Dakka Veteran
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Hey... while on the way to the nova open, me and a friend (both software engineering students in our 3rd and 5th years at college) were discussing what could possibly be an awesome system for hosting tournaments. I'm curious if anyone else thinks the idea is awesome, especially tournament organizers, because they would be the primary clients for the system.
The idea is, that everyone who wants to play in a tournament registers for the website. We would require a cell phone number, a name, an email, and game-specific information. This system would not be game specific to 40k (though that would be the focus at first) so that it would have use for things like magic the gathering. Once a player is registered, he would see a list of tournaments available to him that are being hosted on the site, and can register. He would be able to pay with paypal, and we would most likely charge a small fee ($1 or so) per person registering for a tournament. So a tournament with a $10 entry fee would cost $11 to register for.
When the tournament itself is set up, the organizer would be able to set up scoring information between rounds, with categories such as painting, battle points, and composition, and assign a weight to each of these categories as part of the overall. (If you don't want comp, just assign it a weight of 0 or something and it wouldn't be used). A seperate scoring system for single elimination style tournaments would be available, as well. The tournament organizer would have access to an overall control panel which would let him manually change pairings, though they would normally be automatically generated between rounds, based on the scoring and pairing systems you select when setting up the tournament. The first round would be random.
Now, the REALLY handy part, is that you would be able to submit tournament scores via SMS on your cell phone. Because cell phone is required for your profile, you can verify who is sending the results, and as long as the results from both players agree, you have an authenticated results set that the system could automatically accept. Once the round is completed, and everyone has submitted scores, the system would auto-pair the next round, and send an SMS message to your cell phone alerting you of what table your playing at, along with who your opponent is. If there is a dispute or a problem between submitted scores, a judge could be alerted of the problem, and manually talk to the players to get the scores and enter them in himself. Brackets could also be posted to the tournament website, which would show the pairings, as well as results, on a per-round basis.
Another advantage of a system like this would be that you could look up the player you've just played, and see his records in past tournaments he's played in, that we have records of. If the TO requires a submission of army list via email before the tournament starts, we could link his army list to each tournament he's played in, so you could see past lists used by all players involved in tournaments.
Advantages of this would be that:
1) you are able to see the results of all matches on-demand, so you can know who else is doing well, and who future opponents in future rounds might be.
2) If you want to follow a tournament while not there, you can keep in-touch with results as they happen, and not have to wait for news.
3) As a tournament organizer, the automation of collecting results and generating the next round would really help out. I've never hosted a tournament myself, so I can't really say if this would be a huge benefit or not, but I imagine it would.
4) It establishes a repository of past tournaments, as well as a repository of tournament lists winners have used in the past. Warhammer is sorely lacking this at the moment. If I want to see the results for mechanicon 2009, I need to go to that website. If I want to see results from DaBoyz GT 2006, I have to go to that website. If I want to see results for tournaments Stelek has played in, I have to manually search all the tournaments I can think of to see if I can see his name anywhere. This would centralize all information in once place for future reference.
As for tournament hosting, there would probably be free hosting (except the small surcharge per person) for tournaments under 20 people, an actual hosting fee of about $50 or so for tournaments 20-50 people, and $100 for tournaments upwards of 50 people. This would allow people to test out the system, see if they like it, with a smaller tournament, before actually going and trusting it to run a larger-scale event.
Just an idea we were spitballing in the 8 hour drive, but it seems like it might have promise. I'd be interested in community feedback, because it would obviously be a large undertaking, and if there is no interest at all, its obviously not worth our time.
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After the orbital strikes, Thunderhawk bombardments, Whirlwinds, Vindicators, fusion and starfire and finally Battle Brothers with flamers had finished cleansing the world of all the enemies of Man, we built a monastery in the center of the largest, most radioactive impact crater. We named the planet "Tranquility", for it was very quiet now. 