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« on: August 22, 2012, 01:46:14 am »
I think 16hr is way too short for 200 players, but well.
I have very little experience with non-isotropic play :-) but let's assume 20min is a reasonable amount of time for one game to be completed (I am not considering >=3p games here). Note that with that many players you also have to include time for players to report results, to find their opponents, etc (anyone who played in a big Swiss in of any game -- in my case, bridge and go -- knows that quite some time is always lost there). I'll group the games by two so that hopefully, if the first game is too long then the second one will be shorter (and you gain time in reporting, etc.). This means you can fit 8/(2/3)~12 double games (optimistically) per day.
I would just run a full 2-day, 24-round Swiss, cutting half of the field away after day one (cutting two thirds away may even be better for luck minimization but that would be quite unpopular amongst the players). The reason for prefering a Swiss is that I think 2 of 3 is just too random for a KO, and if you start having 3 of 5 then 1/ you don't have enough rounds (you're basically limited to 5 rounds) and 2/ you have to allow time for games that go all the way to 5 matches while that could be a rare occurence. For each Swiss match, a player can score 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5 or 2 points (victories) (so total 24 pts per day); each player is P1 for one of the games. A common trick in bridge Swisses to keep the second day reasonably interesting if there are players far ahead of the field is to limit the VP spread between the day-1 leader and the last qualifier to some preset limit (6-8 pts sounds reasonable to me); if the spread is larger then divide all scores accordingly to bring it back to that limit. Another advantage using this technique is that because of the somewhat aribitrary divisor, players have some fractional score on day 2 which serves as a tiebreaker.
Card selection (in particular, which sets to use) is really up to the organizer (I mean, if I want to run a Base Dominion tournament, I can do it. If I want to run an all-expansions Dominion tournament, I can do it.). Probably an interesting way to do so is to publish 12 card sets approximately 10 min before each round starts (so while the previous one is running!) and use isotropic-style veto mode.
By the way, another idea I would like to see experimented (but perhaps that is the subject for another thread) is komi-bidding: after the kingdom is revealed (but before veto, if used), both players secretely write down how many points (possibly a negative number, but that should be rare) they are willing to pay for the privilege of playing first. Moreover the price must be a half-integer, which avoids ties. The highest bidder plays first and his opponents starts with that many VP tokens (and a half :-)). If both bids are identical then P1 is determined by a coin flip (and the bid is still paid).
) I fall for it too even though this is a more than questionable choice... neither ambassadors being ever used. Anyways, Develop allows me to scramble a few extra cards into my deck for the win.