There is a structure played at the Bicycle Club here in L.A. that they call a Quantum Reload.
It is hard to describe. It is a rebuy but with a twist. There are 6 hours of registration;
Early registration gets in cheap. 2 hours later the registration fee goes up, but the amount of chips one gets also goes up. 2 more hours and both go up again, and that level of registration lasts 2 hours.
The changing entry and chip stack seems to overcome the nasty aspects of really late registration as we see in the WPN events. Really late registration online means you only get a very few BB's when you buy in (or re-buy) late. This obviously discourages LR or rebuys.
The Quantum Reload concept makes it so you almost get the same ratio of BB's per blind level if you register late, as you would if you help start the game. This (not so obviously) actually encourages LR.
They seem to alway cover the guarantee.
http://thebike.com/pdf/tournaments_daily/Quantum%20Reload%20Saturday.pdf
They have shorter Quantum Reloads with only 3 hours of LR.
With WPN being short on covering the guaranteed big games this year, I'm concerned it will suffer big time before they re-think the whole thing.
Notes I observed when I played the QR;
-I started at the beginning.
-The field was slow to grow.
-I re-bought as an add-on just before the fees went up. Almost everyone did that.
-After that first tier, the field continued to grow. The new arrivals got almost the same ratio of BB/blind levels as I did when I helped start that tourney. But they paid more to get in. They started with a bigger stack than I did. But with my cheaper re-buy before the tier changed, I was still ahead of them, but they were having no compunction to do anything rashly. I thought at the time it was a decent trade-off.
-I played the 3 tier version, and the same thing happened at the next change, where re-buys were at the tier 2 level. -The tier 3 newbies paid more, got more and again, they felt no compunction to be rash. I busted out somewhere in there and didn't rebuy.
I remember thinking the the structure was a great solution to the LR issues we see at all tourneys with uncomfortably long LR.
Another way to look at it is that is sort of a Satellite to itself. Like I said, it is hard to describe. Kudo's to those who figured it out. The Bike holds the Patent on it I believe.