Six months is freakin ridiculous for many reasons. First of all, are these 'epic' quests that require mass amounts of posts, etc to complete? With all due respect to all of you here, I'll have to go Simon on you for a moment. I don't need to read through 15+ pages of an RP to tell if you suck or not in these preliminaries. A decent RPer should be able to pull off 2+ posts a week. Thats pretty generous, IMHO. Personally if you're worth your weight, you should be able to post every other day... but life's a bitch, so I am going with 2+ a week. If you haven't wrote 2 posts in a week, you really aren't serious about this Tourney and should be dropped.
Giving you a month to post isn't going to make your work any better, even if you're a good writer in a slump... it simply won't make a difference in the long run. If you aren't doing good, then you can try again in another Tourney. Obviously, if you're in a slump you're not at your best, so why would you win? Makes sense, right? Dragging the whole system down some long, neverending process hurts everyone.
So here's how you can make this into something reasonable: The preliminaries would last 1-2 weeks each. The judges can easily pick off the folks not doing very well. If you don't post 2+ a week, you're gone. Don't sit around waiting on some lazy punk to post... its your ass on the line. Improvise.
The first round of preliminaries has 4/5/4 as stated. That means after the first round you have 3/4/3. The next round you will end up with 2/3/2. That leaves us with 7 people(not 8 as listed...). Notice, you're still stuck with an odd number. This could be resolved in round one. From the middle team(the big one) eliminate the two weakest links. But that's not fair!!! Actually it is. You'd just get eliminated in the next round, so I'm saving you the hurt. If you do that you end up with 3/3/3 after the first round. Then you can have another preliminary and end up with 2/2/2. That's six people left out of 13. Now we can get serious. If you want longer times on quests, now is the time to start doing it. Its going to take more scrutiny to analyze the remaining ones, so longer time is fine.
The main point is this: A lot of things change in six months on a forum. New people will arrive at TFF who may wish to participate in a Tourney. Some people may leave. Others may get sick of the Tourney after that long. Compressing the timeline really has no major disadvantages, but adds quite a few advantages. I see no reason to drag this out for all eternity. Its a tournament, not a MMORPG.
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