Swiss -> Single Elimination Discussion

[Scar]

It's a player's fault if he loses in a bad matchup, it's a TO's fault if the bracket can't reliably output a strong ordered list sorted by skill.

 

[Velocity]

Swiss instead of pools allows you to accurately seed people based on performance, pools are either biased or random, and can end up with inaccuracies because of people not taking them seriously, people being able to throw sets or matches for other people(which still happens) and certain pools being harder or easier then others. Players get to play just as many matches or more in pools. Players get Challenged and have to take every game serious if they want to have a chance at moving onto bracket or whatever the next step is.

Can be ran with as many TV's In the same amount of time. Rounds are flexible with how many you run in a row and when you allow breaks. Matches aren't dependent on other matches, if player x played all this matches except for one against player y, who is playing player z, player x has to wait. Swiss requires as much organization as pools to run them correctly it's just you can run pools like **** and get away with it.

At large tournaments round 1 pools for viewers at home, spectators at the venue, and players not worried about proceeding to round 2 consider this a waste of time. There's nothing exciting going on. With swiss every round will have some matches worth streaming, worth watching, it'll attract people to watch the stream when bracket isn't happening. Example: armada vs. pp in the third round in a best of three does this decide who will possibly win the tourney? No, but it should influence their seeds for bracket if they both make it out and this match is as important as any other. You don't know how many matches you need to win, other than as many as you can.

There's a huge problem that there are solutions to, but it's already one of the largest problems with tournaments in smash, players have a hard time getting or staying warmed up and events go longer than planned and players get fatigued. Almost all other pro-played games that I'm aware of address this to some extent.

 

[Velocity]

The point of bracket isn't just for hype but because the winner may have even been decided before the final round and it may have not even been a result of the last match the winner was in but rather by the runner up.

It seeds so well that you are diminishing the seed with double elimination. DE works so well with pools because you go into a large bracket with multiple of the same seeds. So the idea would of course be better with a smaller bracket with single elimination from swiss. Which is why most games that run swiss into bracket for single elim. 1 vs 8 is important cause 8 needs to really upset 1 to move ahead that his chance because he was already placed 8th in the tournament from "ACCURATE" seeding you don't go okay well off to losers where that 8 means far less now and you get more chances. It's already multiple stocks in a match, multiple matches in a set, how many comeback chances do you want. Winners finals that turn into grand finals that turns into 3 of the same sets played out on the same stages 3 times. You say double elimination is more accurate, the only way you can say that is out of a top 8 it would seed 5-8, as far as determining the winner both do that. Which one does it better is subjective because you can be better at playing more matches making more less important mistakes but not making major mistakes where as a player who is the opposite would do better in a different set up. Match ups are why we allow counter picking stages and characters and why single elimination would need best of 5 at least for all sets and you could argue for more for FINALS.

But yes it does create more hype for the stream and there as well and if player x doesn't make it to bracket **** hes got to get better. If you make it in as seed 8 and lose to seed 1 then you have to get better to beat 1 or get better to get a higher seed for an easier match. If you are the 1 seed which by the swiss you are "performed best overall" and you lose to 8 then that's not true and you don't deserve to win a tournament if you couldn't beat a player that was determined worse than you by a seeding system.

 

[Fizzi]

http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=308668

^ Florida has been running Swiss -> Double Elim for a while now. It's not exactly what you're trying to do but maybe it could help to discuss with them.

As far as swiss goes, I think it's really good for regional tournaments where you get similar players all the time. The promise of playing a lot of matches can perhaps help attract newer players that aren't too sure about their skill level.

EDIT: TIO really needs to add swiss support (potentially offering my coding services)

 

[Velocity]

http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=308668

^ Florida has been running Swiss -> Double Elim for a while now. It's not exactly what you're trying to do but maybe it could help to discuss with them.

As far as swiss goes, I think it's really good for regional tournaments where you get similar players all the time. The promise of playing a lot of matches can perhaps help attract newer players that aren't too sure about their skill level.

EDIT: TIO really needs to add swiss support (potentially offering my coding services)

Yeah I've been a supporter of it for 6 years now and noticed they've been doing it for awhile, and use them as an example when I tell others about it.

