Tournament mode

[Pasta Ravioli]

Idea:

By some method, several people sign up (or register) for a tournament (we'll say Dave, Tim, James, Mary, Sue, and John). Maybe having a timer where signups are open over the course of 24 hours or something.

By some method, the supreme Dongerdong randomly picks pairs of people and associates them in some DB (we'll say ["Dave and Tim", "James and Sue", "Mary and John"]), and creates a bracket (where the winner of Dave vs Tim must fight the winner of James vs Sue, and so on up the bracket). The bracket could be displayed via web page. Not sure how odd numbers of people would work...

After that, James says !match or !tourneymatch or !official or something, and dongerdong responds:

<James> !match
<dongerdong> **James** challenges **Sue** in an Official Donger Match [or something].

James wouldn't have a choice of who to face - the Dongerdong decides that after registration closes. Sue would have a limited amount of time (5 minutes? 2 minutes?) to respond (with some command) before the match is cancelled until both parties are present to fight. We'd have to implement some sort of feature for dealing with users who go offline for days at a time, thereby holding up the whole process. The winner of the match would go on to face another winner, defined by the bracket created at the start of the tournament.

Tournament matches would have deathmatch rules (i.e. no !joins, no instakills), but should have a higher initial HP setting (150HP instead of 100?) and shouldn't ban. Coward quits should carry some sort of severe penalty to prevent abuse.

I guess the main questions are:

• Should these matches be best-of-three? Best-of-five?
• How will we deal with odd numbers of users, or odd numbers of pairs? Would odd users get a "bye"?
• How long should the registration process be open? Should this be limited to a once-per-week thing? Once-per-month?
• How will we deal with users who go idle for a long period of time? What defines a long period of time?

I had this as an idea back when we implemented Dongcoins, so the coins that the Dongerdong accumulated could be used as a prize for the winner of the tournament, perhaps with smaller prizes for 2nd and 3rd place.