Tournament edits have been posted in advance of the tournament allowed people to prepare, and also to deter accusations of cheating or favoritism.
While it would be nice to surprise people with an edit that was not released beforehand, there will always be people who allege rightly or wrongly that others had access to it earlier and had an unfair advantage. I'd rather everyone had the edit before the tournament and do away with such accusations than deal with the animosity generated by said accusations.
It allows people to practice, and if those who "just show up" lose, it will be their own fault.

I do not agree.

It becomes obvious in short order if a gameop has leaked information repeatedly, and players vote with their feet after that.

I'm not for "off the wall" edits but the odd flaky setting is interesting.

I wish I could agree with you, Kav. The player community is small and we should be able to assume good faith on everyone's part. But as genius and madness go hand in hand, so too does the love of TradeWars seem to go with a tendency toward adolescent drama...

Ah,

But I am both a genius and a lunatic. Sadly, half a century + from the other criterion.

And I've just recently experienced that the distributed TWA was not the game that was played.

True, subtle differences, but none the less it was not the same game.

And the problem with Tournament edits that are repeated year after year, is that #1 the corp who developed the edit knows it better than anyone else, and those new upcoming corps who've never played that game are behind the ball when it comes to study and practicing.

If you are referring to the ICE 2013 edit, the edit distributed was EXACTLY the same. The TWA has been posted for several months.
Here's the thread where the download is located:
viewtopic.php?f=14&t=33576

As far as the person that made the edit knowing more, that edit was made quite a few years back and hasn't really changed much. The only thing that made the game different was importing the edit into Version 2. When imported, Version 2 screws up at least half of the settings. It shouldn't be up to the sysop to have to go through and double check that delays are turned off, that should be done during the TWGS import. That would be another bug in V2.

The only thing that was changed was the sectors, we had it changed from 20k to 10k, and that has always been up in the air depending on how many corps planned on showing!!! So please look in your bag of "Reasons we lost excuses" and find another!!!
Second, Xanos has played in the last 3 ICE tournaments, so he knows the edit pretty good!!! If you want my honest opinion, you need to A: learn to play TW first!! B: you need to think about making so player changes on your corp as well!!! You want to know why you lost? First it took you guys 2 days to bust up red for SDT, By that time we had already made well over 100mil had 30% of the grid, I had 80% of the universe probbed!!!!! Second, your support blues have no idea how to play their roles!! Meaning comet rather be on the forum talking trash, instead of going to the fed sector where your red was cloaked out to make sure he was safe to come in!! When you did bust up you used 200 turns to tow a ship w/ dets and g torps out in space! i torped 3 of you in less then 18 hours! I can go on and on about all the mistakes you made! Maybe u should take time and learn from them instead of making excuses!!!

This is not about making excuses, it's about making changes.

You guys can keep playing the same tired old edits year after year after year....

I want to make something new, something no one else has ever played yet, and run it in tournament mode.

You know your edits as well as most know stock, it's time to get you out of your comfort zone too, if you dare.

If not, that's fine too, your choice.

This is the ICE edit. This is a tournament that I started long before your return. This tournament will be ran the way WE chose to run it.
However, you can feel free to make your own edit and try to start your own tournament. Good Luck, because you'll need it.
Besides, we have played other edits and done very well in them. Edits such as BOTE, HHT, Revstock, and several others very close to stock.

LOL! Come on I'm not that dumb. Yes, I was posting trash talk on the smack forum. However, I was doing it away from my computer on my phone. I am not able to see what is going on while a red decides he wants to come in the game a hour earlier than what was told to our corp. It was a simple mistake. We as a corp did not perform well. Nor were we even remotely ready for the game. it was fun though for as much as it lasted. Secondly there was 2 blues mind you. Myself and Xanos. That night before chaos was killed Xanos was on watch. Nobody had a clue that Chaos was logging in a hour earlier than anticipated. Trust me I know somewhat about what I'm doing. (Not open for discussion LOL) Anyways, yes we had a slow start. But the end was when Chaos came into the game we were ready to start cashing. We got our @#^ handed to us. We've already established this! This topic will soon be locked.

Good. It's a worthless topic anyway.

So this quote from you isnt loaded with excuses and lies about how we tried to change the planet edits, when in all reality its your fault the class O didnt make 1:1 figs because you were to stupid and put all the colonist in fuel making 8:1 !!! Jesus now your talking about making your own tournament edit and hosting them, NO THANKS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe I should start another thread "Sysop 1.01" or "Dummy guide for creating Tradewars TWA's". Figure there's any money in it?

I personally enjoyed making tournament edits. Made several in fact, but never a big fan of posting the .twa file. Discovering how to play it is half the fun.

Ya, you made a few really cool edits, also missed playing at your server was sad when you shut it down:'(