Ngamer
Elite
Offline
aka Jon B
seen 7863 mj vids
Wisconsin
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Hey fellas, Ngamer here. As the man behind the past two Summers at t-e.n, and an avid participant in each of the four GameFAQs Contests... might I make a suggestion or two?
Lower the # of matches per day as the rounds progress. Wow, 128 contestants? This should be interesting, as I've never seen this type of contest pulled off with more than 64 before. Going 4 matches a day in the early going is a good idea, sure... but you really ought to scale that back as the tourney continues and the matches grow more popular and exciting. By the time you're down to the Sweet 16 (or at the VERY least the Elite 8), it really should be just one matchup per day.
Allow voting over AIM. Let's face it: people are lazy. There may be four matchups going on in one day, but unless a player is especially motived to support one of the contestants, he's probably not going to take the time to search for the matchups, open up a browser, log into his e-mail program, type in an address, etc etc. With AIM voting, the matchups are seen at a glance (always post them in your away message), and voted on within seconds.
Tanney, if you don't have broadband and wouldn't be able to stay online all day, I would strongly suggest that you find someone who can, to help you share the vote-collecting burden. Speaking of which, I found tallying the results in Excel to a major help. If you're going to be keeping track with e-mail, and someone else would handle AIM, it could be accomplished pretty easily as long as you both devote one cell to tracking the name of the player who cast the vote, along with who he choose.
Create a matchup/results topic. And don't let anyone post in it, other than those involved in that day's matchup. This is the way we've done things, and it just works so wonderfully on so many levels. First, it's a single location for people to check the entire history of the Contest up to that point, as well as find out the very latest news. But secondly, it's the perfect place for the contestants to make their own "campaign speech" and try to win votes, without spamming the board the death with new topics. Back at our 64-man only Elite, where everybody knows everybody already, these speeches weren't all that useful in persuading. But with 128 users, from across three different communities, I could see a few words here and there swinging plenty of votes.
Make the matchups highly visible. Oh boy, here's a tough one. There's no way everyone will have the time/ambition to keep them updated across 3 main pages. .. What I did was to just keep things up to date on the top of our message boards, but I'm not sure that, with this system and these Mods/Admins, that's going to be an option. But certainly it's worth looking into.
Allow people to predict how things are going to turn out. A hightened level of interest is anyways created when you know that, heading into an especially important matchup, your "bracket is on the line," as we say. wheat knows what I'm talking about. But, I wouldn't worry about this just yet... it would work best if you run through the first round, get it down to 64 players, and when that's over, take a short break. In that time (maybe 2/3 days), the 64 could be seeded based on their performance into a classic March Madness-style bracket. Then you could enter that bracket into bracketmaker, and have an automatic prediction system already in place.
Just a thought, and I realize it would take a little extra work, but I can pretty much guarentee it would pay off many times over in the end.
Alright, but in any case, good luck with this thing guys. Hopefully it'll be as big a success as we've experienced the past two summers.
Oh, and might I hazard an early prediction? I see Derek Clark pulling a clean sweep, taking home the title of world's most popular Karter in another dramatic finish (this time over Kevin Booth).
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