RTAR mapping of tables. Simultaneously allows virtual streaming of every table at a tournament, and allows projection mapping on tables. Finals uses the same system as a set of asset trackers for a holoprojection mapped game with full effects (think the rink show at hockey games or basketball games where the floor starts to morph).

I mean, if we're going deep-end...

I like the full 1:270 Star Destroyer idea, but why not kick it up a notch? Every participant brings two squads, one Imperial and one Rebel.

One group, as rebels, takes on an ISD on day one. The other group, as Imperials, takes on something like Home One. Switch for day two.

All participants get a special set of movement templates (aluminum?). Winners take home some serious dice--metal dice. Maybe copper (red) and brass (green)...

I would use 10% of the money for organizing it and 90% for the prizes! ?

It has strippers and Polar bears in cages above the tables. Although not both in the same cages. The strippers are not bear food. The TO would be in a Jawa suit and have to ride a unicycle permanently; he is only allowed to say "Utini!". Free beer, bacon and whiskey for everyone. Inflatable lightsabers provided on entry. Mark Hamil himself will be one of the table legs for the top table.

This is easy:


First Annual "Money Meets the Mouth" Invitational Tournament

Funds would be used to invite and/or coerce a select handful of players to attend. About half the field would be the players that are some of the proven best in the world (e.g. Heaver, Howard, Berling, Horny, etc.) while the other half would be those personalities on these forums who most rub me the wrong way by talking a huge game but are, I suspect, nothing by blowhard "Basement Aces" that have little to no real tourney experience or accolades. All those folks who have to talk like they're the smartest player in the thread can finally show us all just how good they really are! A certain so-and-so who kept telling everyone they were stupid for not seeing just how great the U-Wing was gonna be can finally show the rest of us just how good the U-Wing actually is. It would be an event poised for the glory that can only come from a talk-hard putting his money where his mouth is, though the humiliation of defeat would always be lurking as a possibility for the loudest blowhards...

Then I'd pocket the remaining $900,000 of course. I've got some old debts to Jabba...

I want a Chucky-Cheese style animatronic band, but its Boba Fett on vocals, Bossk on bass, IG-88 on drums, Dengar on lead guitar, and Zuckuss on a keyboard made out of 4-lom

The band is called "No Disintegrations"

So if we're being reasonable (some of these are either unreasonable or blows the budget), here's the core vision of what I would plan:

512 player event, 128 players win entry, 384 open entry. The 128 would be determined by the top 2 from each regional (or whatever way to make it work) with free travel/lodging. All 512 would be played in one day, 9 rounds. The top 128 would move on to day 2 (which is everyone except for 2 6-3 wins). Standings will reset, and these players will play 6 more rounds. The reason the standings reset is to eliminate any "free wins" some of the competition will get from having easy opponents round 1 and 2, giving them an edge throughout the tourney. Plus, the current FFG system makes it pointless for those at the minimum win count to continue playing day 2. The 5-1 and 6-0 players from here (14 total) will then enter a 16 player seeded bracket, with the top two seeds (the 6-0 folks) getting a first round bye. Single elimination through the bracket to determine the winner.

Now, if we say that the travel for each of the 128 averages $1,000 ($500 for local plane ticket or $1,000 for international, $100/night for 3 nights) that leaves us with $872,000 for the rest of the event. Now with each table requiring 4'x4' playing space, plus another 2' on either side for the players, that means that the play space requires 8'x4' x 256 = 8,192 sq ft, plus walk ways and the TO area, figure 12,000 sq ft hall. I don't know what something like that would cost, but let's just pretend for a moment that it's $1/sq ft/day, so for the 3 days (figure a day for setup, 2 days for tourney), that would be $36,000. Now with 256 games, I would want 128 judges for the first day - each one can stand between two tables and TO those two tables, plus figure you'll need some heirarchy of judges, so another 16 high judges, and a single master judge. Figure $10/hr for the judges and high judges, and $25/hr for the master (Alex Davy or Frank Brooks). And then a team of 4 for running the actual event and figure $15/hr. 9 Rounds @ 90min/round = 13.5 hours on day one, costing $20182.50 in labor, and day two will be 64 judges, 4 high judges, 1 master judge and still team of 4 for running the event for 10 rounds = $11,475, and figure another ~$5,000 in setup/tear down expenses, for a labor cost of $37,000, except half of that is going to be OT, so really figure a budget of $50,000 for labor. $786,000 remaining.

