So with that ruleset, you couldn't use the same weakness twice, and you actually had to legitimately beat the person at something they might be good at?!  :O   I'd say that rule was good then, because why is a tournament fun if you're just exploiting their weakness the whole time? It doesn't prove that you're actually better, if just proves you know their weakness.

Yes, they will try to attack your weakness too, but if you each do that for one song, then you've balanced out. The third song shouldn't be one that is unfairly balanced towards one's weakness/strong area.

And what if it's changed to 3 songs?

Beating someone at a song they're bad at is NOT an illegitimate win.  In fact, when training for tournaments, you SHOULD work on the songs you're bad at.  She practiced rhythm often and they were always tight matches.  And yes, tournaments are about exploiting weaknesses, when 'weakness' is defined as "a song I'm better at than them!".  Good players don't have major weaknesses, so exploiting them separates the men from the boys, so to speak.

And if you change it back to 3 songs, you're back to just flat out level capping, which has already been discussed.

I think level capping is a concern that is legitimate (for some reasons), but it should be addressed after it's actually figured out what type of tournament is being ran here.

That will all determine whether or not capping is a concern.

Oh? Does three songs REALLY equal level capping? Let's try this:

Assume that EXPERT is the only difficulty allowed in the brackets, and we are using the Card System Bo3, meaning two songs on a card per player:

KevinDDR puts down ! (12) and Which MC was That (9)
Ancsik puts down Pandemonium (13) and VerTex (12)

Now, Ancsik could try and take Kevin on in !, knowing well that ! is a fairly challenging 12, or assume Kevin is bluffing with WMWT and call his bluff and 99.xx it.

Consequently, Kevin might be thinking that ancsik is pinning VerTex on him, since he knows Pandemonium is not a great song to FA, but neither is VT.

The Cars System makes for a lot of benefits, players are free to select songs, and the opponent can strategize as to which song to eliminate, sometimes making matches exciting, and, at worst, making them interesting. This takes out the strength equation since it requires players to be strong at more than one notechart.

The last few tournaments we've had haven't had anything that easy in the finals.  Not a particularly impressive chart to watch either.

I can see the limits working if they're scaled right, but 5 songs is pretty long. Peaking at 24 would allow for a solid final round to be sure (13 and a hard 11 or two 12's), but we definitely have potential time issues.  And I don't think Vertex^2 has ever been played in a tournament anywhere because most people acknowledge that the chart is just stupid.  It's not hard to get to the speedup at the end, it's just that the ending is a bunch of retarded runs-with-sudden-stops.

And I've done some thinking and would like to throw this out here, so the out-of-staters understand a little better.  When Tricksy talks about RI tournament memories, she talks about beating whoever by 3 greats and it was awesome because she played so well.  Talking to people, I' ve noticed that when most WA players think back, they seem to remember who they hung out with and what randomness was going on off to the side.  It's not to say we don't have close matches where the whole place is watching - we're still competitive - and it's not to say purely competitive crowds are somehow inferior, but it's not what the crowd likes around here and it's why, for a long time,every tournament was followed by a challenge event (great attacks, gimmick mods, stunts you had to do, etc.).  The shirts Amazon employees wear say "Word hard.  Have Fun.  Make History." for a reason - it's the ideology of most of Seattle (and it's not just morale boosting fluff, we do operate this way) and encompasses exactly what we've been trying to stress - we want a competitive event to be sure, but we don't want it to be overshadowed by this sense of "ARRR I PLAY THE THIRTEENZ NOW GRRR ENDURANCE PLAYER SMASH ARRR" since that's been making our tournaments less and less fun as we go and multiple people have been tending towards not entering due to health concerns.

I still hold that we're better served by a DDR or exclusively r21 event.  Our first r21 tournament was hurt by too little effort on the part of the crowd to make sure the files were good (or even fair - negative BPM glitches have no place in a tournament), but we had some decent 12/13's nobody had seen before as well as some utterly amazing 9's (see: MYKL's Sweet Lab, instead of ITG 9's which are just watered down versions of 11's).  Plus it added a huge sense of uncertainty and strategy, since people weren't necessarily well versed in every single chart (as was the case through most of DDR history with how fast games came out until the post-EX hiatus).

