How do I make a beginner-friendly event ?

[TreK]

I've been contacted by a town and it's my first time working with this kind of organism. Where a bar's interest might lie in my attendees consuming their food, a mayor's interest lies in how much people of his town will enjoy the event.
This means that instead of putting the priority to top players and doing that whole starification thing where I try to get people to stay for the grand finals like a spectator sport, I'll have to focus the majority of my efforts on the beginners instead.
They're doing all the communication in their city so it will bring a bunch of new faces, I'm in charge of bringing the setups and top players, and make it worth their while.

So how do I do this exactly ? Do you have tips, or ideas that you'd like me to know about ? The town is okay with me running double elim but besides that ?

Here are the things I've thought about so far :
-doing grand finals as early as I can, so that people can play with the top players after it's ended. This might have the opposite effect : make people leave early. This would also mean I'd have to reduce the player cap, which means less people will get to play the game.
-doing pools in order to increase the amount of sets everyone is going to play : I don't even need to DQ anybody after pools, just make them play the game more. The hurdle I have to overcome here is that this would greatly increase the amount of time I'd need.
-bring more setups than are needed so that I can have more people freeplaying. I don't see a counterpoint to it besides the obvious "will I be able to do it ?" I can usually have people bring 10 setups which is way more than I need since most of my events have a 32 player caps, so this is looking good.
-tell my player base not to hold setups for too long when freeplaying and hope for the best.

This is especially difficult because it's going to be a PM event : they'll literally learn about the game when they're here.

So, yeah, here I am, brainstorming. Any help is appreciated :V

 

[PlanFive]

So, while I personally have little experience running tournaments for Smash, I do regularly run tournaments for board games and card games at my old school, that are catered more towards bringing up the new players than just focusing on who is the better player (ex. Friday Night Magic for Magic:the Gathering). I can give some of my opinions based on what I know from running tournaments for those kinds of games.

-doing grand finals as early as I can, so that people can play with the top players after it's ended. This might have the opposite effect : make people leave early. This would also mean I'd have to reduce the player cap, which means less people will get to play the game.

Depending on how much time you have, you could convince people to come earlier to play friendlies before the tournament starts. At my tournaments, sometimes players would show up early just to hang out and get some practice games in, it might be easier to get friendlies in with better players before people get into full tournament mode and the possible negative mindsets that come along with it.

- doing pools in order to increase the amount of sets everyone is going to play : I don't even need to DQ anybody after pools, just make them play the game more. The hurdle I have to overcome here is that this would greatly increase the amount of time I'd need.

Especially if the majority of your player base is more casual, and especially since that from what I picked up in your post that Project M is a new game for most of your playerbase, the best way to learn how to play a new game is to be actually playing the game. Card games like Yugioh and Magic use the Swiss format for their tournaments so that even the players that are not on top of the standings can get their games in just like the better players, and while a full Swiss tournament for Smash is not ideal due to time constraints, using pools to increase the sets that everyone plays is something that I can support.

If time is a problem, and depending on the size of the pools, you could run the pools as swiss pools instead of everyone playing everyone in the same pool, and use the records to set seeding for a double-elim bracket.

-bring more setups than are needed so that I can have more people freeplaying. I don't see a counterpoint to it besides the obvious "will I be able to do it ?" I can usually have people bring 10 setups which is way more than I need since most of my events have a 32 player caps, so this is looking good.

-tell my player base not to hold setups for too long when freeplaying and hope for the best.

If you have extra setups, you could assign one of two just for friendlies, so that if people wanted to play friendlies, then they will have a station to do so. Of course, the more sets that everyone plays, the less amount of time that people will have time to play friendlies.

Most importantly, the community is the most important thing to improve your community (that was not a typo). I've seen a lot of people switch from Yugioh to Magic because the culture of Yugioh is very cutthroat, while the culture of Magic is very expressive(?) in the sense that people seem to respect that people enjoy the game in different ways. The culture and the atmosphere will determine where in the casual-competitive scale your event will fall in

 

[Shaq]

Invite lotsa pretty girls, or if you got no girls, pay them

 

[Octagon]

A big tip is just invite anyone who loves smash. Regardless of who's good or bad, anyone who loves smash wants to test their skills. Have awesome food, great tvs, and a good group of people to make it memorable

 

[CHICO 93]

Were do you plan on doing this?

 

[Tristenwood7]

nice post dear!