I would want equipment to stream all 7 of the elimination cuts, so 8 sets of equipment and teams, figure $2,000 for the equipment, and $2,000 for each team, so that's another $32,000 in cost. Short of prize support, that should be the main event. But we want all sorts of side events as well, especially on day 2, when 384 players are not in the main event anymore. I want all of those players to be returning for the second day for side events. Epic, Team Epic, Escalation, and Hanger Bays will all be run, with capacity of up to 128 players each. This means that every tourney should have a good showing of players as they'll have to be relatively evenly distributed throughout.

Now, for prize support... As I said, I want everyone returning for Day 2, and I want everyone playing everything out on Day 1. So, to begin with, everyone will receive a set of acrylic focuses - but to make them special, they're going to be your choice of faction themed (think Team Covenant) with Rebel Insignia / Imperial Logo / Something Scum on the boarder of the token. Those that get two wins will get a second faction, and five wins will net you a third. This should hopefully keep most people motivated to keep playing throughout the day. Returning day two will net you a set of acrylic evades faction themed. Making the top 16 in a side event will net you a second set, and top 4 will net you the third. For the main event, two wins will get you a second, and four will get you the third. By staggering the prizes out like that, it should prevent drop outs from the events. Note that the prizes will be distributed during the final (non-elimination) round, so you'll have to stay for the last match even if you're not playing for anything. So for tokens, it looks like I'm talking about 12,700 focus tokens, and 7,400 evade tokens, at a cost of 50 cents each, yields $10,050 in tokens - except due to the faction thing, I really need 5,120 of each faction, so really $15,360. The rest that aren't chosen will be placed at "The Wall." So that's great for tokens, but there will be dice and templates for the top tables, as well as alt arts for each round played (new ones at that!)... I'm thinking something like top 16 in the main event get dice (including the two that don't make the cut), top 8 in the side events. Top 8 in the main & Top 4 in the side get templates (including R1/2/3 rulers), dictating what event they were from (Epic/Team/Main/etc). Figure that can easily double the cost of the tokens above, for $30,000 in prizes. But I would really like the winners to not be selling their stuff on ebay, so each round of elimination that you play in, I'll give out $500, stating it's purpose is so you don't feel like you have to sell your stuff in order to make your money back... That's $43,000. Give the winners and extra $1000 on the side events, and $3,000 on the main event, $50,000. This shouldn't be enough money that anyone feels like it's a magic tourney that they're playing for the prize, but it should help reduce the sale of the limited edition stuff. I can't prevent the sale of all the other stuff, but that's okay. $674,000 remaining... Gosh it's going to be difficult to realistically spend all of this money.

Alright, so I mentioned "The Wall" above. Without being at Worlds, I expect it to operate very close to that - redeem tickets for prizes. As I said above, the unused focus/evade tokens will go on the wall, but there will be complete sets of faction specific target locks, all of the alt arts that were distributed, ships available for purchase, as well as limited edition mats (think system open style), professionally repainted ships, etc. I'll devote $50,000 for prize support on the wall. Even at retail, that would be over 3,000 ships, or 1,250 mats, etc, not to mention that none of this would be at retail. I don't want this to be a side event thing, I want the tickets to actually be worth collecting, especially since it's the only way to get the faction matching Target Locks. Tickets will be earned from painting competitions, themed cosplay, playing in each round, etc, and judges will have a set to give out themselves for "good sportsmanship" and stuff - and seeing as there's a judge for every other table, it should be easy for them to pay attention. There will also be a specific set of tickets handed out to each player that they cannot spend. Rather, they are designed for them to give them to their opponents or random people for being awesome. A single person can only redeem one ticket from a specific person (so you can't just swap all of them with your friend). The wall won't open until the second day, allowing players to accumulate tickets from day 1 to determine what they're most interested and set as a priority to buy first (In an attempt to minimize all of the target locks being sold out by the time you get tickets to buy your first set, etc). $624,000 remaining.

I think I'm officially out of ideas. Most of these aren't really ideas either, just a grand production of what is already being done with a few twists based on my personal preference on how I would run tourneys. I suppose the remaining amount would be donated in the winner's name to a charity of his choice :).

