I have a tournament idea I was wanting to run, but since we've had a relatively high number of DDR/ITG tournaments lately, I felt that another DDR tourny should wait until spring or so. But, here's my ideas:

-------------------------------
Idea #1 - DDR  Old-School Happy Funtime Tournament!

The idea is to have a fun old school DDR style tournament that's not meant to be taken seriously.

Parameters:
-Available song selections would be anything from 5th Mix and earlier.
-No speed mods.
-Flat mod enabled. (maybe not since this was obsolete in 2nd mix I believe)
-No Bar (Before someone whines, let me remind you that "back in the day", bar use was generally shunned and people didn't rely on it. If you don't like it, I don't care. This is supposed to be an old school, fun tournament, not a $1000 grand prize national championship)

Note: Originally I had planned to ask Bill if we could use the Max 2 at Acme, but since it's now gone, I need to come up with another alternative.
-------------------------------

-------------------------------
Idea#2 - Couples Tournament

It's pretty simple, but different from our traditional tournaments. Again, I'm going for non-stressful and fun instead of serious competition with this one.

Outline: Teams consisting of two players each compete against each other. This can be done on any dance game (ITG, DDR, PiU) and can have a lot of variations to it. You can play round robin, traditional, or even a 1-Up competition (*see below for example).

*1-Up: (This idea isn't perfect, but it could work with some refinement)
Lower seed team declares two mods for the opposing team (higher seed) to deal with on whatever song they've chosen to play. Some mods are restricted, such as STEALTH. The catch is, the lower seed then has to play the same song as their opposition, but the opposition now adds two additional mods. This continues until one team fails out.
-------------------------------

Obviously these are just rough ideas and could be greatly refined. For kicks, I'd love to do the old school tournament, but now that the Max 2 machine is gone, I'm not sure of any other good venues in the Seattle area for it.

I'd participate in all of Jon's ideas and I love the idea of an old school 1x flat tourney, Suko! The only thing I'd like to note is that in Seattle, people like Foy were holding the bar since 3rd mix, and nobody shunned them for it. No bar for the purpose of no bar would be fine, and honestly pretty fun, but to say that bar use was generally shunned... well, we're in Seattle. We sort of originated bar raping. California even made us an awesome photoshop of the Space Needle bar raping!

Maybe for one of these I could run a ridiculous challenge tournament. Oh, and another stupid tournament idea - round robin DRAGON PUNCH tournament!

Lol maybe not being shunned, but I remember back in colorado when we use to have a 4th mix plus years ago, we called people who used the bar "noobs"
But remember this is when people were freestyling all over the place. PA hadn't taken off yet.
Also, I will totally participate in any events suggested so far.
fuckin round robin DRAAAGOONNU PAUWWWNCHA!

Falcon PAAAAWNCH!

1x no bar tournaments are really fun

In New England, there was a huge debate about bar and speed mods when 7th came out.  Bar raping n00bs were taunted heavily until said bar raping n00bs started SDGing catas.  Then the bar was cool. =p

I really like the idea of a couples/team tournament.  I think that could be really fun, but severely overpowering.  Maybe seed it up and have partners based on skill level?  (1 with 16, 2 with 15, and so on.)

Seeding for partners would be pretty good. I remember the "team tournaments" we used to have where we broke up into 5 player teams - those always balanced pretty well because people wanted to be on a team with their friends and at the time, the top tier players ranged throughout a couple of social groups.

The bar issue is interesting because it WAS shunned in every other part of the country, and most of the players around here are from, well, every other part of the country. Technically I am too, but I started playing here so I consider my DDR roots to be in Seattle, where we are bar serial rapists.

I would volunteer to host the old school tournament, but I do think we should wait until this present rush of DDR/ITG tournaments has had time to cool down.

And I know people get flustered when a bar/no-bar discussion starts up, but we're talking about a fun, light-hearted event, not a "who's the m0st aw3s0m3 h4><0r in s34ttl3!~" competition. Though, with a name like that, I bet the event would be epic!

I'm pretty sure people would like to have some fun and not let the bar thing ruin their day. Having the old-school gimmicks I described above is a great way to add some spice and to the typical tournament.

Jon and I were talking last night, and the main concern on both of our minds is a very simple "Who the heck would actually come to these events?" thing. I know that I would, and Tony would, and we'd probably find some way to drag Sara/Tricksy along, but who else would be legitimately interested? Size plays a huge factor in which of these are actually feasible to run.

I'd go to any GFDM related event because I love DM.

Yo Kevin, maybe you could run some kind of "Get into TGM" event at Narrows?

I only meant to offer some suggestions for a partner format, but then I accidentally a whole tournament ruleset.  Is this bad?

Jerrad ran a partner tournament back in late '04 and the main issues were with the rules, not the idea for the format.  Namely, the top two teams could be identified immediately as they were basically the top 4 players who showed up and the format for each round was "every team plays a set, bottom pair drops out," which is just boring.  Seeded partners lends itself to possible sandbagging, so some care would be needed, but it would allow for an elimination bracket to actually make sense.

The trick would be making rounds work; I was thinking of 5 song rounds, 4 songs to allow both players from one team to play both from the other (still working out details for who gets to pick which song) and a random 5th as a tiebreaker with some way to determine whether the higher or lower seed from each team is used.  With enough interest (12 people minimum, 16-20 ideal, so very doubtful), it could be turned into two randomly seeded round robins, top two from each advances into a 4 team bracket (single or double elim is possible) with the first rounds being seeded as first place from one against second place from the other.  With 20 people, you'd be looking at 27 rounds maximum (two 5 team round robins plus a 4 team double elim), so 105 songs plus 20 and some tiebreaking for the qualifier, so roughly 4-4.5 hours of play and some organizational time, which would make for a very clean 11:00 - 4:30 or 5:00 tournament if it was the largest we've had in years.  Plus, unlike pure elim formats, everyone would be guaranteed 7-10 songs (for 16+, 5+ songs for 12+ people) even if they took last, which makes entering a little less daunting for many.

Credit for the robin -> bracket format goes to Bluess and Laura (Reflex [air hockey tournament] was robin -> robin, IIRC) and Gerrak (we talked about possible setups a while back), but it would be perfect if enough people were willing to enter.