On the question of how they
should work...
This varies from event to event, I'll use the Campaign ones as an example.
The original post for the campaign is here.Althunts, are as described above. A group of altmodes are picked as a target, whoever kills the most wins. A fair-play rule was introduced recently that to join you much have a target in your team, and it must be used once a day.
Round 1 of the Campaign for Cybertron was one of these. These are easy to run and the players keep score themselves.
Scavenger Hunts, a list of achievements are given to the players who must hunt these down and collect them.First to complete them all is the winner. These are usually run by Sustain,
which she did for round 2. Players again track their own scores.
Scalp Hunts, a
very popular game where a particular team, individual character or collection of characters have to be CR'd by either a faction working together, team or individual character.
This was round 3, and by far the most popular round to date.
Complicated to score, but most of these were done via the faction forums, with various players organising the scoreboards.
War, the more traditional tourney type. These are however complicated by uneven player numbers so we've had to add in various mechanisms to help run them. Usually we would pick a particular mission set (using the last digit of the mission log number, e.g #123456
0) and all of those 0 missions would be counted, but there has to be at least 3 players on each side for it to be scored. Additional measures were added in as that still didn't work, however these were only partially successful and are under review now.
Scoring these tourneys is a royal pain in the arse and even though drafted in extra help for the last one, it is considered a bit of a failure due to lack of planning and an unexpected emergency absence on my part.
Most other ideas are variations on these four styles. For example:
We had a jailbreak scenario a few months ago that was great fun as the captured commanders from round 3 (who recoloured their entire teams orange by choice!) had to be rescued by two 'heroes', whilst the remaining players had to capture their teams to prevent it.