At our store, we do GNK tournaments once a month from 6PM to 9PM Monday nights. Since we pretty regularly get 10 or more people (@Cranked would probably know if I’m overestimating but that seems to be about the scene to me) it’s not practical in that time frame to actually do swiss pairings, since you’d get probably two and a half rounds done before the store closed. Instead, we do a sort of pseudo swiss where you only play one side for a match and then switch to the next opponent, preferring to play the side you’ve played the least. This tends to let us do something close to 5 half-rounds of swiss against 5 different opponents, which leads to a nice bit of variety.
That said, I think the format is a bit lacking because you don’t get to have the full back and forth of a regular match of corp & runner with the same person, leading to matches feeling a bit undone. Have we basically out grown the 6-9 time slot and don’t have any room for a more regular style tournament? How do other folks’ stores run their regular tournaments/league nights?
FFG’s monthlies start at 6:30 PM and go for 3 rounds of Swiss pairings, 65 minute rounds. You do get ties where someone wins at 5-1 on SoS, but that’s the price you pay for the time slot. Attendance ranges from 12 to 30.
The Thursday night league at Mead Hall starts at 7 PM and also goes for 3 rounds of Swiss pairings, but the rounds are 60 minutes. It typically ends at about the same time as the FFG ones. The league is a little different since even though there is technically a winner each week, the league points are what actually matter in the long run. You get 5 for showing up, 1 for bringing a new ID, and 1 for each win. If you’re in the league but don’t attend, you still get 3 points, and your worst week is dropped at the end of the league – so there’s some rubberbanding for people who can’t make every week, which is nice.
Attendance at the league each week ranges from 16 to 26.
Is that a fairly typical number for most Netrunner meets I wonder? I’ve felt like my scene in Korea is pretty small but after hearing some numbers lately I’m thinking it might be bigger than I realized.
In Warsaw(Poland) we play 6pm-10:30pm , 4 Swiss rounds 60 minutes.Usually there is 15 - 25 people there.
We run now 5th season (actually 6th if counting the first ‘test run’) of our local league, that consists of 10 tournaments. At the end of season we split GNK promos.
In Adelaide we do pretty much the same thing as everyone else, start at 6.15, go till 9.45 or 10 usually, three rounds swiss, last three or four gnks have had between 16 and 18 people, though it used to be a bit less. We used to do 65 minute rounds but will be trying out 55 minute rounds to finish earlier, and encourage people to learn to play a little faster as well. We are generally fine with the fact that SOS sometimes lets some people who might not always win still do well and grab some of the better prizes, it’s all pretty casual, and still has a bit of a learning environment and laid back feeling for the most part. You usually get a bunch of people on 5-1, in some events you get the top 6 or 7 players on 4-2 which can be meh, but that’s it, no one takes it so seriously that it’s an issue.
We do cube events as well, roughly the same time frame though drafting and deck building can take almost an hour so it can drag on. Three rounds, same start and finish time, rounds are 55 minutes, maybe? But could be shorter. Maybe they are 40 minute rounds, actually. 30 card deck sizes btw (minimum) and first to 6 AP.
We do leagues as well but they are for fun, and people play their matches at their own leisure. No prizes other than…prestige? An invisible crown? I dunno. But I think this has all worked fairly well so far for our local meta, illustrated by its recent growth