So how does the event actually work?

In the first round, the 16 players will be assigned to four teams for two 4v4 games. The primary goal when choosing these teams is that each individual game is fairly well balanced. There is also a minor weighting towards teams with similar skill variance. One team wins and one team loses in each game, so at the end of round one eight players are 1-0 and eight are 0-1.

In the second round, new teams are assigned. These teams are chosen so that in each individual game each team has players with the same score i.e. one of the two games may have three 1-0 players and one 0-1 player on each team. Subject to this constraint, we again try to find teams which are fairly well balanced. Minor weightings are applied to promote similar skill variance between teams, and to discouraging players from being on the same or opposing teams more than once. However, in the service of producing balanced teams these minor weightings may be ignored. At the end of the second round, four players will be 2-0, eight will be 1-1, and four will be 0-2.

The third and fourth rounds proceed similarly to the second. At the end of the fourth round one player will be 4-0, four will be 3-1, six will be 2-2, four will be 1-3, and one unlucky person will be 0-4. But again, all of these games should be reasonably well balanced, so a quite high-rated player might end up with the wooden spoon...

What rating is the balancing based on?

Nominally, your "true" casual rating on the day. Actually, it is just whatever number I choose to put in a config file. So don't get any clever ideas about tanking your rating before the event.

What happens if somebody has to drop out?

In principle, if we find a replacement I can edit their rating into the system for the remaining games and we can go on playing. Replacement players don't grow on trees though, so please only sign up if you are reasonably confident in being present for the entire event.

(This ought to be a fairly low-stress event to run from my end, and there are no prizes on offer, so I can play as a replacement of last resort - but it will be late in the evening for me, and I would put any other interested substitute in before myself.)

I reserve the right to blacklist people from future events if they no-show, don't play the games seriously, or otherwise waste the time of myself and the other participants.

Isn't it easier to just play 4v4 games in the lobby?

The idea behind this event is that we are more likely to be able to produce well-balanced games by putting 16 players into two 4v4s than by putting 8 players into a single 4v4. The number of possible permutations to choose from goes up by a lot, even taking into account the restrictions based on player score. Some test runs of the code with sample data produced fairly promising results.

Isn't the actual Quadrille dance for four pairs i.e. eight people?

Yes, I know and I don't care.

Why exactly 16 players?

Everything works out far more elegantly if the number of players is a power of 2. A 3v3 variant for 12 people or a 4v4/6v6 variant for 24 people is potentially possible but a bit scuffed. Eight players playing 2v2 would be easy enough but rather short (and a lot less flexible in terms of balancing). If we somehow reach 32 players that works nicely again.

The goal here is no 3-minute games, no hour-long games, and nothing too exotic. Ideally, maps which result in an actual team game rather than four glorified 1v1s. If a game happens to be played on some other map which satisfies those criteria I don't really care.