Do you like EVO's tournament format?

[t3h Icy]

As in, would you prefer if all Melee tournaments were of this style? There are a lot of positives including less time to play out the tournament, more structure and organization, more prestige and a concrete goal for players when making it to top 8 and 16, and each match counts for so much more than each would in our round robin style pools.

One thing I really like is at first, I thought the pools acted as just subdivisions of a massive bracket, but they actually have the winners and losers of each pool split up into the next group of pools. In other words, the chances of having to player the same player in both Winners' and Losers' is decreased by a lot. Another thing if we were to run them is that we could hold off on making the structure for brackets of top 16 until actually reaching that point so that we can further avoid regional problems, balance problems, players purposely losing if their Losers' bracket appears easier, and cover for unnoticed mistakes early on.

Of course though, there are some disadvantages, the main one being is that a quarter of the players that enter only get two tournament sets and they're out, any errors with balancing can be disastrous for good players, and there's no nice way to determine what seeding players should have beforehand. Apex 2013's format was similar to what EVO has, but I don't know how people felt about it.

Your thoughts?

 

[Juggleguy]

I'd prefer it if five of the other fighting games were kicked out of the event and Melee was given 100 additional setups with a round robin pools format and a veteran Smash TO in charge of seeding the eventual bracket.

You never said my preference had to be realistic.

In all seriousness though, round robin is way better than bracket pools in almost every aspect. I don't know anyone who actually prefers bracket pools over round robin. The only reason Apex and EVO go with bracket pools is due to time and resource constraints; I'm pretty sure the organizers of both would agree that a round robin format provides a much better overall tournament experience for all involved.

 

[Strong Badam]

EVO's format works very well for EVO. They need to eliminate several hundred and in some cases over a thousand players in multiple events over the course of 3 days. There's no way to realistically do this by any means other than double-elimination. They're also executing the double-elimination very well, by separating the huge 1024 man bracket with hundreds of byes into 64 16-man pools (and shoving some of the byes into pools by themselves so there are only 60 pools).

 

[Mahie]

This is a once in a lifetime tournament, and I'm fine with it being double elimination all the way through. That kind of really harsh format will lead to a lot of upsets and let's face it, I want to watch those. Best of 3 will help it as well.

From a player point of view, I guess it might be a lot to go and only play a couple sets. From a spectator point of view, this is going to a great show.

 

[Engo]

No I do not. It is designed with the top players in mind and the tournament experience of lower level players and the community as a whole is largely ignored. The bad seeding only makes this worse because then even good players can end up getting screwed so ultimately it only really considers the top 5-10 players who will make it to the end regardless of how ****ty the seeding is.

It's all contrary to the important and long standing notion in our community that a tournament is an experience for everyone of any level. A tournament is something for the whole community. It's a notion that I, and I think many people, appreciate and wouldn't like to see changed if it is possible.

With that said I do understand if bracketpools is necessary for such a massive tournament but setups and seeding at least are something that should always be prioritized for smash tournaments. If possible I think it's best to avoid this format in our future events.

 

[Arcadia157]

It's not how I would prefer things to be played out, but considering how large of a tournament this is with only 2-3 days to finish everything, I can't think of a more effecient method than what they have planned.

 

[The Business]

i just wish all of top 8 was best of 5, and the winners/losers finals of each bracket pool were best of 5.