YOUR GAME GETS A TOURNAMENT! AND YOU GET A TOURNAMENT!

There's been a huge upswing in speedrunning tournaments in the past year or so. Ever since the SMW no Starworld Tournament and the Zelda 1 No Up+A tournament, tournaments have been springing up constantly. These tournaments not only showcase only the best a game has to offer, but also give new players a chance to go in swinging. The SMB3 Warpless Tournament had 5 runners that hadn't completed a run until the tournament had been announced, with a couple of those guys doing their very first runs during races! Also the GYS Tournaments have fielded massive amounts of brand new runners, each showing off what they're capable of doing even with only a little experience. If these tournaments have proven anything, it's that new runners can really breathe new life into a game, and that no one should be afraid to try and learn a game and compete, even within relatively short time frames.

A problem, at least in my mind, has shown itself with this new excitement about tournaments. How the heck are people gonna find out? One of the biggest missteps in my mind for the SMB3 Warpless Tournament was the spread of news. I'll probably go more into this later when I talk about the tourney after it finishes, (which is coming soon, still working on scheduling :P) but unless you followed me on Twitter or Twitch or happened to hear about it from someone else in the tournament, there wasn't any way for you to know about it. I even had some late entries from people who previously mentioned wanting to be in, but then not hearing about it again until it was almost too late, as well as a few people saying they wish they would have heard about the tournament in order to join. Other tournaments that spring up have had to rely almost entirely on word of mouth within the community, which even for people that try and follow speedrunning can be very difficult to do. Every time I think I know about all the tournaments going on, I see another one pop up that I had no clue about.

I think the GYS tournaments didn't have to deal with this problem, for obvious reasons. If you're involved with speedrunning you almost surely know about SRL, so finding the information about the GYS races and subsequent tournaments was just a couple clicks away. The Mystery Tournament, while structured slightly differently, also doesn't suffer from a lack of knowledge because they have their own website and twitter presence, as well as news passing through SRL and just about anybody who enters it, which at this point has become a massive number of people.

So what have I been blabbering about for three paragraphs for? Well, hopefully I've led you to the conclusion I've made. There is likely a strong need for a speedrunning tournament hub. Now what exactly this hub would be is something that I haven't really been able to pin down; there are a number of decent solutions, each with their own pros and cons. I think the three that I'd like to consider and discuss would be as follows: a speedrunning tournament website, a spot on SRL for speedrunning tournaments, or a speedrunning tournament Twitter account.

Let's talk about the first option: a speedrunning tournament website.

Pros:
Centralized spot for any and all tournaments
Potential to add tools for tournament organizers and participants

Cons:
Could become cluttered if lots of tournaments going on
Maintenance, hosting, design, etc. could potentially turn into a massive headache
Initial use and continued use would be very dependent on tournament organizers knowing about, and utilizing the site. Could become dead if it doesn't "catch on"

Next up: a spot on SRL for speedrunning tournaments

Pros:
Easiest for people to find, especially if they only know about SRL and don't know much about tournaments
Tools for tournament organizers and participants

Cons:
SRL would likely have to do most of the heavy lifting, which is not something we should just force them to do lol
Could become dead space on the site if not utilized, although the risk of this would potentially be smaller
If an overhaul of the system is deemed necessary, it'd have to be something that's discussed with SRL to be sure they still are on board with whatever changes are desired

Finally: a speedrunning tournament Twitter account

Pros:
Super easy to advertise and promote upcoming and ongoing tournaments
Quick blurbs in twitter feeds would be easy for people to find out where to get more information instead of having to scroll through a huge list
Potential for biggest risk of becoming unpopular, but not as big of a headache to manage

Cons:
As mentioned, the potential for this to be unpopular is probably the strongest out of the three options
Not a great solution for showing organizers and participants potential tools they could/should use
If extremely popular, could clutter people's news feeds thereby missing the point of being "quick occasional blurbs" about tournament happenings

Full disclosure: Outside of the Twitter feed, I would likely have VERY LITTLE to offer in terms of making these things a reality. My skills with programming and web design are EXTREMELY limited, so any of this would have to be handled by somebody else. I don't really want to have to tell someone "Hey, I came up with an idea make it all happen for me, thx." but if this is something that people want, then that's the route it's gonna have to take. Another strong risk of this is just the fact that the tournament craze may die out just as soon as it popped up, in which case any of these solutions will become essentially useless. However, it doesn't seem like that's the case, as I mentioned I'm always hearing about more and more tournaments showing up. This is something I think the community could really benefit from, as this could give more people the opportunity to not only join tournaments they would be interested in but would otherwise never hear about, but also as an opportunity for people that want to start a tournament but just have no idea how to get started or how to spread the word.

I'll likely throw out a google doc poll thingy in a couple of days to judge reactions based on this. There's likely pros and cons that I haven't thought of, or maybe there's an even smarter solution that hasn't even occurred to me. Please let me know your thoughts/concerns/questions etc. Also thanks if you read all this lol

TL;DR: Lots of tournaments, almost too many to keep track of, let's keep track of them all maybe
Glib