Well with success there is always downfall. Unfortunately there was a good few problems with the tournament, but nothing too major that couldnt be sorted out with a little tinkering.

I have been asked by a good few people to run something like this again, and I promise I will at some point. I am away all summer and when I come back I will see what sort of interest is there for me to run another.

What I would like people to do is put down some suggestions that they think would make the next tournament better, anything you like but please dont start flame posts. This is to help me improve the next tournament and also for anyone that wishes to run a tournament like this.

Cheers
Crak

Gratz again for getting it together crak. Was great fun to take part in and a good laugh to spec as well.

As for constructive crtiicism.... Next time I think it might be a good idea to have squads, rather than teams, assigned. Attendance was generally pretty good but if teams have a spare player or 2, matches are much more likely to go ahead on time and without the need for ringers.

The system of qualification from the groups could've been a little better. Having a 3rd placed team guaranteed a semifinal place, for example, seemed a little unintuitive and possibly unfair. With hindsight, I think 4 groups of 3 wouldve worked better than 3 of 4.

As for the scoring method on the group stage, I think the easiest and fairest way to do it in future is to award 1 point for a win, whatever the margin. Then if points are tied at the end fo the group, rounds won and/or round difference can be used to seperate teams. This is quite a small issue tbh but could avoid some difficult mathematic problems to do with qualifying (as we discussed before).

The only other issue that could need attention is the issue of team balance and how proactively this needs to be enforced. Obviously if people are left to form their own teams then we would end up with 2 or 3 very strong teams which wouldnt be good for the competition. However, giving some control over team makeup to the teams themselves would add to team spirit. Finding the balance with this one could be tricky though.

All in all it was a great comp though mate. I'm really looking forward to the next one already

Team balance? What kind of a cup would that be? Imagine having teambalance in a soccer or a hockey cup.

well tbh the most interesting games are never whitewashes, there the rly close slog your guts out ones, team balancing ftw!!

Yeah, some of the teams were better than some others, but forcibly making the teams thoroughly balanced might be a bit too much. After all, the basic idea of the tournament was the Nations and teams consisting of them, more or less.

But yeah, it might be a good idea to have some sort of balancing in the next one (there should be more things like this, that's for sure), it'd make it a tad more exciting. The most important part is the fun, after all. That being said, it's important for teams to feel like a team, not like a group of people put together without fitting together, so I agree with DJ overall.

The team sizes were good, not too much for the team leaders to handle and not the typical match sizes, either.

I really enjoyed the cup and I'd like to see more of these, in this form or another. Thanks again for making this happen crak, as well as others behind the curtains.

about the balancing: well, what about adopting the ladies night criteria. Just limit the maximum amount of hlstatsx-points per team, or average KPD. or something like that.

tournament in general: if you're one of the unlucky not high-skill teams you only get very little out of the tournament i think. If we're adopting the squad idea (which i think is good) then even less. So an increase of matches in the first stage of the tournament would be favourable imho.

regarding balancing, it all depends on the nature of the tourney I suppose. Something like this nations cup, it wouldn't be right to balance it up, as it's to find out which region was made of win.

If we're going to put differentl teams together, there has to either be some sort of link between the players, or it should get some sort of balancing treatment I reckon.

I think it would be better if you let people have more say in who is in their team. Although it presents the problems of people forming up into 'super teams', remember that people are still limited to playing with people from their own country/county. Also, I noticed the teams with the best players didn't necessarily always win. It's an advantage surely, but I saw tactics trumping skill over and over which levels the playing field somewhat.

I think there has to be some limits, but I'm not sure to what extent. I think people will naturally just play with people they like rather than who will 'optimise their chances of victory'.

Anyway, I've said this a million times but.... well done Crakishadow for organising this! Not an easy task, it would have been easier to herd cats, glad you persevered though.

Well in reading all this, I have come up with a solution (I believe) to the balancing situation

With the nations cup idea killed for at least the next 6 months, I think the next tournament should be based on teams formed by the people themselves. However as most have mentioned, this presents a problem where people will team up to form super teams. And this is where my solution comes in.

There are a select few in this clan who are deemed the 'oh fuck I dont want to play against them' Namely your talking agent ,ares, ked, queed(sometimes), ntrailz etc. So if they are all willing to play in the tournament, make them the team captains and ask them to form a team out of who they want. Therefore we dont get all the good players on the one team yet still allowing the formation of teams with friendship in mind.

So to put that in simple language. The better players in the community are all in seperate teams, not necessarily team captains, and teams are formed by them. Obviously tweeking would come in with regards to allowing certain players together as you cant seperate all the good players, but it would be a solution to the team balancing.

With regards to DJ's point of the points system, my system was a little eratic I must admit but thankfully it did work. With a few more teams the system will be tweeked for the next tournament.

Another point made was team size. I think the 4v4 arena style worked very well and it would be hard to stray from that. With the amount of applications recieved for the tournament it only just fit the amount of teams. However in the next tournament people have mentioned increasing team size, I may consider increasing team size to 4+1 ringer. Then if both teams have 5 players present on the day allow them to do a 5v5 instead of the 4v4. This requires a good bit of thought but may be something to consider.

Gotta say i loved the arena format of the matches, very good choice of game mode for the tournament - the matches were fast and intense