Mage Wars Tournament @ Origins Game Fair 2014

[Boocheck]

Hmm, in my area, it is a quite the opposite. My league start with 8 players and now, i am ath 24.

I  must also agree about prizes, i would choose some uniqe or LE item, like different creature art etc.

Sometimes, it is not about game but about players in specific area and "Opinion leaders" in that area.

[silverclawgrizzly]

Yeah my area is the same pattern as Boochecks, we're growing by leaps and bounds. I don't think the game is declining, just the opposite in fact. 

Boo you are dead right about the opinion leaders in an area making or breaking a game. I've seen that enough times for sure.

We got plenty of events coming up designed to increase our numbers as well, so I'm feeling pretty hopeful. Big thing that needs to happen at the convention level is we just need to learn from what went wrong at Origins and do better next time, all we can ask honestly.

[Lord0fWinter]

As mentioned already, I would suspect one of the big(gest?) reasons for the lack of turnout is it being an all day event. There are many things to do at a convention; many events to attend and things to see, so people aren't going to want to spend their entire day doing one thing.

I guess what I would recommend is breaking up the tournaments into multi-day events instead. Have a round each day, that way people only have to spend ~90 minutes or so doing it. I know this has its issues as well, but I think it's worth a try.

[shawk]

A little late on posting to this thread.  I believe they may have learned from origins as the tournament at gen-con is multi-day with the finals on Sunday.  They have two qualifying rounds one on Friday the other on Saturday both starting at 4:00 pm.  They are scheduled for 4 hrs.  That will allow people visit the vendor floor and still work in a tournament.  Guess it won't help if you are only planning on attending one day but when I go to a convention I usually attend multiple days.  Top four from each day advances to the finals.