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Umbreon
You could do Round Robin once you reach a certain cap of players, but it may be a massive undertaking trying to do say a top 32 RR bracket. However take your statement about 33rd: those players may get "janked" earlier before this Round Robin anyways so you'd have to start a new format other than bracket for some group of players extending below just top 32, otherwise you're just arbitrarily "saving" top x from MU jank and not extending it to more players (if we still keep bracket as a format somewhere in the tourney)
I guess you could have larger tournaments be 0% bracket, and pools + final RR only? Pools give you a much bigger opportunity to deal with 1-2 bad MU's and still progress further in tourney, however they also still give you the chance of bad MU stacking (unless you want to start taking down character info from players entering and try to use that to also avoid character MU imbalances?). I mean technically, it's possible for a player's pool to be literally stuffed with bad MU's AND you're only playing the people in your pool.
It's still possible for someone really strong to fail to make it out of pools somewhere in the process (assuming multiple pool rounds) because of MU skews that apparently ruin the current bracket format. If say Sethlon or someone better than me, ended up losing in pools because of MU skews, this isn't really any different or better than me getting a placing or two higher just cause my top 64 bracket wasn't super counters left and right. A better player than I would end up placing lower in both scenarios, and both scenarios still have a lack of "Everyone played enough people to rank their skill against each other"
In both scenarios, the really strong player may lose AND he may not end up playing a large enough variety of other top players to consider the results accurate. I could dodge Sethlon in pools AND simultaneously I could be one of the players who keeps someone down cause "goddamn my character sucks vs CF and my pool is half CF". The impact of this is surely greater in Bracket, I do not contest that. Just saying that similar situations that we would want to avoid if we're trying to accurately measure people, can still pop up in pools or RR if we're not having 100% of the player size play each other.
I get the point of wanting a better format, I'm just not sure there's a clean way to improve. Massive Pools and Round Robin sizes, to more accurately assess the skill of strong players, may be a nightmare logistically if you want to go beyond 16. I support making a top cutoff be Round Robin (example: top 16 players all play each other and possibly all guaranteed in the money), I just don't know if we can truly find a great balance below that threshold. We probably can't make entire tournaments Round Robin, but the further away you get from "Everyone plays everyone", the more likely it becomes that your results end up less accurate than they could have been.
If you have a specific idea (haven't read all posts or thoughts on the matter), I'd like to hear it cause I can see the DFW burnout that's been going on for lord knows how long and for other players. I wouldn't mind reversing that if possible, just not confident that we have a great solution to it aside from doing RR for the last players involved and even this doesn't address player situations below the cutoff
steelguttey
