Hosting tourneys can give rise to all sorts of trouble, so I figured I'd post a little guideline here!
First off, find a silent channel, like PT or RH
Secondly, select a day and a time where there's plenty of time for you to finish hosting it.
Tournaments can last very long sometimes (I recall one tournament lasting over 6 hours!)
Once you've decided this, post the announcement!
In this announcement, you need the following things:
- a date. Post the actual day, not using sentences like "next monday"; exact dates.
- a time. it's best to post the time in GMT. http://timezoneconverter.com is your friend
- a scheme. If it's a scheme that's commonly played, you usually don't need to post a link to a download page, but for more obscure schemes, be sure to attach an official scheme.
Next up, what to use?
You can enter the channel using W:A, snooper or mIRC. W:A is a bit clumsy, since the chat scrolls up and it's easy to miss a PM this way.
snooper is good, but keep in mind that might not be able to see messages sent from mIRC.
mIRC is also good, since there's a seperate window for each PM, but keep in mind that people on snooper can't read your announcements! (for this purpose, it's perhaps better to ask someone to help out here)
Now we go to the actual tournament!
Make sure you're in the channel in time, preferrably earlier (about 5 minutes or so); be sure to have MOD somewhere in your name.
Make sure that signups are still open by the time the announced time has arrived! I've seen it happen a few times that signups closed before the announced time, which meant people that arrived in time didn't get to play!
While you're in the channel, either set a timer to announce the tournament (with mIRC for example: use /timer 0 [amount of seconds between announcements] /say *announcement*)
If you don't have mIRC, you can always ask for someone else to type in announcements; there's no shame in having help! (It's what I did at first before I used mIRC)
Make sure that the only way people can sign up is by sending you a private message!
This is good for 2 reasons:
- private messages have a different colour in W:A or open in seperate windows in mIRC (not sure about snooper, can anyone tell me?)
- You can ignore the general chat! Which is what you should do from now on.
There are a few ways to ensure random pairing.
There's using little cards and a hat or a little box. Shuffle the cards and you have randomisation! (use the front to write down names of players and use the back to write down the people that eliminated them and in which round this happened!)
You could also use notepad or excel: make sure you save in between in case of a crash!
You can generate a random sequence using this site to pair: http://www.random.org/sequences/
Then there's a pairing tool at the worm olympics site: http://wormolympics.com
Don't waste time on saying things like "I'm going to announce the pairings now!"; just announce the pairings!
It's alright if you're competing yourself, as long as you're impartial with the pairing.
Announce the pairs, one line at a time.
Don't spam the pairings, just post them once! If you spam them, it's possible that Chanserv will kick you.
After you're done announcing the pairings, stick around for a few minutes (if you're playing) and ask if everybody knows who they're playing. This will save you from a headache later on!
You can wait till all games from earlier rounds are finished before you announce the next round or you can arrange games if both players are back while some games aren't finished. Make it up for yourself.
But it's possible that if the bottom half of the brackets is much quicker, they have to wait extra long for the finals. Make up your own mind for this
I think that's about it! If there any problems, post them here and we can add solutions to that in this post.