DMN's suggestion gives me an idea - combining cards and sum limits (preferably as ranges, at least x, but not more than y, x and y fairly close together).  You get cards with however many points and have to pick 3 charts meeting the limit, then the other player picks one from you list and you pick one from theirs (and obvious, 3rd song random).  Just as DMN said, there's the strategy of forcing them into favorable songs by knowing their weaknesses, but there's a balance again using nothing but one type of chart since two high level charts will necessitate a lower level chart on your chart.  Allow players to use their limits in any order they want and you can get pretty serious flexibility out of the system.  You have to tend towards an easier set SOMETIME in the tournament, but not necessarily early on, maybe you can consistently outdo a particular endurance player on easy stuff and hold on to it until later.  It would be a very deep amount of strategy, not just simple level caps and it would force you to generalize rather than specialize.

BLueSS is right though, level cap systems are a concern for an ITG tournament, and we're still arguing over what game to even use.

Either I misunderstood Jon, or you misunderstood me, because all I meant was that if you use a limit on cards for 5 songs, like 22, then change that to 3 songs, each player still only gets one song, so you'd have to say "oh, you have to pick a 10, period."

It's an interesting idea, but I just personally don't like tournaments with a whole lot of little tricks to make tournaments easier just because high skilled players are involved.  But that's me.  I will still go regardless, because tournaments are fun and the people are fun. 

Well, I stepped in to make one post, and now I'll have to step back out again. I do admit that I'm pretty inexperienced when it comes to tournaments, so I'm not the best at judging what should and shouldn't be done. Regardless of what gets decided, I will definitely be participating in this tournament. I'll still keep an eye on this thread to see what gets decided, though.

Sara, I think DMN is as opposed to caps as you are. I think he was just saying how a card system might help make caps unnecessary.

You're just saying that because you got a wife out of the deal

No, trolling aside, this is EXACTLY what we're trying to convey. Tournaments in Seattle are basically big hangouts/meetups, and the "energy" that players who only care about dominating the tourney bring is often seen as hostile, even if you guys don't mean it that way.

have fun guys ill be out of state until like august. looks like this is shaping up to be one big old enjoyable easygoing dance party!!!!!

To address the first part, our tournaments were amazing.  50 people would show and everybody was too busy goofing off to know that their match was next, and the mod would be screaming for them to hurry up, because despite the tournament starting at 12pm, it wouldn't be over till 30.  We were a real community and were friends.  If you want to tell me that Tokyo Game Action was about straight PA and beating other people, you clearly have no familiarity with the place, because we were a family.

That being said, it's still fun to have a really competitive tournament, no bars.  (No pun intended either.)  We also did challenge tournaments with fun twists, and we had a good time.  It just seemed that we preferred straight competition, as people wanted to see if they had improved by testing themselves in the community.

You can mod this tournament up all you want, but I honestly think that if there are only a couple players who MIGHT use 13s, all of this adaption is over kill.  I'd prefer just a straight tournament, and most of the matches will be very enjoyable.  If a couple morons want to stomp newbies by using songs to show off, they can do that, but it won't wreck my overall experience.

In our tournaments, I guess we didn't need caps, because people agreed NOT to be jerks.  At the beginning of a tournament, you have the #1 seed play #16, and generally, the #1 would ask them what song THEY wanted to play, and would pick it so they would have fun.  Top players often ended up playing Cow Girl and Butterfly, laughing the whole time, and our community was much better off for it.  I'm sorry you guys need all these safeguards to have a fun tournament, but I just want to go to meet people and have a little competitive fun to see where I rank in the community as far as skill.  I feel like mods are used when normal tournaments get boring due to being played to death, but considering I haven't seen a tournament since I got here a year and a half ago, I don't think there's much risk for that.

So that's my two cents.  A regular tournament would still be fun, even if a couple people decide to suck.  The community has been pretty awesome, from what I've seen, so I doubt anyone could ruin the experience.

They WERE played to death, which is why we haven't had one in a year and a half.

That's because our community changed a lot around the time right before you moved to area. Before that time, we definitely needed safeguards. (And again, that's when the last tournaments around here were; the time before you got here)

The time of which BlueSS speaks got to the point where even the top players were happy to play in or run experimental tournaments because straight PA was boring for them too.  Godai tried a small impromptu tournament where two people played, and then someone remaining played the winner and so on, so that it was inherently unfair, just to see what would happen; Jerrad held ITG/DDR hybrids and an SN battle mode tournament; we had a 5th Mix tournament post-SN; we had an r21 tournament.  We haven't had a straight PA tournament in a while because nobody wanted them, and apparently, there's still a lot of resistance.  I think the notion here is that while anything is better than nothing, a lot people figure that all the effort going into our first tournament in a while should go into something amazing, rather than something run-of-the-mill.

