I think there should be some sort of expiration if tournaments don't fill
The problem with this is that it's a bad experience for a player if they join a tournament and it never starts. Imagine it from a new player's perspective: they go to tournaments, see a couple they like, join them, and then... nothing. Days, weeks, months go by and they never see anything happen. Sure, they could navigate back to tournaments and find it they could find a message saying that they expired, but then what? They join more tournaments, and the same thing happens again? It's a never-ending cycle.
It's also a bad experience for the tournament creator, who created a tournament and then never got to see it start most of the time. I want tournaments to work reliably for everyone involved.
I also want real-time tournaments to work reliably. Someone creates one, and it actually gets enough people and starts. For that to be possible, we really need to fix the ratio between creators/joiners. If it's too easy to make one, then they won't hold enough significance to be relevant to people joining.
one reason tournaments stall out is because people don't decline and you can't invite more people
You're talking about private tournaments. Open tournaments do not have this problem -- anyone can always join it, regardless of whether they've been invited. The only reason tournaments reach the invite limit is due to abuse of the invite system -- people are just spamming everyone rather than actually inviting players who they want to play a tournament with. This leads to people ignoring tournament invites, which is the fundamental reason they're taking up a space in that tournament. We can talk about private tournaments more in a different thread, but let's keep this thread about open tournaments, as the subject says.
How about after a certain amount of time the tournament starts irregardless of how many people have accepted the invite? You fill the holes with byes or AIs.
Something like this could maybe work. But we have to consider how it could fail, too: what if the tournament is only 5% filled, and everyone gets byes up to the end of a 512 person tournament? It would be kind of silly. Also, team tournaments are screwed, since not everyone would have a full team. I don't really like using AIs, since the AI will never be as good as a human, and in some cases it's even worse than not having a partner at all.
how about a rule which'll restrict the "number of tournaments" and "players in it" that we create based on the number of tournaments that we've joined that others have created
That could work. As I said earlier, we need to adjust the ratio of people creating to people joining. In your example though, if you're making a 64 person tournament you'd have to join 64 tournaments before you could make your own. Maybe less depending on how many people are joining but not creating.
What if there's just a limit to the number of open tournaments that can be open at any one time? Say, there's 10, and if you want to start a new one you have to wait for one of the existing 10 to start. There are problems with this idea, too, but I say it just to get the idea out there.
when people want to open a tournament there should be a cost for this.
This is interesting. What if there's a coin cost for creating a tournament, and those coins are given to the winner(s) of the tournament? This would REALLY encourage people to join tournaments, and also keep the number created down to a realistic number, ensuring that they all start.
There is also a vast majority of players under the age of 18 that can not receive coins
That's not true at all. Anyone can receive coins. The only thing that you can't do if under 18 is turn them back into cash. You can still buy, receive, and spend them.
Edited 2/10/2015 16:45:01