I had a blast at this tournament as well! I wore an orange shirt, lol. Thank you to Shiloh for organizing it and therefore sitting out on the tournament you wanted to play in (I believe they call this 'taking one for the team').
Highlights for me:
-Playing with a bunch of awesome people!
-Winning one of the base card sets in a raffle - love the curse art with the raven!
-Going 4-1 in prelims, though that was mostly due to getting lucky and not having to play any games with shark, Robz, and ednever
My loss was in a game with goblue (who came in 2nd I think)
-Winning a game by 1 over an opponent who had purchased a curse early to ambassador, and ended with it still in deck
To top it off, his last turn he played salvager with curse in hand, but needed to salvage a card with some value in order to obtain a province.
-Watching that final game! Went right down to the wire, and really everyone was in it at the end. It was just a really bizarre kingdom.
For suggestions on the tournament format, I like the idea of giving weighted points to different places. I was going to suggest 8-5-2 or 6-3-1 for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, but that was mainly because it was either the cost or point value of province-duchy-estate and I thought that was cool
But 5-3-2-1 would actually give more significance to a 1st place finish, which seems a requirement given that's the real goal. For breaking potential ties, I've seen before where you keep track of the cumulative difference in points between your score and first for your game. So those who were closer to 1st point-wise are favored in the event of a tie. While this may actually place a slight disadvantage on prosperity games where the spread might be bigger because of colonies, it seems mostly fair, and is after all only for breaking ties.
Really, so glad I went to this though. It exceeded my expectations in the fun department, which were already pretty high.