I simply allow for the possibility of change in folks. Sure, there are many folks still active and inactive that are always on the up and up. I have a strange feeling you won't ever see me, or zen, or orcun, or nils, or dark, or so on, desync a game even if we would get a loss. Or raise the standard higher - many of us would fight to the end in a lost game for our teammates (knowing its a complete waste of time). Anyway, I could go on with other examples, but I think you get to know the character of players as time goes by. You might not always like them, but whether or not they are a good sport will become evident.
That said, Rich has certainly been prone raging in the past and being a bad sport. I've seen the good and the bad of him. I don't have any issue with him participating or see any reason to give him a hard time. That said, anyone being a huge douche would be thrown out of the tournament. I don't think that's going to happen with anyone that is invited. Because believe me, if I thought that was possible, any person like that would not be invited.
Anyway, I do suggest we get more proactive with our tourney talks if we want this to happen. I'll keep pushing things along, but feedback from you folks would help along with ideas.
So, here's what is set in stone in my mind
While I think a 2v2 would be MUCH easier to organize, folks seem to want a 3v3. So 3v3 it will be - that part of the format is decided. I'm also sticking with a set rotation of players (eg everyone plays with everyone). This means that the more people we allow into the tourney, the more scheduling chaos/potential for the tourney to outright fail. Not the best idea, but I'll go with the generally community on the 3v3 bit.
Here are the questions I've already asked with no response: the tourney will either be 3v3 with no character restrictions or 3v3 and 1 player on each team will have a restricted set of characters to choose from. If we do it the no restrictions route, I think we'll likely see many similar combos. That said, I personally don't think it will be a huge deal. But THAT said, I also like the idea of forcing folks to use da/reg, etc. I have a strong feeling that if there are no restrictions, I'll be going erb like every game unless there's a mismatch in my favor. That's ok, but boring - and I'd wager many of us would agree if we are forced into that scenario. How shall we handle this?
I have a good idea re: scoring that I think will tie into my next question. First, the question - how do we handle scheduling? Let's give 1 point for 1 win, 0 points for a loss, and -1 (or -2) points for a no show. When you think about it, if we have like 12 people in the tourney, we have X games to cover all possibilities (remember how I wanted to do a 2v2?). Anyway, certainly somewhere in all of those games, someone is going to flake out and screw over their team. If you take a loss because your teammate is a no show, then you simply get 0 points. That sucks. But the person that doesn't show gets penalized further. Perhaps we even come up with a rule that a person that hits -X points gets DQ'd and dropped.
And last, re: pacing. Sure, we could try to marathon run this over a few weekends - but perhaps we just schedule like a game or 2 a week. Folks get like a 30 minute grace period to START their scheduled game. If there is a no show, on either or both teams, we just apply the scoring math - call it a loss for all and an additional penalty for folks that didn't show. Pretty sure we are all at our teammates mercy as to whether or not they show up, so it really shouldn't be an unfair adv.