I wouldn't. I don't think you realize just how much $1M is

If I had that much spare cash, I'd just donate it to charity. (though I might spend a couple grand on making sure they start streaming the Coruscant Invitational :D)

I would run a 'draft' style tournament where each player opens card packs that determine what pilots and upgrades are available to them. The cards in the packs would be special alt-art versions made for the event (including updated FAQ wording). The packs would be designed to be anti-meta to really shake things up. For instance, if you get Soontir Fel in your pack it would not contain all of his standard build upgrades but it would have useful stuff for him.

The event would also include a team Epic tournament with full prize support and raffles.

I'd have an invitational, with all the past world and systems winners. The location would probably be Las Vegas. The format would be 2 matches where every competitor would fly premade lists (list A vs list B) and then switch (List B vs List A).

Each player would play against every other player.

These lists would be published at least a month ahead of the tournament so the players would have time to practice.

The ultimate champion of the universe would be determined by a play off between the two highest MOV with two different lists that were secret until the match. The player with highest MOV picks which list they would fly first (List C or List D). Then the two would switch lists.

Ultimate X wing champion of the universe would be one with highest MOV between the two C&D matches.

On 5/10/2017 at 0:27 PM, jonnyd said:

You want to spend a million dollars on a tournament, what's it look like?

First, I'd invite all of the world's strongest street fighters...

Idd have the upper half of several star destroyer's built on scale with X-wing and use them like tables for a running set of massive battles. The hulls would be sturdy and i'dd sell them afterwards at a premium. Gotta make money to spend money.

Pay everyone to play original 4, 5, and 6 ships, with thematic combos.

It would be fun to see Han and Chewie in the Falcon, with Luke and R2 in an X-Wing flying alongside.

First and foremost, I would get decent media coverage of the event, preferably bigger than local news. X-wing deserves more recognition. You could probably do this through hyping the event up. I'd anticipate this to be around 200k, including fancy venue hire for 2 days.

Then, I'd utterly change the format of the tournament by creating a tournament companion app that tracks which ships and pilots have been played and killed in each game, plus which ones were in the initial lists. Pre-registering your list a week early on the app is essential for the following reason:

1. The top 8 pilots (not ships) are banned from the tournament.

This gives players a week to revise their stolen list into something fun. Once the tournament proper starts (100 points, by the way), the game progresses normally for the first three rounds, with some ominous warnings from the app to "git gud or else". After the third round, the app looks at the data and removes from the competition the 10 most successful pilots again (i.e. those that were in the most winning lists), with a break for lunch for those players to figure out a desperate new list.

For the cut, the app chooses the 10 least successful ships in play (like that one guy with a Punisher...) and puts them in a pool for the cut to build a new list from overnight. In the morning there's an epic tournament for the 'losers', and the cut does its thing. Top 4 have to build a new list (in the lunch break) composed exclusively of one Punisher, one Starviper and one U-wing, with no faction restrictions.

As for prizes - that's where things get really fun:

Epic: The winner of the epic tournament gets a 3d printed Raider, made of polished aluminium to correct scale. Top 4 get a 3d printed Rebel Transport in the same style. Participation is a custom Grand Admiral Thrawn card with accompanying absurdly overpowered ability.
Swisse: Anticipating 8 rounds for such an awesome tournament. Participation prizes: each win has an incremental earning: 0 wins) Alternate art cards for every cameo in the Saga. 1 win) A pair of brass target locks. 2 wins) a pair of polished aluminium target locks. 3 wins) a pair of tungsten target locks. 4 wins) a pair of silver target locks. 5 wins) a pair of gold-plated tungsten target locks (probably electroplated). 6 wins) a pair of platinum target locks. 7 wins) 3 tungsten ship bases - never bump them out of place again! 8 wins) A T-65 X-wing 3d printed out of aluminium to the highest possible standard, with accompanying etched aluminium dial.
Cut: Anticipated 32 player cut. Make the cut) Pair of scissors. Top 16) A piece of paper. Top 8) A set of silver plated bronze maneuver templates and range rulers. Top 4) Laser-engraved silver alternate art cards for each of the top 4 player's entire list of cards. Top 2) A set of bomb tokens made out of Potassium (with safe, clear coating)...
Winner: All expenses paid trips to Worlds and the next eight system opens.

Bonus: Any player that flies a T-65 not named Biggs, A Punisher or a Starviper gets a complimentary nerf gun in order to "nerf" any JM5Ks, Shadowcasters or Sabines they come across.

Pretty much OPs idea, plus Gold Squadron stream (equipment provided) and with friendly competent and helpful judges for every single table.