The crowning jewel of this series of announcements is the new Tournament Database. Even with the great work by Gilligan and others, the Tournament Hall of Fame started by Optimus Prime in 2008 has become too much to update manually. As a solution, our friendly web turtle implemented a brand new system for organizing our tournaments, with a built in feature for automatically granting medals. The database now reads tournaments on a per-tournament basis (as opposed to a per-organizer basis in our previous system.), so virtually everything has changed: from how we grant privileges to how you are recognized for your tournament wins and completions. Here is how the new system will work:
- An organizer will post their tournament in the Create/Join a Tournament forum to begin recruiting players.
- Approximately once a day, the Create/Join Director will peruse the forum to find any newly announced tournaments.
- Once the new tournaments are verified to be in compliance with the minimum requirements, they will be added to the Tournament Database as an Open Tournament and have a Type Label attached to the tournament.
- Being classified as an Open tournament provides players the opportunity to search for tournaments they wish to participate in based on the applied Label or by a specific organizer without having to look through all the tournament threads.
- Once your tournament is filled, mark it as [Full] and a Director will move it to the Ongoing forum. They will also change the tournament status to Ongoing in the database, which will automatically grant you tournament privileges to make your games. You no longer have to PM an organizer when your tournament is ready to start!
- When your tournament has finished, you will announce the tournament winner(s) and update the thread title to get it noticed by a Director. It will then be moved to the Completed forum, relabeled in the Tournament Database, and the Winners will be recognized within the Database. All medals will be awarded automatically, meaning you should get your medals within days, not weeks!
By listing the tournaments under this format, one click on a tournament title will let you easily see who organized the tournament as well as who won it. Within the database, you may quickly search to see all the tournaments by your favorite organizer or which tournaments your clan mates have won. You can narrow your searches to include those tournaments currently recruiting players, currently ongoing (to quickly find the tournaments you're in), or ones that have been finished. You will also for the first time be able to see which tournaments were abandoned, so hopefully this will provide some incentive for organizers to finish out their tournaments.
Tournament Director Task Distribution
Because of the large changes brought about by the Tournament Database, we have updated our Tournament Director Task Distribution List. The largest change is the addition of the role of Create/Join Director, currently filled by The Fuzzy Pengui. This Director will be in charge of verifying that each new tournament meets the minimum requirements for privileges as well as granting any exceptions to those requirements. ALL exceptions will go through this organizer, who will then grant the exception, deny it, or ask another Director for assistance. A record will be kept in the Tournament Directors forum of all exception requests for review by the Head Tournament Director for consistency and cases of appeals. By going through one Director for all exceptions, there will hopefully be more consistency in the decision making process as well as faster decisions. Other tasks in the list may become shuffled as we continue to adjust to the new roles without the large Hall of Fame updated weighing us down, so be sure to check it when you need assistance.
If there are any errors in your tournaments within the database, please post them in this thread. We'll get to them eventually, but we're all wanting a semi-break from the nearly continuous data entry and updating we've done over the past month. Do NOT send us PMs requesting updates to your old tournaments. Those PMs will just be deleted.
~Night Strike, Head Tournament Director
- Steelhorse, Lindax, The Fuzzy Pengui - Deputy Tournament Directors
