highfiveIs it possible to start the tourney on Friday this time? 13 hours straight was ROUGH last lan
It's possible, but we really wouldn't be able to fit much in on Friday. There's quite a few players that don't get in until late on Friday / early Saturday morning, so this will hurt the number of teams. I don't know exactly how badly it will impact the numbers, but I'd also feel bad if people decide to just not go to the LAN at all because they can't arrive early enough on Friday.
I completely understand that a top 3 team will spend a good portion of their day playing in the tournament, but I really do my best to make sure the tournament runs as quickly as possible. Whenever I'm rushing people to get their team in the server / ready up, it's not because I'm being irrational or impatient, but that I'm trying to make it so you're not holding up the tournament for literally everyone else. Every single LAN I get close to DQ'ing a team because people go randomly MIA without asking me, so this can cause heavy delays.
Also as a means to speed things up, I tried to poll people on if we should just remove group stage. I think I did this poll at RGB LAN 3, and out of roughly 16 teams, I think 15 of the teams said that they wanted group stage.
If everyone wants a not-so-long tournament, then we either need to make it without the group stage as double elimination, or group stage into single elimination. If we do group stage into single elimination, then we'd also need to make the groups a bit larger so the seeding is more accurate for the single elimination stage.
Again, we can try to keep it the way as it is and move group stage to Friday night, but I'm extremely apprehensive that 1) team numbers will suffer, 2) because it's purely for seeding, some teams will ask if they can use a ringer if not all of their team has showed up, and 3) matches will already get delayed enough because not everyone has arrived / is still setting up.