Generally we do the brackets randomly, at least, we use to up until a couple years ago, but we can seed them based on generalized player skill if need be. This way normally ensures that the top 8 players do not get eliminated early. There are always exceptions of course depending on player performance. Theoretically, it's possible for anyone to get eliminated two matches straight depending on player match ups so sometimes it's a good idea to seed even in smaller tournaments like a UMK3 one. I can't imagine how hard it must be for a 256 person bracket, I have no idea how deeply they go into seeding, or if they look into past placement. We'll probably make the brackets Friday based on assumed players who will be there, and then modify adding in players who enter Saturday and Sunday.
We should have plenty of time to work everything out. I'd imagine if we get a huge turnout Saturday we could very well get things started then but that's unlikely, as we'll be running various other games and possibly some side tournaments for UMK3. If there are 16 players, we would seed the presumable favorites on complete opposite sides, and then the next two favorites on the inner edges of the brackets, putting them as far away from top 2 as possible. You work your way inward from there until you get to players you cannot seed. After that a good way to divide them up is by region so you would figure out which region has the most players in the tournament, and separate them.
So for NEC, if you have 4 north east players left over after you seed, you would put 2 into the top half and 2 into the bottom (again based on a 16 man bracket), as far away from any others as possible, eventually, they all become somewhat equidistant and likely to either be eliminated, or not meet until the next round. Then you would do the same for the next most populated region.
This tournament in particular will be extremely interesting to bracket, perhaps more so than even SBR. We have a number of players who have never played in a tournament before who are extremely good players, and while I could easily say to Phil "Well, so and so is probably better than this guy, but he's never played in a tournament and the other guy consistently places top 5." it'd be unfair to the guy who's played in a bunch of tournaments if the newcomer received seeding priority. You can see how it can get difficult to seed rather quickly. it's worth the effort to make a good bracket for a small tournament, rather than random out the brackets and have a lot of unhappy players.
Making brackets is actually pretty fun. There have been a couple tournaments where the brackets were so complex and annoying though, that I had to sit out of the tournament in order to run them. I eventually figured out a very good way to do them but fortunately I also have a ton of help now at tournaments, I'm practically a non-issue and just supply equip, revise brackets and update them as we go. Phil, Simon, Nit, and Rob have all been a huge help at multiple tournaments. If everyone shows who claims to be, it will be extremely competitive and an impressive top 8 to say the least.
As for button configs, you can use whatever you want on whatever controller you want as long as it works on a PC. We should have ways to make sure pads work while we're there, and you have to be sure you can dedicate it to a specific setup. We'll try to have two setups on Saturday with pads and duplicate those setups so a player with a specific pad type could swap out easily and replace with another pad to not mess up the config. I would like to go as far as to label everything this time if we have a ton of control types required, and make some additional config files to easily swap if there's ever a conflict.
