As i'll be making my way back to normal life soon i feel like contributing to the community in some way. The most appealing and definitely one of the most important things that we lack at the moment are real rookie tournaments to introduce new players to the game. ~40 players signed up for Duelmania and ~30 teams in EQL should be a serious alarm to the community and I'd like some input on this topic to see what you guys think are the best way to pull this off and if some of the ideas i'm throwing around are even feasible.

Mode
1on1! (makes the most sense and is easiest to arrange, the only competitor would be various 1on1 modes like midair or free for all i reckon).

Rules
The foundation of the rules will basically be the same as Duelmania has currently.

Maps
What combination do you think would be best and why?
* The standard five maps
* The standard five maps + some custom maps
* Only custom maps

For custom maps i'm thinking maps like VDM3V3, Skull (although i don't like it ), Doomed(?), Ultrav(?) and whatever else one might come up with.

Tournament format
A playoff tournament with or without double elimination. Might be interesting to use group stages + playoff, but that depends on whether i can get my new website done in time.

I'm also considering if it might be worthwhile doing local newbie tournaments separated by each country and the winners face off in a European cup, but a requirement would then also be to find local admins who could find players on local websites. I think spamming general gaming forums is a great way to attract new/old school players and should be done to a great extent in conjunction with a tournament like this. We definitely need to step outside the ESReality sphere as that audience has been saturated long ago already. I actually posted about Duelmania on two Swedish forums the other day and got a few replies that were along the lines of "would be fun as there's a lot of nostalgia but everyone have 10 years experience...etc" which kinda trigged me.

Time span
~November - ~January/February? (not optimal but the best that can bed one with these preps :p)

Admins
Anyone interested?

Thoughts? Wanted to post this to stir up some discussion.

great idea!!!

UP THE IRONS!!!

The only sane map pool would be TB5. If they really get interested in QW they dont really benefit from playing some weird custom map tournament as their first QW encounter.

Other than that: Good Idea!

True, however using new maps would level the playing field between completely new players and the odd (very) old school player who might join and pick up the game "too quick". Just a thought...

What about the local tournaments? Worth the effort?

I ran a few local tournaments in .cz.

First, duel tournaments were surprisingly quite successful for some time (used 3 divisions system with groups), until later lots of players disappeared from the scene and I didn't have the balls to try to run another duel tournament.

Instead, we ran a mid-air tournament, that one was from my POV extremely successful, as lots of completely new players appeared and some of them outplayed old-schoolers quite nicely (midair is kind of "random" though).

However after that we immediately ran a povdmm4 tournament and informed the very same participants that a new tournament is on, but much smaller part of the players signed up for that one.

If you go for classic duel, maybe limit the map pool somehow - allow players to toss maps first, instead of choose maps first. That way every newbie can choose a map he does not want to learn just now and can be sure it will never be played in his games.

Yes and once the tournament is over, the players have "unnecessary" experience on redundant maps and are a lot worse on the maps that's actually played on a large scale.

I hear what you're saying and usually I probably would have agreed to 100 percent. However, if custom maps makes it a more fun tournament for new players I think its at least worth considering.

If I started to play a new game I think I would be more than happy with 5 completely new maps, new for me anyway, to start off with.
I wouldnt know if these maps were new or old and quite frankly it wouldnt matter either since they would be new for me.

What about just 3 maps? Aerowalk, ZTNDM3 and another custom map. This way you could promote it as "Download nQuake and play for free and legal". No dodgy "google is your friend" or "drop into IRC we will help you there". Aerowalk and ZTNDM3 wouldn't be wasted maps and they are already known to Q3A players. And there are a few custom maps out there which deserve some game play time.

hooray!
great news!

go for it!
besides the mods johnny_cz ran in cz, i think instagib is worth a shot.

Custom maps all the way and I am in. And by custom I do mean maps other than aerowalk, ztndm3, pkeg etc... Some fresh maps would be nice.

blessed and hate would be two recommendations from me. I had great fun on those maps in KTK or whatever tournament had them (can't remember).
ultrav is played so much on ffa. vdm3v3 relies heavily on trickjumps which are hard to do.

nix:

I've been playing bots only for like 5 years... does that qualify me as a rookie ? can I join ?

@ Spirit. Thx for the info. Didn't know about the user developed levels. So nevermind my suggestion =)

@Nooby:
You would probably beat most new players quote badly with 5 years offline experience. I guess some kind of policy needs to be set before tournament registrations however.



It's still interesting in the sense that it takes away one step for new players given that the custom maps are included in the nquake pack. On the other hand they need to dl the episode maps sooner or later anyway.

In case anyone is interested in hosting local tournaments or helping out in a general one then drop me a priv message or reply here. Already have one volunteer but will probably need more to ensure a quality tournament. Only requirements are discipline, knowledge of QW, cheerfulness and the ability to be service minded.