The judge for the DDR competition is Adam Helps. All references to "I" or "me" in the rules refer to Adam, the DDR compo organizer.
This year, there will be two branches to the DDR tournament. First will be the "main" tournament, which will require a qualification round and will have prizes. There will also be several "challenge" tournaments, which will vary widely in difficulty and will allow entries on the spot. Challenge tournaments will not have significant prizes, and will mostly be for fun. How many challenge tournaments I have will depend on how much time there is.
Here's the general idea: The main tournament will mainly be for people who have played a fair amount of DDR before. There will be a moderately difficult qualifying song, and passing that song will get you into the main tournament. The challenge tournaments will mostly be for people who have never played DDR before, and should be a fun way to introduce people to the game. The main tournament prizes will be decent, though not as large as last year's (think $50 for the winner). Playing solely for the prizes is kind of lame anyway ;-).
Two Cobalt Flux dance pads connected to a PS2 will be used. I'll be using the American "DDR Max 2" game for all songs in the challenge tournament (you may get a list of songs here). All songs available in the game will be unlocked. I turn off the danger warning and use Type2 arrow coloring. I also have adhesive sticky things on the pad this year, so hopefully you won't go sliding all over the place on the fast songs ;-).
If you're only coming to Pilgrimage for the DDR tournament, then you're missing out. However, just because I love you, I'll allow people to both qualify and compete on Saturday. I'll be starting at 9 AM in the morning, and will take qualifiers until 11 AM. So if you want to play in the main tournament, you should show up by 10:30 at the latest.
To get into the main tournament, you have to pass a qualifying song. "Passing" means that you get a D or better according to the usual game scoring rules. The game will be set to its default difficulty. Expect the song to be either a hard standard or an easy heavy, and somewhere in the range of 6-8 feet. If you don't pass on the first try, I might allow you to retry the song, although this will be a judgement call, and "retry" qualifiers will be dropped if I have too many people qualifying. If too many people qualify even after dropping retries, I'll disqualify people using perfect attack as a tie-breaker (that means that whoever gets more 'perfects' on the qualifying song wins), and I'll use rematches if that still leaves any ambiguity. The maximum number of participants in the main tournament will be 9 -- this is because it's a round-robin tournament, and the number of matches gets excessive if I allow more than 9 people to participate.
The main tournament will take place reasonably soon after 11 AM on Saturday. Every qualifying player will play every other qualifying player in a match. The number of songs to a match will depend on how many people are participating: if there are 5 or fewer competitors, it'll be 3 songs per match; 6 or more, 1 song per match.
In any case, I'll decide who chooses the first song by flipping a coin, with the winner choosing the song and the loser choosing its difficulty. The first song must have a choice of difficulties, so Challenge-mode-only songs are not allowed for this song, unless the competitors mutually agree on one. If it's a three-song-per-match format, then the winner of the first stage chooses the second song and its difficulty and the loser of the first stage chooses the third song and its difficulty, with challenge mode songs allowed. If it's a one-stage format, then the coin toss matters a lot more; fortunately, you get several matches, so hopefully your luck isn't too terrible.
A player wins a song if they score higher on that song than their opponent, where the score is the number of perfects. To win a match, a player must win the majority of the songs played. If there's a tie, then you continue to play additional songs until the tie is broken, alternating who gets to choose the song.
A player may only select a given song once during the entire tournament. They may choose the qualification-round song, if they wish, but only once. You can pick any difficulty you like.
Round robin means that every participant has a match with every other participant exactly once. You get 1 point for each victory, and players are ranked according to who can get the most points. If there are ties for deciding the first three places at the end, then I'll use tie-breaker matches to decide them. These tie-breaker matches will be 1-song-match round-robin format for all people ranked at the same point level.
Because playing songs can be exhausting, I'll guarantee at least 2 minutes between matches for you to drench your head or something. You can waive this if you don't feel tired. Other than that, there's no guarantees about the order that things get played in, and I might swap things around if someone needs to run off for a bit. Be warned, though: if you're too difficult to find for your matches I might disqualify you. Please be available while the tournament is going.
You can use any option that doesn't change the steps to be played (flat coloring's OK, stealth or hidden is OK, but rotating the steps is Not OK). If I forget to revert options for the next player, then you'll start the song over and fix it.
Any and all conflicts or problems will be decided by the Judge. Whining is strictly prohibited.