CCP Zirnitra
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Posted - 2011.05.31 20:25:00 -
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As I have mentioned before in another thread, we saw a huge increase in the number of alliances that signed up this time around, and while there may be some "alt alliances", the current rules did not forbid them to enter the tournament. We are however thinking of methods to try and curb this trend even more, with the pilots date of joining the alliance being the first step towards this. We are also looking into ways to make the tournament pre-qualifiers a bit more dynamic, and allowing more teams to enter as more teams sign up.
Last tournament we only had 69 teams sign up for a tournament with 64 slots, so of course almost everyone was happy. This time we had over 110 teams sign up, however, a lot of teams only signed up in the very last days and hours of the sign up period. This meant that we were too close to the start of the pre-qualifiers to make significant changes to the schedule and add more rounds.
While a lot of you seem to think that this tournament is easy to run, and doesn't require more than one person, that is very far from the truth. At minimum we need to have 6 people working the entire time the tournament is running to be able to run the number of matches we currently do. If we were to increase the number of matches, we would either have to book minimum 6 people for over a month straight, with no days off work, or book maybe 8-10 people for 4 weeks, with multiple matches running concurrently, which adds a lot to managing the tournament.
Since the Tournament takes place in uncharted space, players are unable to reach the tournament systems on their own, meaning that we have a team of GameMasters who handle the direct contact with the teams, and assist them getting to and from the tournament system. On top of that we have CCP Sreegs and myself handling the actual matches, starting / stopping matches, punishing players when needed and doing all the necessary background and module checks we need to do, to ensure that people are all running with valid fits and players.
We do have a lot of tools, and we are always increasing the size of our toolbox with every tournament, there are still a lot of things that we cant (or don't want to fully automate) simply by the fact that the event takes place on Tranquility and not a test server like Singularity. We are dealing with human beings here, so there isn't always an absolute right and an absolute wrong, so it would be near impossible to "just write a script" that handled all these things automatically, and have it make the right decision every single time.
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