Yeah yeah yeah the lolis are going in the boxes; give me a few days.
Choco: I think you should do what Fubarduck did when he was trying to qualify for Arcana Heart last year. Front the money at release, take payments and donations from whoever, try to qualify, and regardless of what happens with the qualifier sell the kit in the summer (by then there will probably be news of a home port, at the very least) and take that money to go to Japan. However, fubar did take money from people who traveled down to play AH at his place back then, and I think it would be a reasonable request to request :bux: from people who didn't initially buy in on a per-day basis (or they can buy-in and then get a cut of the proceeds when the machine is sold).
Honestly, I don't see a MB:AA qualifier happening in the US (for various reasons) but that's neither here nor there, and you have a few months to figure everything out.
Mailorder: I think a better implementation of your idea would be to just have all of the battles at a local tournament, and just run a ladder side-event. You start with the bottom two people -- if the lower ranked player wins, they swap. Then you move up to the next pairing and keep going until you reach the top. If someone is not there, they 'automatically' lose their one match and the other player just moves on. New players get inserted at the bottom. It's a nice system as someone on a bad day will not lose much but someone that gets hot can make moves.
It's something we used to do locally for SC2 back in the day and it worked well imo.
