Hello,
I fear that sean is right that we will end up bursting at the seams with more tournaments.
There is a definite balance to be made between getting too few tournaments, so alot of people are left wanting more/ different tournaments, and getting too many, so that the talent is spread around too much. Of course, small tournaments are a great thing, so fourteen players just playing a couple of games and a final is great, but something involving about 50 players is on a different scale to that.
At the moment, you can get:
2 x 4 game seasons in the leagues
2 GFDT games
7 Masters games
In a year, without doing anything special. That's already 17 games. Somebody who is very successful already looks like getting:
2 x 4 game seasons in the leagues
2+2+1 GFDT games
7 Masters games
1 Champions' Trophy Game
1 World Series Diplomacy Game
World Cup games potentially?
Or 21 Games.
I fear that we are reaching the point where very few people can properly commit to all the tournaments, and loosing either the concentration of top quality players in the tournaments or having people spreading out the efforts in them seems to me to be a problem.
So the question becomes which main tournaments should we have?
The GFDT is a fantastic tournament- it is a knockout, which is hard to do for diplomacy, it gets over 50 participants, has a good final game, so is super-competitive all the way through the tournament.
The Leagues are a good staple tournament in my opinion. They offer the element of carrying-over from one season to the next, which is a distinguishing feature.
The Masters is a very different tournament, and offers a style of game-play that obviously appeals to people- again over 50 signed up, because it is uniquely low on the meta-gaming front. In addition, it offers a great way to meet new players.
My experience from the above tournaments is that we are starting to have people in positions of choosing between the tournaments. That to an extent is great- we want to give people the chance to play in the tournaments that suit them- but take it too far and we have a problem, because what's the point in a tournament without top players?
There are a few things about the structure of your tournament that I would like to comment on.
1. You are unlikely to get the top 49 G-Rating players to all play. You are looking more at making teams from a standard tournament sign-up list. Both GFDT and Masters (one-off tournaments) get about 55-60 people, so you're really just slicing off the top of them. This doesn't really worsen the tournament though, but you should be aware of it.
2. 7 Rounds of 7 Games (Each player playing 7 Games) is alot of games. It works out rather like the Masters does, but with one round missing (which would be a team playing completely amongst itself). You're looking at a major, year-round commitment equivalent to the individual tournaments. I would want to cut it down big-time, otherwise you're making the choice an either-or. Team tournaments should not demand massive individual participation- the World Series is one game per player; I just don't think that people will choose to play 7 games for a team rather than 7 for themselves. I'd cut this down to about 2 or 3 games per person.
3. Mods can select countries
I'll talk about your tournament in comparison to similar tournaments suggested/in progress. It is a team tournament, so rather different to the three Individual tournaments mentioned above. That is important. However, it is similar to the World Series and the World Cup.
The World Series is most likely going to happen. It involves the top players only, so perhaps isn't so relevant for the discussion. However, I think the existence of a top player inter-site team tournament means that perhaps fewer of the very top players will want to play in it, so the idea of it being a very elite style tournament is probably not feasible. It is going to be a rather more inclusive team tournament.
An inclusive team tournament might be a great thing to have, but we can only have one of them.
Looking at this and the World Cup, the differences in scoring system, layout and so on could well all be changed completely. The main difference as I see it is the basis and number of the teams.
The World Cup (hopefully) would have more, probably smaller, teams; the world cup chooses teams by Geography, rather than a pseudo random process. My thoughts are that the World Cup is likely to be the better in this respect, because it could be more meaningful to people(An American team as oppossed to a Delta Team, for instance).
The other ideas are all worth thinking about in terms of how to go about the World Cup, and I think I'm starting to get some ideas as to how I would do that now.
So, that's my view on this: I think that you might be over ambitious in terms of having the top 49 or nearly the top 49 Ghost-Rating players and the game count also seems ambitious, but that isn't critical. The World Cup seems a more naturally appealing team tournament, and only one team tournament seems sensible. That seems to suggest its a bad idea- it isn't, the tournament details themselves are very good and clearly well thought out, and reading them is worthwhile if only as background reading whilst thinking about the World Cup (I know that writing this post I've come up with some new thoughts on the World Cup).
Of course, there is no monopoly on tournaments on this site, and if you want you can try to run the tournament, there is no reason why you shouldn't- the best of luck to you. My word is not law here, it cannot be, because the tournaments aren't in any way official.*
Yours,
TheGhostmaker
* This might actually change, which would be wonderful for the site, and I really hope it happens, because a set of 4 or 5 Major, official tournaments would be such a wonderful thing (and would free me up no end).
Italy: 3 fleets opening
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