#PastebinMonday 11/28/2022 Reminder That You CAN Have Too Much of a Good Thing Edition

'Sup, doods!

My goal with each tournament is to take away at least one thing from each experience to apply to the next tournament. I think I made a lot of strides with the back end of organizing this tournament. I made a spreadsheet to control the text and graphics shown on the stream in real time. Is it everything I wanted? No, but it made controlling the stream much easier to pull off. That design philosophy I can definitely use going forward.

Actually, here was the real lesson I learned from this tournament: the tournaments run too damn long.

This past tournament, in particular, felt like a harsh reminder that you CAN have too much of a good thing. (Should've taken that message to heart when it came to Thanksgiving...) It was conducted over three stages and took nearly four months. Good news: the format definitively decides a champion. Bad news: the participants are burnt out by the end due to its length. How can I tell that the format is too damn long? I simply have to look back at the Classic Tetris World Championship—the 2021 one. You know, the last online one. That's the closest parallel I have to the kind of flow that I want for these tournaments. A tournament of that scale still managed to be in and out in two months. After three weeks of registration, it was one week of qualifying and six weeks of main and side tournament play. For consistency's sake, I am highly considering going to a similar format while also mirroring the established procedure we have for minor and side tournaments. I will need some time removed from this tournament to let cooler heads prevail before settling on a specific change.

Today's (permanent) extra streaming goals:

Goal #5: script and record footage for my Puzzle League tutorial series. I am in the middle of compiling all of the technical specifications common to the series and for each individual game. At this point, I feel like I will end up writing all of the scripts before filming anything. I am going into the tank to focus on this as much as I can. I have zero plans to stream from now until registration for the Tetris Attack tournament opens in February. Well, there is the Dr. Mario tournament in January that was just announced and I will restream, but that's about all I have planned.
Goal #6: clean up my own stream layout. I am brainstorming how I want the final theming to be. I probably want to lean into the Puzzle League aesthetic, but I have multiple ideas rattling around. I don't expect to get to this anytime soon.


That’s my life story for the week. Later, doods!

--Cards