7 replies to this topic

[Decency]

There's been some negative feedback about the World Championship Tournament format since the announcement post here, and it's clear to me that there are some avoidable mistakes in the current structure both in terms of keeping things fair and fun for competing teams, and in keeping things interesting and exciting for spectators. I wanted to offer some alternatives to help prevent some of these mistakes, based on my experience running and following esports tournaments for more than a decade across a variety of games, including StarCraft, Counter-Strike, and Dota2. Here's how I'd run the event:

Regional Qualifiers

- Teams from each region will be split into roughly equally sized pools. NA will have 8 pools, EU and AP will have 4.
- Teams will play each other team in their pool in a Bo2.
- The winners of each pool advance to the Regional Finals.
- Top teams, based on their performance in recent leagues, will be spread among the pools as best as possible.
- All teams earn some fair amount of C-Bills based on their number of wins.

Regional Finals

- The qualified teams who won their pools compete in a double elimination bracket (8 teams in NA, 4 in EU/AP)
- The winner of each regional final advances to the World Championship
- In NA, the second place team will also advance to the World Championship.

World Championship

- Single elimination bracket, now with 4 teams, playing in a Bo5.
- The two NA teams will be placed on opposite sides of the bracket.
- The winner of the bracket is crowned as the World Champion.

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Why this tournament structure improves the tournament:

- Instead of ~2800 matches in the biggest region, there's now have about a tenth of that, with teams only needing to play ~12 matches or less. This is a much more achievable commitment from players and casters, and will make the event more interesting to spectators by being easy to follow.
- When the value of each individual game is so low because there's so many, interest is also going to be very low. This avoids that problem by making clear the importance of each individual match. Imagine if a Football season had 100 games per team: who would watch?
- By giving teams an incentive to compete after they're mathematically eliminated, teams which are out out contention will be less likely to drop out and will still take games seriously. Something like 1 million per player per win seems appropriate. Otherwise, there's a serious risk of a large number of teams dropping out, especially with such a lengthy tournament.
- 4 and 8 (unlike 3 and 5) fit into a Double Elimination bracket properly, and so for the Regional Finals and World Championship, all of the teams in each bracket start with an equal standing. No team needs to be given a bye and thus there's no room for favoritism or bad luck to hurt someone's chances.
- Regions are represented more proportionally at the World Championships, making it more likely that the final match of the event is actually a match between the two best teams in the world.

I think there's also room to improve the format for each match, where I'd love to see a variety of maps and perhaps a couple of different modes all be used.

[Liveish]

Decency, on 05 May 2016 - 03:55 AM, said:

- The two NA teams will be placed on opposite sides of the bracket.

So if the EU team and the NA team are top 2, why are they not on the opposite sides of the bracket ?

[PhoenixFire55]

Decency, on 05 May 2016 - 03:55 AM, said:

- The qualified teams who won their pools compete in a double elimination bracket (8 teams in NA, 4 in EU/AP)
- The winner of each regional final advances to the World Championship
- In NA, the second place team will also advance to the World Championship.

lol ... how about NO.

North America has how many countries? Like ... 8?
EU has how many coutries? Like ... 50?
Asia/Pacific has how many coutries? Like ... 100-ish?

Seems like 1 team from NA and about 6 from EU and 12 from Asia/Pacific to me.

Either you treat all zones equally, or you don't create them in the first place.

[LordSkyKnight]

live1991, on 05 May 2016 - 04:20 AM, said:

So if the EU team and the NA team are top 2, why are they not on the opposite sides of the bracket ?

Ummm, one of the NA teams would be playing the EU team, the other would be playing the AP team......

PhoenixFire55, on 05 May 2016 - 04:53 AM, said:

lol ... how about NO.

North America has how many countries? Like ... 8?
EU has how many coutries? Like ... 50?
Asia/Pacific has how many coutries? Like ... 100-ish?

Seems like 1 team from NA and about 6 from EU and 12 from Asia/Pacific to me.

Either you treat all zones equally, or you don't create them in the first place.

He's splitting it based on number of teams registered for each area, not based on number of countries in each area. It's pretty obvious which one makes for a better split.

[PhoenixFire55]

LordSkyKnight, on 05 May 2016 - 05:47 AM, said:

He's splitting it based on number of teams registered for each area, not based on number of countries in each area. It's pretty obvious which one makes for a better split.

And what makes you think that top X teams in NA are better than top X teams in EU for example?
Total number of teams means nothing.

[Decency]

Total number of teams is the only objective criteria that we can work off of, given the lack of prior inter-regional results. I'm happy to hear another non-subjective method, if you have one.

Personally, I would've preferred that they had preempted this problem by creating 4 regions instead of 3, but it's a bit late for that. The reality is that a 3-team tournament bracket will be terrible unfair, and this is the most reasonable way to add a 4th team, based on the interest in competing in the tournament.

[Bilson]

PhoenixFire55, on 05 May 2016 - 07:51 AM, said:

And what makes you think that top X teams in NA are better than top X teams in EU for example?
Total number of teams means nothing.

It's actually reasonably fair to base it on the number of entrants from each region, as there are no easy metrics to determine the skill level of the finalists between the regions, until they fight each other... and by then it's already the finals. For example, how do you know that all 3.5 teams that entered from AP don't deserve to go through?

It's not unreasonable to have 2 NA teams, as last week the region splits for the number of teams were roughly 57% NA, 31% EU and 12% AP. Assuming that split hasn't changed much, 2/1/1 NA/EU/AP is a pretty close match for that.

Think of it less as EU getting ripped off, and more as AP getting a disproportionately sized slot, since you can't give out a fraction of a slot of course.

Obviously a larger group of finalists would be even better, eg. 4/3/1, but PGI would have to be willing to spend the extra $$.

Late edit: A better solution altogether might be to merge the regions at the first stage and run the qualifiers in a format that would rank all teams before picking the best teams from each region, though I don't know what format would be needed to run the rankings in an efficient but accurate way. There would still be a disadvantage in that the mixed rankings could actively highlight better ranked teams being passed up because their region slots were already filled.

Edited by Bilson, 05 May 2016 - 08:35 AM.

[Hunter Watzas]

You would never ever be able to fully gauge team's ability and claiming the "BEST" teams in the world. Perhaps the best team ends up forfeiting due to poor circumstances or soemthing and ends up behind on victories against other competing teams. What is to say that NA has the top 3 teams, and EU and AP fall behind those?
While nominally would love to mix up all the players from all the regions into 4 divisions, that is not practical due to the massive amount of time zones. What could work in the future is:
1: Break each region into 4 divisions
2: Round robin for each division; 2 matches against each team
3: Then either top player or top 2 moves to a 4 (or 8) player single elimination bracket; best out of 3 to advance
4: Top 2 players from each division move on to the world finals (6 players)
5: Double elimination bracket; the runnerup champions from two of the regions with worst score start in "loser" bracket.

You could also divide the AP region into two; but that requires more player base.

I agree that there needs to be more map possibilities for the round robin for sake of viewers and tactics/skill
I agree with incentivizing teams that have already lost the tourney to keep playing rather than dropping out
I'll be bored of playing canyon network after the third week this summer