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With round 1 of qualifiers having concluded, it feels appropriate to take a look at this now and make the change for next years edition. 3 weeks for players to complete 2 games is excessive; players do not need more than 2 weeks to complete 2 games. Almost no games are played in the first week regardless, and tiebreak scenarios like what we're seeing this year prolong the process even further. 2 weeks for R1 + 1 week for potential tiebreaks + 1 week for R2 allows us to complete qualifiers within a month and start looking towards the main event.
Shortening qualis round 1 to two weeks won't "move up" the start date of the main event any sooner; it's posted annually in the year's official schedule, and it takes a wee bit of meticulous planning to push earlier dates before that so that the start date of pools is around, ideally, plus or minus one week from the posted Monday.
I'll put this year's schedule below, which has been pinned in #wcop in stours for months now.
March 16th - Captain Signups open (all teams)
March 23 - Quali Signups open, intro thread opens
March 30 - Roster thread opens, captains chosen
April 1 (Tuesday) - Quali prelim rosters due
April 6 - Quali Signups close
April 11 (Friday) - Roster deadline
April 13 - Qualis R1
April 27 - Main Event Player Signups open
May 5 - Qualis R2
May 9 (Friday) - Main event player signups close, main event rosters due
May 12 or 19 Buffer week for tbs
May 12 or 19 or 26 - Buffer week for media
May 19 or 26 or June 2 - Pools reveal, pools go up
June 9 or 16 or 23 - tb/quarters
June 16 or 23 or 30 - quarters/quarters tb/semis
June 23 or 30 or July 7 - semis/semis tb/finals
June 30 or July 7 or 14 - finals/finals tb
What's important to note is everything prior to May 26th is worked backwards from that date. I'll start at the beginning and explain some of the logic in the schedule I worked up for this year.
We've pushed main event manager signups up for the past couple years so that spriters are afforded more time to work their magic and pump out 40 custom avatars for the current 20 main event teams, of which 2 teams get ~2-3 weeks of time to have them worked on, whereas the final 2 will get ~1-2. Perhaps unsurprisingly, not all teams are equally responsive despite the extra time, things come up that delay spriters having time to actually work on them, and there's always minute details to hammer out so they both fit in with the spriting standards and satisfy requests from teams, so the ~2 months between initial captains being chosen and announced and posted main event start date likely shouldn't (and won't, hopefully) be deviated from too much.
Quali player signups close a few days before rosters are due because inevitably someone ends up being chosen for a roster or suggested around the time they close for a team they don't have eligibility for and teams need time to work through that. IP checking and verification of eligibility takes time, and there's not many of us who have capabilities to comb through IP histories of potentially hundreds of players, especially because there are times when we need to check PS alts, making the ability to check even further limited by only having PS admins be able to perform these checks. Lastly, with eligibility rules changing, new continental team players have the added privilege of full IP history checks to ensure compliance.
While I have asked Chains of Markov to generate matrices (last year's qualis R1 in the spoiler below) from which I further generate pairings to cut down on time in regards to generating Round 1 in both levels of the tournament, it still takes quite a bit of time to prep for Round 1 in qualifiers and pools with respect to translating these matrices into actual matchups and the text you see in the threads. I've written a few Google appscripts and new Google sheet formulas therein to streamline the process should I host again next year, but many of them also require tweaking depending on the number of teams, slots, and pools in the main event.
Beyond turning these matrices into actual matchups with country codes and names, the added return of the predictions tournament means I had the pleasure of creating what is probably one of the longest forms in Smogon's history (so far; pools will be twice the length). That takes hours. I don't mind the work, and I think the predictions tournament is super gas. But it takes time, and I work a full-time job with a fun 2.5 hour roundtrip commute during the week, and creating forms and keeping matchups tight-lipped prior to their release means very few people have the full information available to them in order to either help or contribute to putting things together in order to prevent any possibility of things leaking. This isn't to say I don't trust my fellow hosts (or they wouldn't be cohosting) but rather secrecy surrounding the matches is simply a high priority. Same goes for pools.
Cue main stage signups mid-qualis round 1. I've moved them and made the roster deadlines slightly earlier compared to the earliest (original) potential day for pools to be revealed because finalized teams generally give input on their team's custom avatar prior to its finalized version, which, unsurprisingly, also takes time.
Enter where we are now: Qualis R2 (play-ins) was supposed to start Sunday night my time if there was no tiebreak. However, we've got a fun event that's basically unprecedented in official tournaments, and so I added two buffer weeks for tiebreaks in the event we repeated a 3-way tie like last year's main event. Shame on me for not predicting we'd end up with a 5-way with the last game ending ~40 minutes prior to the round's deadline, but these weeks to solve it and do play-ins are still built into the schedule from the start (unless we fully reset the 5-way and cannot physically do a live reset this Sunday, which, transparently, is a possibility, even if unlikely).
Even without tiebreaks, there's still a week for media to do article prep, myself to put pools together and get them to Kalalokki to get the graphics for the reveal stream together and then create a 300 question form for predicts, and then the earliest date it would've possibly started is May 18th (if we get everything done that Sunday, otherwise Monday the 19th). We're on track at present to likely start at the date initially posted in the year's tournament schedule, the 26th (25th if up on the Sunday) or potentially a week later due to the tiebreak.
(tl;dr for those who don't want to read my yap)
So, this isn't to say I don't support dropping qualis to a 2-week deadline. This is purely to say that it won't affect the start date of pools at all, and it likely won't affect the initial start date of captaincy signups. The tournament requires so much more administrative overhead than the other two in the circuit because of all the moving pieces, we need to coordinate across multiple sections of the site, and there's >30 teams participating annually at this point. If we shorten qualifiers to a 2-week deadline, it will likely add another dead week (everyone is free to decide if that's a good or bad thing on their own), especially if/when there's formal discussion and accepted policy of expanding to even more teams in the main event, because putting all of this together takes more time than most realize.
And I'd be remiss to not formally shout out the goats TickenChains of MarkovKalalokki for their already-insane or yet-to-be-done amazing work to contribute to make the matchup generation, sheeting, and graphics move along seamlessly.
