butcher ships is looking for participants

[dr.wapon]

hey guys, I just make tournament called "butcher ships" at challenge.com, right now am looking for participants, if you a captain and your like hearing this and want to join this tournament, I be glad to let me know, in case you didn't know my tournament, its a single stage tournament were team pro player trying to fight for it, to be claim champions and victory's, ( and be the best butcher of course ) the tournament starts in December 16, 2014 - 4:15 pm, will you join tournament and trying to be best butcher in entire game and chop your enemy ships to truckload ( witch is a fancy word for butchers and me ) of parts?, and who's pros players team going to win?, we see in the future of "butcher ships"

[GurasOguras]

Okay, okay. 4.15pm, but what timezone?

[dr.wapon]

georgia

[DMaximus]

georgia

The country or the US state?

[Jub Jub]

georgia

Guns of Icarus is an international game with players all over the world. You'll see many competitions list their start times in multiple time-zones to avoid as much confusion as possible. EST, PST, GMT, and UTC are some of the more common ones. You also must take into account how long your event will last. 4:15 PM in the Republic of Georgia is a good start time for Europeans, but may be far too early for most North/South Americans. 4:15 pm in Georgia, United States is fairly reasonable for anyone in the Americas, might be pushing it too late for many Europeans. So, as GurasOguras said, "what timezone?"

[Dutch Vanya]

I'm going to go ahead and assume he is talking about the state This is written in english and the republic of Georgia even has its own alphabet.

[Velvet]

I'm going to go ahead and assume he is talking about the state This is written in english and the republic of Georgia even has its own alphabet.

yeah, people who don't speak English natively are normally better at it... and more aware of timezones.

dr.wapon, if you want to host an event you'd be advised to announce it with a little longer notice (I recommend a week for a small to medium event) and to provide more details, including providing a timezone as has already been suggested. But also:

• how long is the event meant to last?
• how large teams are you looking for? 1, 2, 3, 4 ships? Presumably 2 but it's good to clarify.
• do people need to sign up prior to the event?

[nanoduckling]

Hi dr.wapon,
While it is great that you want to organize a tournament, I think you may have drastically underestimated the amount of work needed for these things and the amount of information people would like before they will sign up. I'm going to offer you some advice as to how you can get this kind of thing off the ground as I suspect you aren't going to get many takers today.

Format
Has been covered by Velvet, but I will go into a bit more detail. Make sure you have a clearly defined format for the tournament. Is it going to be a knockout tournament? A league? How will matches be decided? What time limits are you going to put in place, if any? Will you allow pauses? How many ships do players need to fill? Will you let players run with AI? How will maps be picked? A good example of the level of detail you want is provided by the rules for the R&D invitational:

https://gunsoficarus.com/community/forum/index.php/topic,4800.0.html

Time
As Jub Jub said, this game is played internationally. Time should be specified exactly, UTC is a good way to do this, but you should also list the time span (not just the start) of the event in the time zones of the likely participants (something like PST, EST and GMT, even MSK if you are aiming to get some Russian folks on board).

Communication and Organization
Your original post here had no paragraph breaks. It had no capitalization. It contained multiple spelling mistakes. It was hard to read and I could not get the information from it fast enough because it was not organized. An invitation to a tournament needs to be clear, concise, and send the message that the organizer is competent and mature. Before you react hostilely to this keep in mind I'm dyslexic, so I know this is frustrating and is arbitrary, but what you are doing here is promotion, and people are superficial. You cannot change that (at least not on your own and in the short term), so you have to operate within it.

Community Participation
A good way to ensure you have a tournament is to organize a couple of teams yourself before the advert goes live. That way you know your message will get a couple of bumps and it will be clear to those interested in taking part that there will be some other participants. I suggest talking to some of the clan leaders about them submitting a team before the advert goes live to see if they will field a team for you.

Notice
Velvet has pointed this out but I want to reinforce it and point out why it matters. Folks need more notice than you have given here. Organizing even a team of 8 is a lot of work (it is more like organizing a team of 10 since you know one person will have connection issues or be ill). Give at least a weeks notice, consider two. I used to organize a table football team, it only needed four players and it took me an hour or two per week to get sign ups.

Points of Contact
Get points of contact from your participants, and provide a point of contact yourself. I suggest setting up a dedicated gmail account for the tournament or something along those lines. People will go missing / be late / have enquiries beyond the information you provide so you need to offer a line of communication to them.

Casting
Will your tournament be casted? If so, by whom? You will need to negotiate a lot of things with casters (they will likely want time limits, they hate pauses, they will need clear scheduling). You will want them on board well before you advertise, and you should send them preliminary stuff to show them you are serious (lists of rules for their approval, any promotional material, teams who have agreed to enter prior to the advert going live).

Results
How can people find the results of your tournament? Will you post them to the forum, or are they on some external website. If the latter providing a link is a good idea.

Niche
Your tournament is competing with the Sunday Skirmish and a bunch of other competitions for my attention. Why should I look at yours specifically? What niche are you going to occupy? Are you going to run something folks don't often get else where (say a CK tournament, or a 4v4). Folks are going to need a reason to sign up for your event beyond it just being an event. Look at what events already exist and see what is missing, ask your fellow players what competitive itch is not being scratched.

Hope that helps and good luck organizing your event.