The list of reliable TDs that coordinate with me on tournaments:
- Swkoll
- Dragun
Do note that there are several Russian TDs that host their own tournaments, but these are often more Russian specific events that are often done for their own streaming communities. I appreciate these events as well of course as they are unique and fun, but it didn't seem relevant to what is being brought up here.
Swkoll is a mod, an active player, and already hosts regular, valued tournaments. Dragun is a key developer in one of the few sim mods actively maintained on FAF. I do not expect either of them to shoulder more of a burden for FAF than they already do.
There is no problem with lower rated tournaments, but lower rated players implicitly already have an endpoint to reach a higher level. If I do not have anything around to induce activity at higher levels, then lower rated players both will have no ability to actually attain a higher level and the higher level itself will continue to die out more and more.
If people want to host blitz tournaments for mid level players or weekend events that's fine, nothing stops it. But I can't exactly invent more hours in the week for myself on top of real life responsibilities like work and uni as well as what I already do for FAF.
If you're competitive and want to get good, you now have the route of getting 1800 to ladder, playing ladder regularly during the ladder leagues, and then getting into the smaller scale league tournaments which let you play in a tournament setting against people you should be comfortable playing against. Then, you can take it up a notch by deciding to try out for seasonal tournaments where some of the top players that do not play ladder regularly show up. Then if you performed particularly well, you get an option to participate in the big community event of LotS.
I also don't understand how you can argue that I'm favoring players like Tagada, Nexus, Petric, etc when I had to deal with a lot of pushback just implementing this system in order to reward ladder activity with LotS placement by higher level players that were annoyed at having regular activity being considered. If anything, this is the first time in FAF that any sort of actual systemic reward for the player that just wants to have fun playing the game a lot has existed in terms of both tournament placement and monetary awards.
I'm more than willing to coordinate with new TDs to work out a solid format, a nice reward, and a time period for the tournament that can result in live casting coverage for the event. But again, that requires TDs.