I have an idea that I want to throw out there to everyone, Alec said he would be interested, this wouldn't take place until after this tourney is over, and I agree with Alec that there will be a rest period after this one before this would start. I'll just copy the message with a few additions:
I was thinking of having it more like a boxing style, where there are different tiers and belt holders. And instead of everyone voting we could have like 5 judges for each battle (judges being different for every battle to switch it up a bit).
I think it would solve the problem we usually have, which is when people get knocked out, the voting dies out, since people can't officially be eliminated. Also in cases like DC or others that are just busy, people could always take time off because they would have to agree to any match beforehand. Once every month or so we could have a "special event" where there are title matches for all the tiers (I'm thinking there should be 3 or 4 of them depending on how many users we get) and a few other potentially exciting matchups.
In between the big events we could hold a couple weekly small battles (one verse each, no actual rebuttals, so you'd be dissing them on past events or just bars you come up with, so that the user that goes 1st isn't at a disadvantage) which would only affect someone's all time record, and move them up or down the rung a bit. If someone holds a belt for a predetermined amount of time, they can move up a tier, and if someone struggles for too long, they can move down.
It also sets up for some other original ideas we could always come up with in the future that we couldn't do before. A royal rumble style battle, or even freestyle battles where users have 10-15 minutes to come up with 4 lines. Tag team battles where two users make verses together to battle another pair. Not to mention easy differences on how each battle is different. Heavy weight title matches could be three 16 line verses, etc. I'm sure we could think of more. This also means users could join at any time which would hopefully keep this going for a while. I've just started thinking this out so many details would still need to be tweaked, but I'd like to know what everyone else thinks.
--
TimJab you a pimp boi