How many people is too many if we have 4 WiiUs for a small business hosted Tourney?

[SharpEdge]

I work for a business in the Chicago area and I've been charged with advertising our Smash 4 WiiU tournament. They have hosted tournaments before but have primarily stuck with Facebook to get the word out. I've helped the business expand to advertise places like Reddit and now they expect me to try to advertise our tournament is as many places as possible.

We will have 4 WiiUs available and a relatively small venue. I have a paranoia that if TOO many people show up. (We've been in the news a bit lately.) We won't be able to manage a tournament comfortably and in a reasonable amount of time and then everyone who shows up will hate on our business and then we'll get bad press and *deep breath*.


I will be posting the event here as soon as I have some details hammered down. I'm curious if I should announce a player cap or something early?

 

[BombsOnBombs]

Answer these questions for me and I can kind of better help you out.

1.) Do you have "enough" seating and tables? How small is the venue?
2.) How long do you have to run the whole thing? Is time a constraint?

These two things are the only things I'd be worried about. If you have enough room and can fit people in chairs, you can easily accommodate larger numbers of participants by offering some kind of incentive to people who bring their own setups. (WiiU + Game + TV.) Usually the way Smash tournaments work is there is a venue cut and a pot cut. So if you charge $10 for the tournament, it's generally accepted that $5 goes towards the prize money and $5 goes towards paying rental for the venue. If you want to give people incentive to bring setups, you can offer to waive venue fees for those who bring complete setups. After a certain point you will have to turn people away since so many people will bring their own stuff, but you can do it on a first-come-first-serve basis until you've got enough equipment to get everything running smoothly.

If you have a strict timetable you need to stay within, it shouldn't be hard to reach once you've got enough equipment. A fairly well-run tournament can be done in under two hours. Use some kind of tournament bracket website or tool to make things easier for yourself. (I use http://www.challonge.com/ personally.) I've run multiple tournaments within business hours pretty easily. The key to doing this is to make sure that people aren't using your tournament setups for friendly matches, and to keep people moving.

 

[MrJeff]

A local group that puts on tournaments occasionally here always announces a cap in advance. If you end up being forced to turn people away, the cap lessens the blow because you warned them about that in advance. But if you find out that you can handle more people after all, no one is going to be upset about you lifting the cap. Also, if people are concerned they will get cut out because of the cap, just offer the ability to preregister to secure their place.

 

[SharpEdge]

Thanks for the tips. I think we can comfortably keep any amount of people entertained at our business entertained between rounds/after rounds. We also are considering waving the entry fee for anyone who brings there own WiiU to expand how many players we can handle. We will just have to buy more copies of the game.

I think at the moment a soft cap of 64 players will work out. Our prize is pretty basic at the moment, considering it's a midnight launch tournament, we just have the Smash 4 Controller Bundle. We are considering making that a cash pot.

It's just at the moment it's a lot up in the air and use buying any copies of the game for any WiiUs that are brought up will be a gamble, but we might raffle off any excess copies at the end of the tourney.

 

[BombsOnBombs]

If it's a release tournament, you should have no shortage of people who have copies of the game there.

 

[SharpEdge]

If it's a release tournament, you should have no shortage of people who have copies of the game there.

Oh we are launching the game AT the midnight of launch. We cut a deal with a local gamestore to get copies of Smash WiiU a few hours before midnight.

I imagine most people will be waiting midnight to get their copy so people bringing copies might be unlikely.

 

[BombsOnBombs]

Oh. I mean, there are probably some people who will have Japanese copies of the game too. I'd get an idea of that ahead of time, 'cause things will run way better if people bring it.

 

[Lex__]

Oh. I mean, there are probably some people who will have Japanese copies of the game too. I'd get an idea of that ahead of time, 'cause things will run way better if people bring it.

It gets released in US before japan

 

[Gamers_Gauntlet]

We just did a tournament today with approximately 17 people on 3 set ups and it took quite a few hours. With a dedicated TO who's getting on players to get to their matches and keeping people from playing friendlies on tournament set ups will help make the tournament run smoothly and quickly.