NOOOOOOOO
OOoooh well, enjoy combodia!
ye shall be missed.

I vote yes. And the prize should be a giant slurpee. I'm serious, that would kick ASS.

Well, the general WA format has always been a Challenge event following the PA event if enough people are willing, so some sort of craziness is to be expected.

We could always adapt Gilly's Friday Night Gameworks format (since it was only an 8 person format and single elim, neither are really going to work if we can get a lot of people interested) - quals to narrow down to 8 (2 songs available for qual, if you don't like your score on the first, you can opt to try again, but must take the new score), the 8 players play premade 3 song sets (Gilly used cryptic set titles, so you didn't really know what you were picking; I think 3 options were given and then each player eliminated one), the remaining 4 played some sort of challenge round, then the top 2 went head to head on an escalating 10 song series (started with mid-range 8's, culminated in stuff like PSMO S4R - and this was 2003 when PSMO has a big enough challenge on its own) until their total scores were far enough apart.  Again, needs to be reworked for a larger group and other preferences, but the entire point was to have a fun spirited gathering, which is what I think most of us want.

I'm totally up for this.
Like having people play backwards holding up a mirror, or seeing how long they can last playing upside down leaning over a bar, using their hands on light mode?(I've done it and it is MUCH harder than you might initially think.)

I'm currently trying to teach myself how to FA 1s and 2s by sitting on the pad and playing pop'n with the arrows. I call it Poppin The Groove

@Gerrack: Though he's definitely not the events coordinator, the Acme Ops. Manager, Rob Cotter (if he's still there) has always been favorable toward the arcade (he posted to ITGFreak a couple times soon after Acme opened and generally recognizes/greets players he's seen frequently if you run into him) and may have some sway with the relevant people.

For those not in the know, Acme works like this:

A few Microsoft millionaires own the place and don't care what happens inside as long as it's fun, since they'll soak up the losses with their own pockets.  Nobody really knows who these guys are, but they wanted a cool place to bowl since the Seattle area bowling alleys are decidedly not so cool.  They have very little to do with the actual operations, since the place is just a playground for them and their friends, but if they knew about us, they'd probably give us the arcade no questions asked a whole Saturday.  They are awesome, awesome people, and it's sad we don't get to meet them.

Under them is the general management and head accountant, these guys care about the money Acme brings in and see the arcade as an annoyance, since it's not very profitable compared to the $100/hour lanes in bowling lounge.  These guys tell the people under them not to be too generous with us for that reason.  They used to force the desk staff to refuse to give change if you didn't want to put a $20 into the change machine.  If a machine isn't making enough money, they tell Bill to remove it immediately.

Under these guys are people like the events coordinator and Rob.  Rob really likes the arcade and basically thinks of the place they way the owners do and therefore loves that the arcade regulars come in to play games so often.  The events coordinator probably doesn't want to create friction with upper management.

IMPORTANT POST, PLEASE READ

Time for me to chime in.  

First of all, kudos to Gerrack for wanting to take this on.  I'm sure that by now he may realise this event can become a major undertaking.  These tournaments can be complicated, and the help of someone that has experience running one appears to be a good thing about now.  We are requesting that Amber be allowed to co-admin this tournament along with Gerrack.  Acme was interested in the amount of experience the administrators would have, as are we, to be sure of a succesful and fun tournament.  

We got a call from Acme today, and of course they are getting concerned about this tournament since they have had a few phone calls from Gerrack wanting to work out details.  We had hoped to alleviate that problem by telling Gerrack on the phone a couple weeks ago to work out the proposed details, come to me, and then we would take it to Acme for approval.  This would have worked out smoother as they would rather we handled the arcade related issues and then make the approach with a worry free finished plan.  At any rate, a Saturday is completely out as the summer birthday party bookings are strong this year.  Friday night, or possibly Sunday is acceptable to them.  Of course, we can always use Narrows as that is fairly wide open.


One very important note, Amber will not be back until August, so the tournament would need to delay until then.  If Amber decides not to partake in this, then another known administrator could step in to help Gerrack.  

Hope I have not pissed too many people off, as that is not my intention.  Just putting out fires.  

If Amber doesn't wanna help out I'd be more than willing.

This is why we love you, Bill.

I know I've never run a tournament at ACME before, but I've assisted with scoring at lots of DDR tournaments and have obviously run air hockey tournaments. I'd be happy to help. Amber would be great, though!!

... Just please not August 14th-16th, pleaaaaase.

July 26th to August 9th is out for me.

Can I just run one the 23rd of August at Narrows?