 

[Scar]

If you are the 1 seed which by the swiss you are "performed best overall" and you lose to 8 then that's not true and you don't deserve to win a tournament if you couldn't beat a player that was determined worse than you by a seeding system.

This is the exact argument I'd use to counter your point. Swiss is a more robust system to determine an ordered list, single-elim has a much smaller sample size and is less accurate by definition. If you ran Swiss, and you compare these hypothetical 1 and 8 seed players, you can say with confidence that the 1 seed is in fact better.

This whole idea can be compared to filming something in high definition, copying it to a VHS, and watching it there.

 

[popsofctown]

How is that true if your argument was that a player might not ever play someone else in Swiss? lol

Round Robin gets you the best results of all, not Swiss.

Swiss with a maximum number of rounds is identical to Round Robin. X>X? is false.

I can't remember the last time I had to play Falcon vs. Falco in chess...

I can remember the last time I had to play a Combo deck against a Control deck in MtG though. Wizards of the Coast has been using Swiss for epochs, sometimes as the whole tournament, sometimes to seed a single elimination bracket.

I personally would prefer pure Swiss for maximum accuracy of results. It's kind of lunacy for Swiss to kick into brackets. For example, let's say I play Rob really well and go 7-0.
Then you seed me first in a single elimination bracket. I play against the number 8. His record is 5-2. He beats me with ZSS. Now my record is 7-1, and the number 8's record is 6-2. Over the course of the tournament, I have won more games than this player. An objective assessment of who is the best player indicates that I am. But that last game was arbitrarily designated to be part of an elimination tournament for hype, so I'm eliminated. "Herpderp you lost to him head to head, therefore you are worse" isn't sound logic. If I get to first seed and lose to eighth seed, somewhere along the line there is a rock-paper-scissors triangle where people each beat eachother. A round robin tournament between Venusaur, Blastoise, and Charizard is inconclusive, there is no right answer for a TO trying to produce an accurate ranking.

Swiss handles rock-paper-scissors matchups way better than elimination tournaments. Elimination tournaments are accurate for arm wrestling contests, not games like this.

If you use Swiss to seed a single elim, you could very well actually see top seeds deliberately losing games to avoid low seed players that happen to be a bad matchup. It actually would take an unusually predictable Swiss event for that to happen, but the fact it could be advantageous at all for someone to lose a game should illustrate what's wrong. In Swiss it's never advantageous to throw a game.

I think in the long term, accurately rewarding good players will create more of this "hype" stuff than running less accurate, simpler tournaments. If someone upsets the best player in elimination, then he can't do it again next tournament, there's no "man to beat" next tournament, just two people we know are good, and some confusion about which is really better.

I have no idea whether several rounds of Swiss followed by Single Elim is better or worse than fewer rounds of Swiss followed by Double Elim. I just know they're both inaccurate. I really wish the smash community would consider fully Swiss tournaments. I kinda care more about the experience of the guy that pays tons of gas money, venue fee, and entry fee and takes a lot of time to go to a large tournament rather than the guy that rolled out of bed and flicked on the livestream.

 

[Velocity]

Swiss with a maximum number of rounds is identical to Round Robin. X>X? is false.



I can remember the last time I had to play a Combo deck against a Control deck in MtG though. Wizards of the Coast has been using Swiss for epochs, sometimes as the whole tournament, sometimes to seed a single elimination bracket.

I personally would prefer pure Swiss for maximum accuracy of results. It's kind of lunacy for Swiss to kick into brackets. For example, let's say I play Rob really well and go 7-0.
Then you seed me first in a single elimination bracket. I play against the number 8. His record is 5-2. He beats me with ZSS. Now my record is 7-1, and the number 8's record is 6-2. Over the course of the tournament, I have won more games than this player. An objective assessment of who is the best player indicates that I am. But that last game was arbitrarily designated to be part of an elimination tournament for hype, so I'm eliminated. "Herpderp you lost to him head to head, therefore you are worse" isn't sound logic. If I get to first seed and lose to eighth seed, somewhere along the line there is a rock-paper-scissors triangle where people each beat eachother. A round robin tournament between Venusaur, Blastoise, and Charizard is inconclusive, there is no right answer for a TO trying to produce an accurate ranking.

