Doing a tournament at a LAN. Tips would be much appreciated.

[Clipsterman]

My University (ITU in Copenhagen) is holding a LAN-party from the 23rd to the 25th of october. I'm on the crew and planning to hold a GoI tournament, because I love the game, and would like to see it in tournament format. However, I have never held tournaments of any kind before, so I would like to hear if anyone has tips about it.

I haven't fully decided whether or not participation will be joining as either crew or captain (and to randomly assign teams in advance), or if I should allow people to join as teams as well. I'm planning to ask Muse Games if they're willing to put any rewards up for the winners, (which I believe they will as they said they would on one of the Fireside chats). I'm not completely sure if it's possible to make it be single ships against each other (or if it's even a good idea). That is most of what I thought of myself. Any and all tips and advice would be much appreciated.

[Kamoba]

If it is just a one off tournament, keep it a simple elimination tournament to make organisation much easier for yourself, practice setting up your own lobbies in custom matches and setting passwords before the event so you know how to best do it on the day.

1ship against 1ship is possible on practice map but unbalanced.

Typically in hosted tournaments the easiest to organise is where teams of eight sign up, two pilots and six crew and the teams battle their way through the tournament until one team reigns victorious.
However teams of eight can be tricky to organise at lan parties you'll find it easier than trying to herd around teams of four players and mixing and matching the teams... But this makes it harder for the individual to take part.

Be sure to.remind Muse of what they said during the fireside by emailing them on feedback@musegames.com

[BlackenedPies]

Single ships against eachother is possible in practice mode, but I'd recommend the classic 2v2 or even 3v3 due to more strategic and tactical options.

How to setup the tournament largely depends on the number of people attending. If there's a lower population it might be best to play in a custom 2v2 and swap the ships around. Points could be awarded to the ships based on score or wins. For example a match ending 3-5, both Red ships get 3 points and Blue gets 5 (or wins = 1 pt). Keep track of the points and at the end tally them up. For a tie where the top ships each have the same score and wins play a final sudden death match.

If there are slightly more people you could try it in a 3v3 format. If you've got a lot of players you could have teams play eachother in a round robin where each team plays every other team. Points can be assigned based on score or wins. So the setup is determined by the number of players and time, what are your thoughts on those?

[Lueosi]

If you want to have a nice bracket management you can take a look at challonge.com where for example the weekly Sunday skirmish event is organized.

For a 1vs1 tournament you can ask a moderator ahead of time to force start lobbies for you (so you can play 1vs1 on other maps than sandbox). Also do you know how many participants you have?

[Clipsterman]

The LAN hasn't actually started accepting signups yet, and no one has done a tournament in the game before, so I don't have a clue how many is going to show up. I'll probably have to postpone deciding the tournament format as much as I can. I have however been convinced to avoid 1v1.
Muse games have also responded that I just need to say specifically what the prizes should be, and they'll see what they can do, so that's pretty cool.

Does anyone have experience with how random team assignment works in a local tournament? In theory, it should scare some people off since they would want to play with their friends, but I'm not sure how much of a problem that really would be. It's not like it's hard to let people sign up as teams as well. I just think it's more fun if everyone is assigned randomly, and not just those who couldn't find a team.

[BlackenedPies]

Unless there's 30+ people you probably want single ships instead of teams of two. You probably don't need to randomly assign teams, let people join in and stick on ships or move around. If you have empty spots you can invite other people. Many of us would love to help.

Joining in the lobby is the easiest assignment of teams. Otherwise you'll need to assign everyone a number and run that through a program. Joining isn't exclusionary