After having spent two years in the QuakeWorld community mostly arranging tournaments and playing way too little I left to focus on studying. Now as I am starting my worst year of studying I feel the need for something relaxing to do in the evenings and QW is the first and best thing that comes to mind. However I don't want to make the mistake I did before of playing way too little, so I have decided that next fall I am going to play a lot.
Which is fine, except there doesn't seem to be any tournaments to participate in.

In this blog post I want to talk about fixing that.

A big problem I had when I played QW was that even if I did participate in a tournament like Ownage I would be out of it after 2 - 3 weeks and then there would be nothing until the next season. The situation is much the same with EQL, sure you got your ten games to play but many teams are inactive and once you have played your games, that's it. I believe we could fix this by having more tournaments every season.
I want to be clear that I think having a big epic duel tournament such as Ownage which goes on for several months more than once or twice a season is unnecessary. The community is missing tournaments lasting for just a few weeks, tournaments which encourages activity while maybe not trying to determine the world's best player.

If we want people to always have official games to play (I want this) then we can solve it in a few ways. We can try reviving QWDL, however QWDL had several problems the biggest one being that most players played all their games in the first week. While this was great and showed an interest in playing it didn't allow activity to last and a league is about playing games regularly over a longer period of time. Once again we have the problem of having to wait until spring for a new season.
However with subsurface this might be a really interesting option.
The second solution is to have multiple tournaments running at the same time, if we start an Ownage tournament every month then we will have solved the problem but killed all excitement for Ownage and we need high prestige tournaments, tournaments with a lot of hype, people betting on goldrush and discussing who will win, drama.

I believe there are better solutions. We should continue to run the high prestige, drama filled tournaments such as EQL and Thunderdome however in addition to them we should start running smaller and shorter tournaments. Tournaments using more activity friendly formats rather than double elimination.
NQR is a good example of this, sure it was big and it was epic but the format is good for a smaller TDM tournament and activity friendly. Running a full NQR in four weeks should not be impossible. If we can have a TDM or duel tournament lasting only four weeks than we can have two, maybe three tournaments during autumn in addition to EQL / Thunderdome. For a low skilled player like me that means three times as many games as otherwise.
It also means that players can decide to skip participating in tournaments they do not have time for, lowering the need for admins to push for games to get played.

We can also stop using double elimination for every tournament. I have complained about this before but the problem with double elimination is that half of all participants will be out in three games or so. While it is not the most exciting format, using the swiss system (which is like double elimination but without anyone being eliminated) would allow new players to participate in tournaments and get to play games, gaining experience and becoming good.
Just starting to use group stages before double elimination playoffs in duel tournaments would increase the amount of games for most players by a lot, while not necessarily making the tournament longer than normal. If you know who your opponents are for your next three games then you should be able to get them played in two weeks if not one.

This is what I want to do this autumn, I want to run short tournaments using various activity friendly formats so as many players as possible get to play as many games as possible. As for those who are not sure if they have the time, it should not be a problem to not participate in a tournament because there will be a new one soon.

As for exactly what I will do, I am still planning but if you want to help contact me on IRC.