Swiss handles rock-paper-scissors matchups way better than elimination tournaments. Elimination tournaments are accurate for arm wrestling contests, not games like this.

If you use Swiss to seed a single elim, you could very well actually see top seeds deliberately losing games to avoid low seed players that happen to be a bad matchup. It actually would take an unusually predictable Swiss event for that to happen, but the fact it could be advantageous at all for someone to lose a game should illustrate what's wrong. In Swiss it's never advantageous to throw a game.

I think in the long term, accurately rewarding good players will create more of this "hype" stuff than running less accurate, simpler tournaments. If someone upsets the best player in elimination, then he can't do it again next tournament, there's no "man to beat" next tournament, just two people we know are good, and some confusion about which is really better.

I have no idea whether several rounds of Swiss followed by Single Elim is better or worse than fewer rounds of Swiss followed by Double Elim. I just know they're both inaccurate. I really wish the smash community would consider fully Swiss tournaments. I kinda care more about the experience of the guy that pays tons of gas money, venue fee, and entry fee and takes a lot of time to go to a large tournament rather than the guy that rolled out of bed and flicked on the livestream.

As a player I want all swiss as well and agree completely with why swiss is good and what it does. I'm in favor of bracket from a spectator point of view and a marketing view(profit or not)

 

[popsofctown]

As a player I want all swiss as well and agree completely with why swiss is good and what it does. I'm in favor of bracket from a spectator point of view and a marketing view(profit or not)

This is a really good starting point. If everyone understood things this much, we'd see full Swiss or at least Swiss single elim at in-state tournaments where the spectator to player ratio is very low. A big problem is that people don't understand why elimination is inaccurate, and even when they do, they don't see the gravity of it.

Something I forgot to mention in my larger post is that the Meta Knight ban greatly increases the extent that elimination is inferior to pools. Meta Knight dittos and MK vs. MK counter games had many fewer rock paper scissors interactions.

 

[GOTM]

Good post pops. Honestly, everyone has been making valid points. I feel like there's this feeling that I think going to bracket from Swiss is helping accuracy, or at least not changing it. I completely understand that bracket after Swiss is less accurate than only doing Swiss. I really don't know why people are even questioning my knowledge on that subject, lol.

Point is this.

Most -> least accurate:
1) Round Robin (or as many rounds of Swiss that it would take for everyone to play everyone, because eventually it would happen).
2) Swiss with correct # of rounds.
3) Swiss seeding into double elimination bracket
4) Swiss seeding into single elimination bracket.
5) Pools seeding into double elimination bracket.
6) Double elimination bracket.
7) Pools seeding into single elimination bracket.
8) Single elimination bracket.

I hope everyone can agree on that. Now let's go down the list and I'll make notes about each one.

1) Round Robin (or as many rounds of Swiss that it would take for everyone to play everyone, because eventually it would happen).
This can never happen at a Smash tournament. It would take way too long. Honestly, the hype factor here wouldn't really be too bad, because everyone would know beforehand what the good matchups would be, and would be guaranteed to see them.

2) Swiss with correct # of rounds.
It's hard to get hyped for this UNLESS you derive your hype from being able to see the most accurate results. I personally need a bit more than that, and would be willing to sacrifice a little accuracy for more hype IMO. Accuracy though is the best you can get in the time allotted for most smash tournaments.

3) Swiss seeding into double elimination bracket
Once again, would take WAY too long. Most double elimination brackets even without pools take too long on their own. I would never want to be at a tournament long enough to run both of these.

4) Swiss seeding into single elimination bracket.
Less accurate than method #3, but takes a lot less time, and IMO, offers WAY more hype. Once again, this is opinion, but I honestly think single elimination puts so much pressure on players that we can promote say top 8 from Swiss no matter the tournament size, and everyone else at the tournament has incredible matches to watch. The players would HAVE to play well under pressure as every match would be do or die. Yeah you could get a ****ty match and get bracket ****ed, but that happens in double elim too, and will probably happen more often here, but at least you ain't waiting 8 ****ing hours for it to happen.

