Some information is outdated as some changes have been made, but I can't be bothered to fix them.On the 31st of March
The Tournament Organisational Group thread has been posted on FSE forums. It is a group of 4 Head Organisers, organisers, referees, mappers, graphic designers and server providers who are all listed on their thread, but in addition to that they have also team captains which are not listed. Its goal is to prevent spam of low quality tournaments in the community and instead have well timed and well organised tournaments. I think this is a good idea and that spam of shit tournaments is a problem, but I have been sceptical of this group ever since I've heard it exists.
Eventually as I wanted to host a tournament I find out that things are even more dire than I thought they are. As I would acquire more information on TOG meanwhile negotiating with them when I simply wanted to borrow a server.
Here are my points to what is wrong with TOG:1. It is a cartel group trying to maintain monopoly over hosting tournaments: What I do not agree with is how this group operates. Something that you will not find on their thread is that everyone associated with this group (names you can find on their thread plus team captains, apparently 10 of them) is automatically forced to boycott any tournament organised outside of TOG. That would cause the tournament to have a really low attendance and would not be considered a community competitive tournament by the TOG. That could cause split of the community one side saying TOG is actual representation of the best community has and others saying that host outside of TOG are. Kind of like in middle ages when half of the time two people claimed to be king of the same Kingdom. Even though it might currently seem TOG with 10 team captains and others associated with the group represent the community what they claim too and think they are leaders of the community they clearly aren't. They might be majority of the competitive scene but even then am I supposed to believe every member of the each team was on board and fully understood what this cartel is? I don't think anyone should have the audacity to think they can monopolise tournament hosting in a community. When one of the head organisers (who's name is written first on the list and that has posted the thread btw) is a forum moderator who has been known for being power hungry at least in the past and when thread says nothing of recruitment of the team captains and boycotting it comes out really shady. And I can with doubt say this is a cartel even though not everyone involved with it might be aware of it. Voluble, Herishey if you wouldn't mind sharing our steam conversations on the forum as evidence for boycotting thingy that is conveniently missing from TOG thread, that would be great. Else there are other means for someone to find the truth.
pm me lul2. It seriously hinders the creativity of tournaments: You might think just join them 4Head, you get everything you need, its so easy. To host a tournament under TOG you must take their map, their server, their admins, their rules and you are also given exact date and time when the tournament will take place. I personally was able to negotiate the date because captains agreed on a different date, map and some changes in rules but I am not so sure everyone else would be so lucky. And about the format of the tournament as far as I understand 4 head organisers propose a few tournament types and captains vote on what they want, I believe it is possible that head organisers deny your tournament idea without a vote from the team captains. This means tournaments lose any kind of creativity outside of minds of head organisers. Sometimes you can't know if something is a bad idea until you try it. First groupfighting tournament, NWEC were made as an experiment by Hekko, nobody was sure that it was a great idea, my point here being is head organisers nor team captains know what is a good idea and what is a bad idea for a tournament.
3. It makes it harder for community members to join the competitive scene and makes competitive itself stale:Group is a few days old and it has 10 team captains signed. Which means it is likely more captains might want to join TOG. Eventually making it 16 which is team cap for all the TOG tournaments. Firstly team cap is beyond stupid. Nobody will care if you came 10th or 7th, you didn't win so having brackets with numbers of teams that aren't 2^n n€N (sorry disease) is completely okay. Recent tournaments have been 16 teams cap and always full. That clearly implies there is more teams willing to play than 16. So how does one join a tournament when there is 16 captains signing up within 10 minutes of a thread being posted. And these captains also won't be willing to take players in their team that they don't like or think are bad. With pretty much constantly same team captains you get same teams competing in 2 tournaments a month hosted by TOG. Sounds pretty boring to me.
So what do I want them to do?I want them to change the way they operate in order to achieve their goal. I like connecting of organisers, mappers, referees and graphic designers in order to help each other. But I want them to drop boycotting tournaments hosted outside of TOG and recruitment of team captains. Instead when tournament is hosted they can post on the thread and offer help to the person hosting. Even if they go on with this boycotting cartel they can't completely stop other tournaments, there will be people who won't know about TOG and host tournaments and won't be willing to cooperate with TOG, so you can never fully stop spam of bad tournaments, you can just make them worse by them having low attendance and being kind of irrelevant. So boycotting will decrease them amount of those but so would just offering help and cooperation without blackmailing to boycott. Which method is more successful is debatable. Maybe a example of positive reinforcement being more successful than negative reinforcement is drugs. In Portugal drugs were legalized and drug users were considered patients that needed help instead of being criminals and the drug use has halved, meanwhile we can all see how well sending military in the streets works in South and Middle America.
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