Online Tournament Tips and Tricks

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BenWeiner27
Wakka
Posts: 214
Joined: Mon Jun 19, 2017 9:30 pm
Location: Minneapolis, MN

Online Tournament Tips and Tricks

Post by BenWeiner27 »

After running the online mirror of WAIT (WOKE) this past weekend and due to the large amount of online events that are to be played in the coming weeks, I figured that it could do the community some good were I to share what I learned after TDing the event. Mike Bentley's post from just under two years ago was super helpful in getting me started with the DOs and DON'Ts, but that being said, online events have changed since then and as they become larger, the methods in which they are executed also change. At the same time, some points from this post will be redundant with Mike's post in hopes of nailing home some key points. While the WAIT Online event was not flawlessly ran, we were able to fit 11 games in for all 24 teams, plus two rounds of a final series in about 8.5 hours, which I personally consider a success.

Splitting Servers
Splitting teams into a server for each pool went rather well as barring the exception for one player, we had zero connection issues throughout the day. The following are a couple of tips that I found to be helpful for setting up individual servers:
1. Use a server cloner. For WAIT online, I used the Xenon Discord Bot which helped me clone the server and I kid you not, exactly three days after the tournament, Discord unveiled the "templates" feature which makes the cloning process a lot easier. Regardless of which way you go, using a cloner will save you a significant amount of time as you only have to do all of the setup work once per each type of pool.
2. Use my templates! Assuming they work for your format, I can save you a lot of time if you use the templates linked below. For WOKE we used two kinds of pools, one was a pool of 6 teams playing a 5 round, round robin; the other was a pool of 8 teams with a carryover match from the morning (giving us a total of 6 rounds in the playoff pool). Both links can be found below for tournaments looking to use similar formats. Hopefully I can save you some time when it comes to setting up the servers.
Pool of 6: https://discord.new/y28JugcM9z3H
Pool of 8 meant for playoffs: https://discord.new/atAWuaKSWRFw
If you use a different format for a pool, please consider making a template of it and posting it here to help out future tournament directors and save them so time.
3. Have all players join all playoff servers before the tournament begins. This will make re-bracketing significantly faster as you will not have to wait for teams to join playoff servers, but instead you will be able to assign roles and then just kick the members that will not be playing in that pool. For this to work well, it is critical that you have players set their nickname to their real name and affiliation. Most of the time lost during the re-bracketing period was due to players not following this instruction thereby creating a lot of extra work for me as I try to figure out who is who.
4. Set up a Hub server for general tournament discussion, check-in, tournament wide announcements, and finals (if your tournament runs them). This helps keep individual servers' #general channels free from side conversations as those should mostly be reserved for people having permission problems or other technically difficulties.
5. Make sure you have players ping you if they need you to fix a channel permission issue or if they need anything else from you. We had 8 different servers for WOKE 4-5 of which I was checking at any given time. It becomes difficult for the TD to see that you are having problem unless you ping them.
6. If you choose to play them, conduct finals in the Hub server. You can make the permissions such that everyone not on one of the two teams or a staff member can connect but not speak. This lets teams who are finished for the day, but want to watch some really good quizbowl have the opportunity to tune in as opposed to were the finals played in the upper bracket playoff server.

General Stuff
1. This was a pretty big point from Bentley's post, but I want to reiterate it: have moderators check their mics before beginning. This was something that I had meant to do, but forgot about and as a result we had at least one moderator who kept cutting out. Just have each mod pull something up on the archive and have them read you a tossup the night before. This can help prevent delays from occurring on the day of the tournament. Oftentimes, cutting out issues are simply due to mic sensitivity being too low in Discord, however it can also be a physical problem with the mic, so it helps to get that figured out the night before (or even earlier).
2. It 100% definitely helps to have a separate person taking care of stats. I had Carsten help me out with stats which allowed to me to focus on fixing permission issues, prepare for re-bracketing, and basically respond within 30 seconds if anyone had a problem. While it is probably physically possible for the TD and stats person to be the same, I would 100% recommend not doing this. The worst case of having a separate stats person is you, as a TD, find yourself bored, which is generally a good thing.
3. Stack your fastest moderators in the championship pool, then spread the remaining moderators across the remaining consolation pools to try to create uniform speed amogst the consolation pools. Essentially, you want the championship pool to finish first in order to make playing a final possible. The entire day is going to feel like a race against the clock. I feel like anywhere from 8-11 games can be played in a day (before finals) depending on the difficulty of the set. By having your fastest moderators reading for the best teams, the championship bracket will likely fly through the afternoon compared to the lower pools, which is good. While the other pools finish, you now have time to play a final which the other pools can spectate once their matches finish. For WOKE, the championship pool ended up half a packet ahead of the first consolation bracket and a packet and a half ahead of the second one. This gave us plenty of time to play the finals which ended at the same time as the second consolation bracket.
4. 24 teams is probably the maximum number of teams you can run an event like this in one day without things falling apart. Due to the reduced number of tournament formats that can fit in the reduced time constraints of an online tournament, and the fact that you, as a TD, can only be fixing so many problems at once, I feel that any tournament that has more than 24 teams will not run nearly as smoothly as a tournament with 24 or fewer. I would advise against TDs trying to run online tournaments with more than this.

Those are my main takeaways from last Saturday. If I think of any additions, I will be sure to add them to this thread, but these were the big ones.
Ben Weiner
Wayzata '20
Minnesota '24
VP of Tournament Direction, PACE
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