5) Pools seeding into double elimination bracket.
We do it now. Pools are ********. I'd rather just do double elim to save time.

6) Double elimination bracket.
Most accurate way to run a tournament if you don't have a pre-bracket stage with time allotted. We've been doing tournaments like #5 & #6 for SO LONG, that I honestly feel like we need a change of pace, even if it's just a cool fresh way of doing things.

7) Pools seeding into single elimination bracket.
Really?

8) Single elimination bracket.
Really?

So I mean there you have it. I understand the method I am proposing is sacrificing a lot, but I honestly believe it wouldn't be too bad and players would still enjoy it. I think it would add so much hype to tournaments, with the exception of Scar because he wouldn't attend on principle, lol.

Also, as a TO, I understand everything is for the community, and I would obviously not do this anymore and go back to the normal boring way if everyone hated me afterwards. I just honestly think we should try it, and if people are willing to protest my tournament just to try one new thing out which seriously will not achieve results much different from the norm, that's kind of lame. You're still getting friendlies, you're still getting important matches, you're still getting practice, and you're still having a good time.

 

[Scar]

We're back to swiss>double taking too long? If that's the only downside then it's obviously the best option because it doesn't take too long. When you have a small enough bracket (top 4, 8, 16), double-elim doesn't take much longer than single-elim, and for single elimination, you already mentioned that you need more matches.

Also, using swiss to seed the whole tournament in an ordered list, 1 through last, is largely unhelpful if you're moving to a bracket. I think I've mentioned this. Swiss is a much better tool than pools when used to take everyone in the venue and get good seeding for a bracket.

The best compromise between logistics, accuracy, player fairness, and "hype" is, at this point, demonstrably and clearly swiss seeding to a top 8/16 double-elim bracket, and that's exactly what I hope to see my region do. I'm happy to see other regions try different things, but I can't in good conscience encourage TOs to sacrifice player fairness and accuracy for logistics and hype.

 

[GOTM]

The best compromise between logistics, accuracy, player fairness, and "hype" is, at this point, demonstrably and clearly swiss seeding to a top 8/16 double-elim bracket

I agree with everything you said, and have been saying, except for this.

Without "hype", yes. As soon as you add that in, I don't think so - but that's just me. You're smart so I won't argue about anything else. I think we agree on the facts, because they are facts. "Hype" is only about opinion, and when it's just as two arguing, it's the opinion of one person vs. another. We need to get a SWF poll here for any resolution. You're a mod. Do that, lol.

Honestly though, the more I think about it, the more I just want to only run Swiss, because it would take MUCH less time, and I think having basically PERFECT results, and MUCH MUCH less time, MIGHT be enough to make up for not having single elim which is in my eyes the most hype thing a tournament can do.

 

[KevinM]

Mass Madness tournaments routinely get 30-60 people and are out at 10 at the latest running three events, you all are just doin it wrong lol.

TO's need to start enforcing DQing if people are not on time for matches, getting people to report matches right away and making no changes to the schedule for ANY player.

Also we ran a Mass Madness this last weekend with 28 players

Played through 6 rounds of Swiss to seed a top 10 in a double Elim bracket and finished it by 8:30, we only had 8 set-ups with each swiss round needing 14 pairings.

TO's just need to step up their time management.

Btw I'm not trying to brag I'm pointing out that a lot of TO's just really get in over their heads on this.

 

[GOTM]

@KevinM, I was going to ask you, do you know what software you use for Swiss? I've been using Swiss Perfect 98, and it's great, but it's not free, and my trial is up in like a few weeks.

Also, yeah I mean, honestly for me, this never came down only to run time, that was just a part of it.

Look, really, the whole point of this for me, was to try something new and fresh. If the community that is coming to my future tournaments doesn't want to give it a shot because it lowers accuracy of placings, then so be it. I'll just put a poll up and see what people want.

