I'm sorry that a Community Ambassador feels the need to be so aggressively disappointed.
This entire event could have been easily avoided had I included that sign ups required a list of members. Past experience has reminded me how impractical this is, and I was not thinking of that particular rule while writing the sign up post. This did not happen, and so we had to play with the hand we were dealt.
When made aware of this discrepancy, I chose to stand by the rule as best as able while still being flexible. It is common for teams to be composed of people from the same clan. We can see that in this tournament, the majority of the teams were composed of players from the same clan. When 501 signed up, we were under the impression there was 4 Ryders. Then Ouroborus signed up, taking us to 8 Ryders. TUNA signed up, but this was not immediately identified as a Ryder ship. Team Bumble signed up, and this was known to be a Ryder ship, taking the total to 12 Ryders, beyond the limit.
When extra teams signed up, we had to decide which teams would not be able to participate this week. This is when we employed the rule to remove Team Bumble, as they were believed to push the limit past 10 clan members. Ayetach is a Ryder. This was posted as soon as it was able so teams would have time to respond and plan for the weekend. There was also a provision to allow them to participate if we came up to 20 teams.
There was no responses until early this morning about debating the decision. Again we mentioned that it may be possible if teams were available.
We also needed to come up with a substitute for 'A Fine Nights Curse' who was not able to play but did sign up. Team Bumble was approached and agreed to this. After this point, with encouragement from clan Ryder, other teams signed up in the couple hours leading up to the event, as well as HelFyre offering to forfeit the position for Team Bumble to play. This seemed an ideal solution and was put into play. This was posted on the forum for anyone to read. If you did not choose to stay up to date on the forum with everything that was happening, there's nothing I can do about it.
With Team Bumble back in play, we had to contact the extra sign ups for a potential replacement for A Fine Nights Curse. Of the 4 teams, only the latest team was online to respond (30 minutes before the event started). Since the other teams weren't available despite having just signed up, and with so many changes occurring, we decided to not to attempt to alter the bracket immediately before match time. So these teams were put on standby until next week.
During all of this, we had larger problems to deal with. Neither of our main casters showed up today (1 had a good excuse, the other just didn't show). We managed to get 1 caster to sub and could not find another. I was in the process of setting up to stream (Getting the program, setting it up, checking if everything works, etc). Luckily Urz signed on and was willing to stream the event, even though he had his own things going on (Give a big thanks to both Dementio and Urz). We were also missing a ref and were not able to find a replacement, requiring me to ref the matches as well as try to keep track of scores and communicate with teams.
We encourage you to re-sign up your team to potentially get in for week 2. Team leaders (points of contact) are encouraged to discuss among themselves before making big decisions (such as forfeiting their team).
Again, we will be enforcing rules more strictly for weeks 2-10 so this does not happen.
For a first single ship tournament with mostly random partners and all the problems we faced, this actually went quite well. The following weeks will definitely be a lot smoother.
