Since this will be closed in a day and a half, I figured I'd give my own impressions of the whole tournament as well.
Starting with the planning stages, I decided to try and focus on the first and second rounds more so than the final one as far as close matches were concerned. There were two reasons for that, firstly it's safer than having to hope for the "right" people to advance, secondly, while the finals are supposed to be the most exciting matches, they're just 1/7 of the whole tournament.
As such, I attempted to make the block matches as even as possible and then focused on arranging the blocks in a way that would make for interesting semi finals for the majority of possible combinations.
Maybe the greatest unknown variable for both singles and doubles for me was Momoshiro in this regard, as I wasn't sure how highly everyone would value his Black Jack Knife by now. Also, I restricted myself a bit with the choice of characters overall and at least in singles I wanted to avoid having the same type of player (which is why Yanagi wasn't in the high tier group), and I also decided not to use any pure power players for reasons everyone should be aware of.
Moving on to the matches themselves, high tier played out about the way I expected it to, although I thought more people would argue for Shiraishi against Yamato.
Low tier on the other hand went completely against my expectations. Instead of Kikumaru, Hirakoba and Akutagawa winning their first round matches, they dropped out right away, especially the amount of votes Hiyoshi got over the course of the tournament surprised me.
I can't really say anything about the doubles matches in this section since I went into them without any elaborate predictions.
As far as activity is concerned, I think we did a pretty decent job there since it was at most five or six people arguing at the same time and for that the number of posts isn't bad. One thing I'm definitely going to change next time though is that there won't be any parallel matches anymore. In I believe every round, high tier got discussed for a day and a half to two days, and it was only afterwards that the attention shifted to the other two categories (doubles more so than low tier).
I'm also leaning towards removing low tier as a category for good as even after high tier was done for the day, low tier got very few posts (Kikumaru vs Shishido being the only exception). In exchange, a bigger doubles category should be doable.
That's should cover everything, again thanks everyone for participating and I hope you will be looking forward to the next tournament as well.