Mainly I'm just tired of going to a tournament and having double elimination, no pools, being the only option of bracket. Seeds are 100% TO biased, and whoever helps the TO seed, and it's kind of lame. I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a tournament and have seen some lower level players just get M2K first round, and then some other dude in losers that still ***** them, when they were seeded entirely wrong in the first place.

Swiss -> single has worse accuracy than single-> double, period. We all get that. But I just thought it would be cool, and new, and hyped up. I guess I was wrong.

 

[KevinM]

We used the WotC approved software and ran a smash tournament as a Neopets cardgame, lol.

Our attendees really liked swiss and pools have always been run as long as we have more then 24 attendants.


As an attendent as well as a host I can say some of the big mistakes I see are

1. Not having enough help and still playing in your tournament: We have 5 people that help at Mass Madness and only 4 of us actively play the game. We make sure not to call all 4 of the other peoples matches at the same time and the people that aren't playing actively look to make sure every TV has a tournament game running on it.

2. Not DQing, changing the schedule, showing up late to host: Self-Explanatory

3. Not organizing and/or having enough set-ups: Seriously label the set-ups and make sure that you have enough, plead for set-ups and bring as many as you can. You should shoot for no less then 8 at any sort of tournament and shoot for 12-16.

 

[GOTM]

Do you have a link to the software?

 

[Mogwai]

Swiss -> single has worse accuracy than single-> double, period. We all get that. But I just thought it would be cool, and new, and hyped up. I guess I was wrong.

I really have nothing new to add. I just don't see the point of dropping double elim for single elim in the context of Smash. That decision feels like a logistics decision to me. In MTG, when you're doing a bracket, you can't have ties and as such, matches can take a LOOOOONG time. Likewise with a game like Starcraft or LoL where a Bo3 can take multiple hours, the logistics of potentially adding 50% to the bracket time is daunting. But with Melee, I just don't see why it's worth sacrificing the extra accuracy that a double elim bracket brings due to Bo3 match duration being 30 minutes tops if you take a long time with stage striking and setting up recording and ****.

Also, I really need to stress that people are overblowing how accurate Swiss is. Swiss is good, but it's not like bad matchups don't happen in a Swiss bracket. Someone can go X-0 in a Swiss bracket due to fortunate draws.

Pops, yea, Wizards has been using straight swiss for casual events forever now, I'm well aware, I was just talking about the Chess comparison which I felt was stupid. The fact is that Wizards prefers Swiss -> Single Elim when they have the time and resources to do it though. Straight Swiss is just for FNM and Prereleases, where running quickly is a primary concern. Straight swiss also has the benefit of higher placement variance, which is good for casual players since they can get fortunate and place really well from time to time. But when you start talking about GPTs and PTQs and anything more serious than that and they always cut to top 8 and do single elim bracket, which feels like a logistics decision to me since these tournies already routinely take like 12+ hours.

 

[GOTM]

The simplest approach to this problem is probably simulation. I want to try to sample player skills Si from a standard normal distribution, then model individual match-ups by testing S1−S2>X, where X is a normal random variate with mean zero and variance v. The value of the parameter v will determine the likelihood of weaker players beating stronger players, which I'd have to tweak until the results seem reasonable for this scenario. If I took a large body of match records, I could probably use this to guide my estimate, either in an ad hoc way, or by using a system like TrueSkill.

You can then set up a number of different tournament forms, and run a couple of thousand simulations on each. That should give us a rough idea of how the various different forms compare. Intuitively though, I think my initial ideas are probably right, that single does not sacrifice as much accuracy as some of you guys think, but how much accuracy you 'sacrifice' in the Swiss/single elimination system will probably depend strongly on the value of v.

 

[popsofctown]

Also, I really need to stress that people are overblowing how accurate Swiss is. Swiss is good, but it's not like bad matchups don't happen in a Swiss bracket. Someone can go X-0 in a Swiss bracket due to fortunate draws.

Swiss doesn't fully resolve bad matchups, but it is the best available answer. It's also useful in combination with top 8 elimination, because it weeds out archetypes that don't have well rounded matchup (like a very mediocre ZSS player that has practiced infinites enough to upset better players, etc).

