You might want to think about using a different map and staging two duels or even more simultaneously. It seems like we are looking at like 60 participants so far, with the potential for a good deal more. The last tournament had Ft7's, which is 13 duels max, and one match lasted about 20-30 minutes usually. With 9 duels max and lower armour you are probably still looking at an average match time of at least 10 minutes.
60 participants with single elimination should be 59 matches. So that is 590 minutes if you assume a 10 minute average duel time and assume everything else goes smoothly, which is very optimistic. 590 minutes is a 6 hour tournament in the very least. If you were to divide the duels over two pits you could probably cut the duration down to like 3-4 hours and go back to one duel pit once you hit the quarterfinals. You could even go as far as to doing 4 pits so you could fit it all into one session.
Of course it is nice to have everyone watch every single duel, but with this amount of participants you risk losing a whole load of participants due to not being able to be present for a bunch of different sessions. If you want I could create a map with any number of lowered down pits, blocked off by invisible walls with room for spectators.
In any caseCharacter name: RamjamContact: forum or Steam (Teeth)Edit: retracting because of real-life obligationsReason for them being allowed is only cuz we lack the possibility to check the loom-status of armor (hopefully that may change in the future).
Preferably future events will be mostly loom-free to give everyone the same chances, especially non-veterans of the mod.
If you edit textures of loomed items in the way that the heirloom pack has done, you should be able to place like a pink dot on every loomed item. Distribute this texture pack to referees and you got easy loom checking forever. It is a bit of tedious work, but you could divide the effort and then it's no big deal. If someone tech savvy figures out how to do it and sends me the instructions and an item group that I should do, I'll help. I'm sure there's a few others.