Left 4 Dead 2 Tournament?

What are your thoughts on the following?

I’m running a L4D2 tournament at the end of January - Part of Winter-een-mas for this year. Anyway, all of the information I can find on past Left 4 Dead tournaments are those that are played over several days. These tournaments are teams of 4 (no AIs) that play through a campaign, with the team with the most points at the end of the campaign as the winner for the round. Tournaments are Single Elimination. This tournament needs run somewhere between 3.5 and 5 hours, significantly shorter. As such, I’m working on some modified rules to shorten the amount of time. Any/all input would be very helpful, even if you don’t have experience with the game or tournaments.

Thoughts on:

  • Single Elimination: Double elimination would be absurd for a game without a time limit.
  • 2 player teams: I wish I could require 4 people per team, but truthfully I expect only about 20 people or so to participate in this specific event. I’ve been suprised with tournouts for other games in the past, though. However, we all know that teammate AIs are dumber than sin. I’m not sure how to work on this. Thoughts?
  • One chapter, not whole campaign: An entire campaign can take up to two hours on versus, which I can’t risk on my timeline. This next part is tricky. L4D2 is significantly more random than the original. Horde spawns, weapon spawns, special infected spawns. Since there’s no way to assure a level of “fairness” for this, I’m thinking that each chapter available to be played in the tournament must have an “Alert the Horde” section, where weapons are more lickely to be present. What are your thoughts on only playing the “Last Stand” chapters? There’s a time limit and each team can switch off to play both the infected and survivors.
  • Team with the most point advances: Combines as special infected and survivors.
  • Cash Prize: We always do one.

Many thanks in advance!

Maybe you guys could play survival and the teams with the qualifying scores move on to the campaign.

I’ll do some more research into that. I haven’t played [STRIKE]very much[/STRIKE] any survival, is there a maximum number of waves or is it endless? My concern again is for the time. If there’s no way to tell the score until the game is over and it’s limitless waves until you lose, a team could theoretically go on forever. If score is also has a time-based variable, however, we maybe could incorporate that somehow to prevent team DVDA from going on forever.

you won’t last too long in survival, the number of hordes are endless, but after two minutes there are usually multiple tanks.

Then that’s definately something to seriously consider. Thanks!