When Swiss into Double Elimination versus full Swiss is being compared, yeah maybe it's getting overblown. But when comparing Swiss with methods involving pools, I don't think it's possible to overstate the improved accuracy.

 

[Mogwai]

Oh, I agree wholeheartedly about swiss over pools. Pools suck. I'm just saying that the notion that full Swiss is the next best thing in terms of accuracy to round robin doesn't seem quite right to me though I don't really have math to back it up.

In case it's not obvious I want Swiss for seeding, but double elim bracket. I don't see the point in single elim bracket for a game with half hour matches being on the long side.

 

[popsofctown]

Swiss is the next best thing to round robin in terms of accuracy. It's partial round robin with an algorithm identifying the most important games. I'm not going to make a mathematical proof of it, but Wikipedia, the way I read it, indicated that it's the most accurate method when round robin isn't possible (wikipedia is pretty accurate on math or science topics)

 

[Mogwai]

it assumes that matchups can't wildly affect expected outcomes though, which I'm uncertain of with Smash tbh. It's very good at weeding out strictly inferior competition, but doesn't seem like it would be good with weird matchups all over the place.

 

[Dark Hart]

My 2 cents

I hate single elimination

And most people I know hate it as well

 

[popsofctown]

I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think matchups change whether Swiss is better. I think matchups behave like variance, which Swiss handles the best. To use a metaphor I used earlier, round robin between Charizard, Blastoise, and Venusaur is inconclusive. The best tournament format possible can't fix matchups. Nothing can fix matchups. The only thing you can do is try to work to make sure that someone doesn't get a disproportionate number of bad matchups, which is a variance problem. Say you have a tournament of 10 Charizards, 20 Blastoises, and 40 Venusaurs. After a round Robin, a Charizard player expects 44.5 wins, 24.5 losses. A Blastoise expects 19.5 wins, 49.5 losses. A Venusaur expects 39.5 wins, 29.5 losses. The true, fair, pure result is for a Charizard player to win this tournament (whichever one is best at the mirror, but definitely a Charizard).

A good tournament format can't "solve" the problem that Charizard will paradoxically lose to inferior Blastoises. All it can do is try to reduce the chance that Charizards end up playing against Blastoises with disproportionate frequency.

A good tournament system has to be blind to the strategies chosen, the only thing it can use as information is wins and losses. That's what Swiss is going to do here. Swiss is going to pair a player that won game one (probably a Charizard, second most likely, a Venusaur) with another player that won game one. It will pair a player that lost game one (probably a Blastoise, but second most likely, a Venusaur) with another player that lost game one. It's possible for a Charizard to get paired against a Blastoise over and over again, but the format makes it as unlikely as is mathematically possible.

It doesn't ge better than Swiss.

 

[TheDekuNut]

Blastoise is obv the the best -------Surf/Hydropump and Ice beam/Blizzard

c'mon, he would beat everyone

 

[Strong Badam]

I will never run a single elimination bracket.
Swiss has its merits, but after SSBPD has stabilized, Elo ratings will allow for accurate pools seeding.

 

[GOTM]

I'm about to just start running tournaments only Swiss. All this bracket talk is starting to piss me off, lol.

If accuracy is all good players care about, all Swiss erryday.

But honestly, if this thread has taught me anything it's that regardless of what's accurate or not, different players have different reasons for coming to tournaments, and different ways of enjoying tournaments. Some want an accurate placement, some want NOT to waste an entire day or weekend, some just want to hang out with people have a good time, and some want to see hyped *** matches.

I think because of this, before each of my tournaments, I will just poll people and run brackets/pools/swiss based on what they choose. Easier for me, I don't have to decide - and better for them, majority gets want they want

 

[Pakman]

I will never run a single elimination bracket.
Swiss has its merits, but after SSBPD has stabilized, Elo ratings will allow for accurate pools seeding.

That system is not nearly organized enough to gain legitimate merit. It won't be organized either because there is no governing body of the competitive smash world. The way those ELO ratings are being generated is more of an interesting statistic than a legitimate rating system.

