we could get it casted. and since it's friday night / not ESEA mtaches / casual tournament we could rotate newer casters in for practice

wish i could

In South America we had been doing Fastcups on Sundays while we don't have a league going on. There may happen some issues with lack of players in some rosters, and some delays, but they have been a success, because it's our chance to reunite our entire small community in the streams.

If you guys try something like that in your community, I'm sure it will be great.

There is another style tourney you can play, I'm just tossing out this as a suggestion. It takes a lot less to organize (you don't need a set amount of team, bracket seed, servers, tourney dosen't have to last hours and hours till completion, etc), old school King of the Hill Ladder.

Essentially anyone who wants to put together a team comes to the Friday night IRC channel, at a set time (say 9est) your team captain msgs the tourney organizer (lists your 6 players and says your ready to go). It's first come first serve. The first 2 teams to msg the organizer go into the server, the third team joins and specs. 20 minute KOTH map. The Losing team leaves, the winning team stays, the specs join the losing teams spot, next team joins spec (you have like 3 minutes to ready up or the game just starts), so it's constant action, with the on deck team joining spec. So if you keep winning you stay, if you lose you are out (go back to IRC and resignup and get in line).

The amount of wins at the end of then night determines the prizes you receive. Your team won 4 games out of the 16 played, you get 1/4 of the prizes. So yah, not everyone who signs up gets to play each night, but that's the way the system works. If it gets popular you can have more then 1 server running parallel tournys, but you do not split it by skill level (it leads to sandbagging for prizes).

I like the idea a lot, it would just be hard to get a decent number of teams to actually show up I imagine

with how many people i see pugging for 6 hours straight on fridays i think that we could at least get a 16 team bracket

Typically the issues with these types of ideas are lack of organization and lack of a clear plan. If you nail those things and keep everyone informed well enough to where people actually show up on time, and not have everyone sit around for too long this could be great fun for players and viewers.

Interesting, but I know that I appreciate a little downtime in between scrims/pugs as is. Winning 2-3 in a row would lead to some burnout for sure. Maybe if you wanted to keep the rapid-fire thing going, shorten the rounds down a little? Make KOTH first to two or something and 5cp a 15-20 minute game? It'd allow for faster switches (and more teams playing) as well as cut down on teams getting sick of playing long games with few breaks.

I feel like organizing a hat raffle every week isn't very practical and besides, people will run out of hats soon. What might work, or just would be a nice addition, is sort of a betting system, where people bet on one or several pools (first place, second place, most ubers dropped) and get stuff back if they win. Part of the pools would make up the prizes. Then again, this seems like even more of a hassle unless an automated system was implemented, but at least it wouldn't consume hats that aren't worth much and replenish very slowly.

Or just make the whole thing for free, which seems like a better idea anyhow. That might lead to teams bailing out last second though.

I like Blue's idea but another thing to consider is that I think the OP wanted closer/more interesting matches? If one team gets in early and dominates everyone, then it might not be as fun. So you kind of have to take the good with the bad in weighing the amount of work that you want to put in to organize this vs. how interesting the overall event would be.

Could very easily lead to a situation where one or two teams are much stronger than the rest and as a result one of them is always playing and you get MANY rolls between matches where the top teams face eachother.

The idea of the raffles is to give some sort of prizes to the winners without costing any entry fees

I think if possible (all 12 people have premium) this should be done through ESEA. That takes care of servers, configs, score reporting, and ESEA gives out prizes at the end of the month for TF2. The prizes are pretty shitty right now (Zowie Camade) but maybe if we do these tournaments for a while, they'll get better prizes and even servers.

Sounds like a joy to play and even spectate if run well.

If you are talking about separate, standalone tournaments every Friday, your timeframe seems impossible. 1 6 teams would mean 15 games before grand-finals, and double bo3 means at least 4 more games. If team A wins the first bo3 and team B wins the second bo3, you'd need another single game or another bo3. This means anywhere from 19-24 games to determine a winner.

Best case scenario: 19 games
Winning team plays 7 games.
8 servers needed to ensure all teams play without waiting for available servers.
Granted, there will be games that don't last the full 30 minutes, but if we assume all games take 30 minutes and everyone plays the initial round simultaneously, the time required would be 3.5 hours. Hitting that time would require zero pauses, zero seconds of delay in getting a game started, and zero seconds of delay between each game. The winning team would be playing the entire 3.5 hours.

Worst case scenario: 24 games
Winning team plays 12 games.
This would raise the minimum time to 6 hours (assuming all maps take 30 minutes and each bo3 goes to 3 maps) and would result in a grand finals lasting 4.5 hours.

The idea seems good enough, but you'd probably need to revise the time table and amend the final match to a single bo3 or a single bo5 at the heftiest.

I really like the idea but I don't think it could happen every week. I think once a month, maybe at the end of the month, would work out more consistently. IMO every week seems super ambitious.

That's the thing, in the OPs tourney it's single elimination seeded, for the most part everyone is eliminated quickly, only playing 1 match or 2, with no shot at any prize. Sure the semis and finals are good matches, so you see maybe 3 or 4 good games all night.

In this format, if your captain is faster then platinum or b4nny when you sign up, you get a shot to play a few matches, some close ones, some nights those great teams don't show up or are in another server, so your squad can make a mini run. It also gives a lower end team a chance against great players they never normally have. And yah, the best players win, that's how it goes, you will still see plenty of good shows. Organisers can also tweek the rules and put some limits on teams, "x" amount of invite players, or invite teams can't sign up until 10pm, or w/e. Lots of choices, and it's just a thought to run a simpler tourney is all, I've seen it work well in the past, that's why I brought it up.

How about you start at 8pm and finish with one bo3 as a final so it's actually over by midnight? That means the winning/2nd place teams only play up to 6 maps. With delays that'll take about 4 hours.

Something like this is the way to go...I think that's how FNF (friday night fights) was run back in the TFC days. Saturdays was SNSF (saturday night soldier fights) which was 5v5 or 6v6 all soldiers...I forget. SNSF was more fun IMO as it was a total change up from typical matches :)

They might have had brackets towards the end but it seemed like it was all organized on the fly in IRC using the kind of 'king of the court' method. You formed your team, made up a name and waited to be called up. Good teams could run the table the whole night if they started early. There might have been 2 servers hosting games simultaneously and at the end the kings of either server met up for a final...can't remember as that was like 10 years ago lol.