Hello TILT forums. First post here. I haven’t organized tournaments for a while and I quite frankly don’t play much these days either. Nevertheless, I’m experimenting with a new tourney format I’m soliciting feedback for and opening up for scrutiny. My home arcade is called “Raccoon City” from the Resident Evil franchise (there’s more story here but I’ll save it). So, the tournament would simply be called “Escape from Raccoon City”. The naming allows for other places to adopt the format. “Escape from Lynn’s Arcade” and so on.
The main objective is to escape (duh) and it’s a matter if you do it alive or as a living dead (this is a zombie themed format).
Preparation Round
The first round will be played group matchplay, but the standard conventions end there. Groups are fixed (balanced based on IFPA standing) and every group plays each machine. Each game has objectives on them and every group plays every game. The purpose of the preparation round is to collect antidote vials. Antidote vials are being used in the next round, we’ll get to that later. Each game also have a Resurrect Injection, each player can only collect one injection in the preparation round. Here’s an example how I would setup Doctor Who for the preparation round.
Each Dalek down (Jackpot) during multiball collects one antidote.
Complete a full 3x Sonic Boom for an injection.
Team objective score: 1 antidote for each billion completed.
The idea here is that the group needs to stay focused on the game to count antidotes and encourage others to play well. Coaching during gameplay will be allowed and strongly encouraged. The preparation round would run across a handful of games. I’d say this format would work well for 16 to 24 players on 4-6 games in the preparation round.
Outbreak Round
In the outbreak you play traditional score based matchplay of four player groups. The antidotes collected will be used as strikes. You lose as may many antidotes you lose against players in the match (0-1-2-3). A player is not “dead” until there’s a negative balance of antidotes. If a player collected an injection during the preparation round, the player will continue to play with a zero balance of antidotes and injections. Players that “die” during the outbreak are put on a single elimination head-to-head bracket, the “Alpha Zombie” bracket. This is a “king of the hill” style format where the winning player stays in and the losing player is eliminated and lands in the next available position in the standings from the bottom. In the outbreak round, multiple players will most likely get knocked out in the same round. Highest IFPA rank is by default the Alpha Zombie in the first match of the bracket and need to defeat lowest to highest ranked player lining up (game will be selected randomly and the alpha is player one and only one game is played).
Final Battle
The winner of the Alpha Zombie bracket will eventually meet the winner of Outbreak. This is a best 2 out of 3. Outbreak winner selects game or position. Game 2, loser selects etc. Either the world is lost (Alpha Zombie wins) or our hero of the outbreak round eventually saves the world by eliminating all remaining T-virus.
Completely overdoing it, you could have two perpetual trophies, one with Alice (a resident evil heroine) and another with a "Alpha Zombie”. Date, place and initials on each accordingly.
I expect this format would take a full day to run and maximum antidotes need to be a balanced amount to prevent running forever. When everything is said and done, you’ve played three different formats in one event which I think is neat. It will also take a toll on manual score and power-up keeping.
Thoughts? Prayers? Thanks for reading.