 

[Scar]

it assumes that matchups can't wildly affect expected outcomes though, which I'm uncertain of with Smash tbh. It's very good at weeding out strictly inferior competition, but doesn't seem like it would be good with weird matchups all over the place.

this is what i've been waiting for / trying to say

single elim would work better if we were in a competitive space where strict superiority/inferiority were better established. smash is not that space and as a result single elim opens the door for wildly inaccurate tourney results

@pakman i'm not sure I agree about SSBPD, the ELO isn't perfectly accurate but all tournies within our scene are basically run in TIO, and it's a strong indicator of ability leading up to the tourney. i mean, we seed swiss/pools/bracket currently by how good we "think" people are. having data only makes it better.

 

[GOTM]

Let's end this discussion. I'll admit defeat.

 

[Pakman]

@pakman i'm not sure I agree about SSBPD, the ELO isn't perfectly accurate but all tournies within our scene are basically run in TIO, and it's a strong indicator of ability leading up to the tourney. i mean, we seed swiss/pools/bracket currently by how good we "think" people are. having data only makes it better.

It isn't the inaccuracy of the ELO that bothers me. I actually think Elo would work well if the Smash scene had a fair structure, but the smash scene is too disconnected for those values to mean anything.

I am fairly certain the West Coast has more tournaments and more participation than the East Coast. If we tried to use ELO for a national tournament, we would run into problems. Ratings in games like League of Legends and Starcraft 2 work because their system is managed by riot/blizzard respectively.

However, when it comes to competitive tournaments I am not sure how much ELO and ranking factors into the seeding.

 

[Alex Strife]

anyone ever thought about using a modified version of what EVO does with their games?

Qualifying brackets - 64 man bracket ( seeded based on who was in losers/winners of each bracket )

This would be a lot faster and can help solve equipment issues. Also...we could run more exhibitions like usa vs world and ec vs wc at events.

 

[GOTM]

The EVO way is great for speed, and speed only. For seeding, it's the worst. Swiss and pools both offer better seeding.

In swiss, you're playing more matches and it seeds based on calculated ELO, and pools well, you may seed the pool bad but at least you're playing everyone.

EVO way, you'd seed it the same way as pools but you only get to play in a double elim bracket, which is less accurate than pools, so the eliminated people are less accurate than the other 2 ways.

The time you'd save however would be MASSIVE, and because of this, I think for some tournaments it would be beneficial, depending on # of people and # of side events you'd like to run.

 

[Alex Strife]

You can seed it the Evo way just fine if you have pre-reg and stuff. I doubt it is just for speed only.

 

[Strong Badam]

It is for speed. It's because EVO tournaments often get entrant #'s far exceeding record numbers for us.

Pakman: I very highly disagree; as long as every recent tournament gets uploaded to the database (we're currently at a 50%ish upload amount after only a month or two) it will be a very good way to seed players.

 

[GOTM]

You can seed it the Evo way just fine if you have pre-reg and stuff. I doubt it is just for speed only.

Didn't say it wouldn't be "fine", just that it will NOT be as accurate as pools or swiss.

also, if the tournament is large (and therefore probably expensive), you are running risk of having people travel very far and spend a lot of money for only 2 matches TOTAL, that would suck so hard. doing pools or swiss guarantees at least what...5 matches?

unless you're taking like every single person except for the top couple (whoever made it to GF) and putting them into a losers bracket, it would suck MASSIVELY for the lower level players who only get to play 2 matches total at a tournament.

 

[Pakman]

Pakman: I very highly disagree; as long as every recent tournament gets uploaded to the database (we're currently at a 50%ish upload amount after only a month or two) it will be a very good way to seed players.

No it won't. If west coast uploads 50 tournaments and the east coast uploads 10, and the results are used at a national, the west coast players will be rated much higher than the east coast players because of activity and not because of skill.

ELO requires a very large sample to get legitimate results and I am not confident that gathering ELO from a bracket based system is legitimate. The top placements get a decent number of samples per event but the mid level and low level players get much smaller samples. (A guy who goes two and out plays two matches for data and the winner of the event could play upwards of 10).