Loading Ready Run March Madness Sketch Showdown

[NickTheDM]

Hey there Runners,

So in a recent LRRcast, Top 5 sketches, the crew mentioned how awesome it would be to have a March Madness-esque tournament in which people voted to pick out the best of the best of Loading Ready Run's 11 years of weekly sketches. So of course taking that as a challenge I started setting one up the best I could.

I've done the first step, but here's where I need the communities help to continue. I've run into some issues and want to crowdsource some solutions. Let's all work together and maybe we can at least START this before it's name is entirely obsolete.

Problem 1: So Challonge, the tournament website where I would like to run the bracket from, can't handle all 587 of the weekly sketches in a single bracket. In order to best represent Loading Ready Runs deep library I've decided that the best way to get an accurate assortment of the top 100 or so I would run 3 seperate double elimination brackets each with a large chunk of the library split by time. The top 32 from each bracket would advance to a final single elimination showdown that would actually be properly seeded. I haven't randomized the seeds yet, but here are the 3 sub-tournaments as I left them.

http://challonge.com/LRRA
http://challonge.com/LRRB
http://challonge.com/LRRC

Problem 2: Many of the videos from the earlier seasons aren't available on LRR's main site, or in some cases at all. Obviously this will give the earlier seasons a disadvantage (which is why they are the biggest pool) but I don't really see a way around that. If any of you have a solution, let me know.

Problem 3: RapidFire and other Multipart series. Although it would probably be nice to find out exactly which part of those series was the best, I worry that giving it multiple entries will knock out other contenders that should have gotten farther along. Currently in the brackets it's listed entirely out but I feel like it should only be a single entry per set (i.e Rapidfire and Rapidfire 2, but not Rapidfire 2 Part 3)

Problem 4: Actually running the tournament. So this is a little tricky but if we can get the Crew's support I have a pretty cool idea. I think we should set up groups of straw polls for the "Active" Contests at any given time, a few of them in any given day, and then if I could get a Twitch Moderator to put it on LRRbot's !polls command we can either have the streamers direct people to them, or have it be something to do during commercial breaks. It seems like the best way to get a large group of people to take a few seconds and give their opinion. We'd let each contest run until either a set amount of time or a number of votes (open to suggestions here) and then move on to the next one. Then we'd post the results here and I would update the brackets. Alternatively we could run it exclusively through the forums, but that seems way less effective at getting the critical mass LRR's history deserves.

So yeah, that's where this stands so far. James has said that he's interested to see this happen but it's on us the community to get it there. Who's with me?

[HmFons]

I would be up for fixing the Challonge issue. I'm in webdev and could probably whip up an application that handles everything in one bracket. It would most likely become april absurdity, though.

[Robo4900]

Sounds fun. I've got lots of stuff going on, so unfortunately I wouldn't be able to help too much, but I will gladly take on the role of "Executive Moral Support Assistant."