online tournament best practices
Sam Bloom
On September 14 my branch will be taking on a nearby branch in an online Super Smash Brothers Wii tourney for ages 8-12. I've personally run plenty of SSBB tournaments, but never a tourney of the online variety. I'm looking for some good ideas from the collective brain - what have you done in the past to make this work? In particular, how do you run a tournament such as this (logistically speaking)? Do you use a bracket, March Madness-style, or do you just yell out kids' names and let them go at it, or something else?
Both branches will have IT people on hand to make sure the Library's firewall doesn't cause problems (as it did for me last year on NGD). That personally takes a great load off of my mind, but I am curious to hear from all of you good folks. Thanks!
Sam Bloom
Groesbeck Branch Library
Public Library of Cincinnati/Hamilton County
Eli Neiburger
Hi Sam, sounds awesome! There are a couple of different ways you could handle this. The biggest challenge when running online tourneys is managing who's playing and whether or not a match 'counts' or not. My tendency to keep kids happy in these situations and based on some of our NGD experiences is to apply a minimum of organization to the event. So, I'd recommend just having a line for the online station and having kids line up in pairs, then doing 1 2v2 match after another and keeping score as to which branch wins. Thats super simple and fun, but it wont necessarily result in the best players from each location facing off. If you want to make sure that happens, two approaches come to mind; especially if you have more than one wii at each location.
First, you could just do inter branch open play, I.e. Matches that don't count on one station while you run a standard single elimination tourney on the other machine. Then you take your top 4 and have them play 1v1 matches online against the top 4 from the other branch. Or, you could combine open play and qualifiers by keeping track of who wins in FFA matches against the other branch, then, after everyones had one try, only using the winners as your representatives in the next round and repeating the process. However, this could get sticky if one branch has stronger players.
Like anything else, its primarily a factor of stations, time, and turnout, combined with how forgiving or not you want the tournament structure to be. Hope this makes sense... Let me know if you'd like to schedule a call to talk about this further, and be sure to test an actual match from the actual rooms in advance! Ssb networking is fussy and demanding. Have a great event!
-eli
Eli Neiburger
Associate Director for IT and Production
Ann Arbor District Library
(sent by tapping on a glass slab, please excuse slappy topping)
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "LibGaming" group.
> To post to this group, send email to libg...@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to libgaming+...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/libgaming?hl=en.
>