Friday Night on the Frontier - An event idea

With the announcement in the recent town hall of skins etc it sounds like we could be in a place where we can do something to attract players into tournaments from frontier mode, a casual event with minimal prizes that could encourage further the move to modern format ranked too.

Based on my memories of Friday Night Magic from my youth, a four round Swiss event that everyone gets to play in, done live so tournament splinterlands can be enjoyed as it should be with tactics (should they get added to frontier, plus items and spells in the future) and as a casual environment that people can chat between rounds.

From what I understand this would take a bit of dev work to create Swiss tournaments so I know it’s not something that will happen overnight but I feel like it’s required if we ever want to attract tournament players at a higher level to live events.

What is Swiss format?

A Swiss-system tournament is a competition format in which contestants are paired using rules designed to ensure that each competitor plays opponents with a similar running score without playing the same opponent more than once. Match pairing for each round is done after the previous round has ended and depends on its results. The winner is the competitor with the highest aggregate points earned in all rounds.

In this case though the idea would be those that win 4 games get x, 3 games get y. For example win 4 games and take home a starter pack and a cosmetic (avatar, skin, battleground effect), win 3 games receive a cosmetic which could be the same as the winner or different. The prizes could run for a “Friday night on the frontier” season of say 2 months. This also gives us a template for moving away from SPS as prizes.

How do we let everyone play?

With this being a live event and wanting it to be accesible to everyone the only option is to have multiple start times, I would say that having 3 start times - once every 8 hours would give everyone a chance to enter an event. To avoid the event being exploited though with multiple entry into all 3 events it would be necessary to give each account a weekly token to spend on which of the 3 events they wanted to enter (or have a flag on each account that has already entered one)

Perhaps giving a token to everyone who has a foundation draw during the weekly draw would be a way to distribute them?

A cost to entry?

I would hope with the low level of prize we can find a way to fund weekly events through the DAO but there may need to be some kind of fee just to introduce event entry costs to all players.

The number of winners of packs would be approximately 1 for every 16 players so 100 DEC entry would cover the cost if required.

I know @keeegs and @roguepatton have recently suggested different approaches to tournaments and there are definitely many reasons to rework the current format of live events to assist in getting some kind of esport mentality into Splinterlands tournaments giving streamers something to feature and players something to aspire to.

What do you think? Is a live Swiss event and a chance to meet up with fellow players something you would be interested in?