Monthly Format
 

For anyone who used to play Classic, I'm sure you know we (usually) had a spar tournament on the second saturday of each month. We aimed to have 16 players in the big tournament, and we had "qualifiers" in order to narrow down the participants to that number. There were two types of qualifiers: location and summon spars. The summon spars were a 1v1 match between the first two players to pm the GC, while the location spars were 1v1 matches between the first two players to arrive at a specified location by the GC. The winners of the 1v1 matches were warped to the GC waiting room, and the tournament would start when we had 16 qualifier winners.

So, here's my question: should we continue this monthly format? IE: should we continue to use qualifiers, whether the old way or another way, or is there another format we could use?
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Thoughts:

Personally I never had an issue with the format we used, but from time to time we saw complaints (mostly from people visiting from other servers for the monthly.) The biggest issue were the 'location spars,' because the visitors wouldn't know where they were. If I recall, Night once told me the reason we had location spars was to give Classicians a solid chance of getting in their own monthly, rather than having the tournament filled with random visitors who don't play on Classic. Obviously this can look a little discriminatory, but only half the matches were location format (and its not like most of the spar arenas were that hard to find.) My thought is that we currently don't have many spar arenas on the overworld (just have supernicks right now,) and I don't know if we plan to have as many as we used to. So perhaps we might not even be able to do location spars, idk. The other big issue was the losers of qualifying matches getting into other qualifiers before people who hadn't gotten into a 'quali' yet. Personally I didn't mind the 'first come, first serve' mentality, but others had different opinions.

Any thoughts? I didn't mind the format, but I'm interested to see if what everyone else thought and if anyone has any ideas on a better format.

As always, any constructive thoughts are welcome.

I think that would have been better when there were more players on classic. However, the recent monthly's it was more of a hassle.

Also, new players didn't know where any of those location spars were.

Personally I like how the format is.

This might not be a most original or even well thought out idea but hey it's worth a go. What I was thinking is maybe do something like a dragonball z martial arts tournament and umm well have qualifying matches in an arena so that winners of spars move on to the main event or something. Hmmm a warp can be set up for people to enter and if there's a limit on how many can enter, well we could come up with a limit to how many players can enter or a time limit for the warp to be open.

I'm sure there are others with better ideas :)

I've had feelings for both sides of the matter. I liked the location spars personally. They were somewhat competitive to get to and I liked the different sparring arena settings. But as the others above have stated, no new person knew how to get there. Perhaps you can try it both ways and find which one had a better outcome or put up a poll.