Yeah you need prizes, but largely this would consist of avatars with cash prizes generally going to 1500+ brackets. Doesn’t really harm anything to give out Tournament Champion avatars for a U1000 bracket.
How are you supposed to manipulate to get into a lighter group? In addition, how would this benefit you? For manipulation to be productive you would need to know the precise breaks for brackets ie is it 1800 or 2000 and you’ll also need to know which group is getting funds as well as how many funds. This relies on having omniscience and knowing exactly how many players are signing up.
Who isn’t allowed to play? The only time anyone isn’t going to be allowed to play is when extreme outliers are in the tournaments like a single 2400 signs up and then the next highest rated player is sub 2000. This is about grouping brackets so that tournaments are LESS of waste of time with dead games that were never really a question.
No, because nobody will know how many captains will be in any bracket.
- The bracket rating is not released prior
- It cannot be known how many people will sign up at whatever rating level
- The TD could use rating at X date as Katharsas pointed out if this is still something you fear (I don’t)
It doesn’t require any large number of top players as captains. If a bracket has 4 competitive teams, then there are 8 players that are considered competitive at this rating range and so 4 captains.
Your solutions of highest rating with lowest are exactly what incentives rating manipulation. The reason captain picking stops rating manipulation is that it doesn’t matter if a dude deranks by 300 points, if everyone is well aware he is better than his rating then he will still get picked first. So the only deranking gain is for captains, which again have no ability to know whether they will be captains until after signups close.