I love this line:
"the details of which need to be worked out"
You know that "the details" are the only thing that matters, right? That's where all the hard work is. It's the details that take sports leagues and tours decades to get right, and are constantly refining to make better. Without firm details, you have literally nothing.
Tiny, tiny details can make the difference in who wants to take part in tournaments, and who is rewarded for doing so. By changing a little mechanism here and there, whole systems can implode.
For example, to make a Elo/swiss system work as a way to take players rating or ranking, someone will have to enter every score of every match of every qualification session ever. That is not a small job! If you are expecting me to do it, you have to understand that you want me to do between 15 to 20 times more data entry per tournament. If you expect the tournament organizers to enter that data, are they going to sign themselves up for so much work? Probably not! Organizing a tournament has to be as simple as possible, and it's already on the edge of being too complicated.
Also there must NEVER be an incentive for a player to not take part in a tournament. And never an incentive to do badly at a match. At every point you have to design the system that when trolls and idiots do their best to fuck other people over and only care about their own best interest, it benefits the system overall.
Again, I'm not saying don't experiment, as I always want to find new ideas and ways to make the FNC tournaments and rankings work better. Just know that the details is where everything interesting happens, they aren't just an afterthought.
by lukeburrage, in response to this post 2015-10-01 12:17:02