So here is my concept for the TSC Super Online Sonic Competition Extravaganza. Comments/criticism plz. Note that all this is tentative and drastic revisions can be offered.
The centerpiece of the competition will be the subsite on TSC, on which registrations will be entered, competition emu movies will be submitted, (importantly IMO) pre-competition notice emails will be sent, rankings pronounced, smack talked, etc. I'm thinking right now that all events will be offline and emu recorded, as online has homoqueer lag and pretty much shuts out most potential competitors in 2-player events.
First will be the registration and qualifying period, from roughly the time the competition is launched until 2 weeks or so later. Before this time, we will ideally have partnered with other Sonic sites (perhaps from the ranks of TSS, SClassic, SCD, whatever - though of course we know stadium and cult still can't play) to promote it; all else fails, I can splurge $10-15 for ads on a handful of popular sites, since they all seem hungry for $$. Those who want to join the competition will be able to either link their competition status to their existing TSC account, create one and link it simultaneously or just join the competition if they don't like us. After registering, before they are recognized as a competition member they will be required to qualify by submitting something trivial like a 32sec run of Green Hill just to prove that a) they know the ropes and b) they're relatively serious about actually playing.
After qualifying, they can create or, with an invitation from the creator, join teams. A team can also be recognized as the official team for a particular website community, for which a certain level of support should be self-evident from visiting it; a topic on their forum in which a team has congregated won't suffice. By way of comparison, SoaH's SO team this year would not be recognized as it was hardly possible to notice they existed, whereas TSS's would for having prominent support by the site administrators (ignoring the fact that nobody showed up). Teams are composed of 3-5 members at their discretion, and may choose who competes in which event at will, with a few restrictions: 3 player teams may not have any player compete in another event if he would exceed one other player's current event count by 2, 4 players if exceeding 2 players, 5 players if 3, and in no event may a player exceed another by 3 plays. So a 3 player team may not have one person play the first two events, as he would then exceed other players' counts 2 to 0. (This I'm highly considering revising, as it's not the most intuitive rule.) Players also compete as individuals whether within a team or not.
Now for the meat of the competition. The general format of most events will be that each event has a theme, all of which will be known by the players, and may even take the form of a riddle or some other similarly obfuscated phrase but will give direction in what to practice. Perhaps "Yellow In Yellow". At a predetermined time, all the competitors are (ideally) ready to go and the exact objective is revealed - in this example, to get the most rings in Sandopolis 1 within 1:00. Competitors now have 10 minutes (or some other arbitrary amount of time) in which to work out the best route, execute it, record it, and submit it through the website for judging, after which some sort of points are awarded.
In the first round of competition, there will be eight events. Players may play as many or few of them as they like, likely on the basis of what they anticipate the event to be from the theme or simply which times work with their schedules. Each team must select three events to grant team points and each individual must select two to count toward individual points (or fewer, but with a corresponding loss of pointage). Playing additional events will appear on your record and can grant you event awards but not further influence your overall points. Conceivably there could be some (1-3?) events which do not require players to be present at a particular time, but are objectives which are made known from the beginning of the round in which players have until the end of the round to submit. Points will be awarded based on ranking in the event, with possibly the top getting 100 and bottom 0 and a constant increase in between. At the conclusion of the round, an arbitrary number of teams and individuals will be culled from the competition - maybe the top 1/4 continue, or top 5 teams and 15 individuals, or teams over 200 points and individuals over 150; I dunno. Depends on what kind of support we get, perhaps.
In the second round, there will be both team/individual and competitions. The latter will take the form of challenges: a pre-determined pool of objectives will be determined, and in the order of their final ranking in the first round, teams or individuals will be able to pick which one they want to complete. One might, for instance, require the team's players to each complete a different Act of Sonic Chaos in 15 seconds; they will receive 50 points minus 20 for each player who fails with a lower limit of 0. The former will be similar to the first round, except that for the teams, instead of simply adding the 0-100 points of the first round, the 1st place team player will receive 50 points for his team, 2nd 20, 3rd 10 and further nothing. There will be six events and two challenges, one of which will be for the whole team and one for an individual from each team and anyone who qualifies as an individual. From this, the top 3 teams and 5 individuals are culled.
The final round will be composed of flash events and SO-style marathons. In the flash events, competitors will be given an extraordinarily low amount of time to complete an objective - presumably by this time they're acquainted enough with the software to handle the mechanics of movie recording. One possibility could be 5 minutes to get into (and submit a run of) a Special Stage in Metropolis Zone, and the player with the most Rings at the end of the Special Stage wins. The marathons will be, well, marathons. Pure running skills. Maybe there'll be something to change it up, but I haven't thought of anything suitable yet (maybe score attack instead of time? iono). Each of the flash events gives a single point, and the marathons two; victors are declared at the end, with some sort of tiebreaker condition defined ideally based on something already present and judgable.
So what do you think of that tome? There's a few stumbling blocks I can foresee already, most prominently teams and being able to keep the competition balanced between those with different player counts, but perhaps just having finely-tuned challenges will even it out.
