why is there a limit to the number of people being invited to a tournament at a given time?
especially for private tournaments if you're waiting for people to decline before being able to invite more it takes ages to get the tournament started!

this limitation doesnt make much sense.
has this issue been raised before?

i would hope atleast there was some sort of automatic decline when people enter holidays or dont respond to the tournament invite for longer then the tournament boot time. but that doesnt seem to be in place either. :S

One fateful day in 2009, a young lad decided to try making himself a tournament. Just a small one to test it out. Two rounds should be enough, he presumably thought to himself. Just a 4-player tournament to see how it goes.

Who should I invite, he asked? Without giving it a second thought, let's just try that "Check all" button.

Unfortunately, this lad did not think through his actions. After clicking create, the wheels start churning. Thousands and thousands of e-mail notifications are sent out to everyone on his invite list, letting them know they've been invited to his tournament.

The first four readers? Those were the lucky ones, if you want to call it that. The real casualty are the thousands of players who were left staring at an e-mail in their inbox, beckoning them. Hundreds flocked to the tournament page, only to be disappointed that they didn't have the split-second reflexes necessary.

Contrary to your statement, an invite limit relative to the tournament size actually makes perfect sense. You should not be able to invite thousands and thousands of people to a 4-person tournament. The current limit is 8 times the size of the tournament, and even that is probably too high (if everyone joined, you're disappointing 87% of invitees.)

Allowing too many tournament invites would only further encourage people to start ignoring them. This is really the crux of your problem -- people spamming tournament invites rather than inviting selectively the people they'd think would be interested.

hmmm... true

guess most users don't really manage their invite lists although there have been some requests for features to help manage those better (grouping, searching, etc) but i guess it's not that high priority on development roadmap.

still.. how about automatic declines for people who are stacking up invites without responding? :S
if they can't respond within the boot time of the tournament it's highly unlikely they'll have the time to play the tournament itself.
also, if they are joining holidays with pending tournament requests it makes sense that these should get declined automatically, leave the user a notification or something so they know what happened when they return from holidays.

thanks for the reply! keep up the cool work.

double thinking on the automatic decline on holidays, there might be some users / clans who want to organize multiday tournaments and invite folks that are currently on holidays but will return soon and they dont mind wait. so i guess it would make more sense to have that as a default option on the tournament settings, a "people on holidays or innactive for x days will autodecline the invitation for this tournament" check-box

ROTFL, nice story telling!

Given that is the problem you're trying to solve, wouldn't it be better to (severely) limit the number of people each player (except the original creator) can invite to the tournament / at once? Or to simply remove the "Select All" button (I can't really think of a legitimate use for it...)?

By the way, I also like ps' auto-decline-after-boottime suggestion.

yes, auto-decline makes a lot of sense. you could even halve the invite limit if auto-decline was introduced.

though i haven't really encountered many problems with tournaments since wl got put up on kongregate. they usually all start in a decent amount of time. but this would definitely speed things up.

added the auto-decline suggestion to user voice.
folks who agree with it please vote for it

http://warlight.uservoice.com/forums/77051-warlight-features/suggestions/3012597-add-an-auto-decline-an-invited-player-if-innactiv

Are you sure you want it to measure being inactive? So if I log in every day, it will never auto-decline? Wouldn't it be better to measure from the moment I was invited?

well, i would reason that waiting 5 days for someone who has been innactive for months is 5 days wasted.

but i guess you have a point that if you're innactive for 2 months and suddenly get an email with a cool invite you might be tempted to accept it and return to activity to play it and bringing back players to activity might be more on the interest of the community.

eitherway, both options are better then the current state of things imho.

maybe the ideal would be to have both possibities and let the tournament creator define.
with some reasonable defaults that already speeds up the tournament filling and reduces needless email spam.

I'm not sure inactive's the way. Why not just have autoboot apply to invites to? Or, maybe double the autoboot or something.

I'd like an indication of how many invites are left somewhere on the tournament page. I hate clicking the forward button, carefully going through my list and selecting 20 people to forward to, then getting the notification that there are only 2 invitations remaining... tell me that before I choose whom to forward the invitations to!

used 3 of my remaining 4 votes- absolutely a good idea