So,
The following isn't set in stone, so don't light your hair on fire!
Our tournament is 4 rounds, and a single day. This year, the logistics of that aren't too flexible. I'm not comfortable with the scoring resolution of 3 rounds, nor the "bang for your buck."
That said, 4 rounds is a long day! So, how does the schedule work?
Well, have no fear, we've done this before. The way we made it work was to build in a lot of "between rounds" time for scoring and results allocation, and subsequent "next round" assignments.
How would it work this year, with 128 participants across 2 events? Well, preliminarily, here's how! ...
7:30AM - 8:30AM ... Registration / Sign-In
9:00AM - 11:15AM ... Round I
11:15AM - 11:45AM ... Results and Round II Assignments
11:50AM - 2:05PM ... Round II
2:05PM - 3:05PM ... Lunch, Results, and Round III Assignments
3:05PM-3:15PM ... Round III Assignments "hand-out"
3:15PM - 5:30PM ... Round III
5:30PM - 6:05PM ... Results and Round IV Assignments
6:10PM - 8:25PM ... Round IV
8:25PM - 9:00PM ... Results and Cooldown, Paint/Conversion/Army Finalist Judging
9:00PM - Awards
Sound like a long day? Be glad you are the one playing, not running it!
How do you feel about a tournament of this format? Have you been in a 4 round single day before? Notice the extensive "between" time in between rounds.
Here's another subject of interest. In the past, we always "allow" draws but break them with battle points in terms of tourney results processing. So, while you might score an objective draw, in terms of tourney scoring the highest battlepoint scorer for that round is going to earn the de facto win. This results in a clear break-down by the end of the day for 64 players. There will be 4 players who don't formally win a single game (though they might have 4 near-loss draws). There will be only 4 players who are truly undefeated, and there will be at least 20 players of 64 eligible for Best Overall.
Food for thought, and a little insight into the kinds of things you start pondering at the very beginning of the tourney planning cycle.
PS - Speaking of food, such an event would carry an urging of snagging breakfast before, and dinner after, with an hour for lunch and beverages/snacks available to munch on through the day.
I worry about the 30 minute between games 1 & 2, and 3 & 4. How are you going to have games going over time, which happened pretty regularly at SVDM and we were playing 2.5 hour rounds instead of 2.25 hour rounds like in your example. I am a fairly quick player, but that is because my army lends itself to that. Some armies don't. How do you plan to handle overflow?
ReplyDeleteResults recording mechanic is one important component, and we'll have a basic program built to rapidly "eat" the data and process it.
ReplyDeleteThe other important mechanic is time limits on rounds, appropriate alerts when time limits are approaching, and having staff rapidly assist with and manage the collection of data.
Last year at a much smaller event we were spot on timewise with no delays or issues, despite being understaffed and utilizing an incredibly bad results scoring mechanic (manually entering everything into an excel spreadsheet and then manually processing the next round's matches).
Oh, and we only had ~15 mins b/tween rounds last year.
ReplyDeleteI think 30 minutes between rounds can work. I would suggest food on site for lunch. Perhaps make it optional (purchase food vs part of the fee), but defineatly have the food on site. This will save people time to run out and getting back late to the start of round 3.
ReplyDelete