@swkoll said in LegendoftheStars 2021 Championship Tournament:
I mean this is basically what I do for my tournaments. If you do GSL groups, what typically ends up happening is the elimination of the 1st seed vs 4th seed matchup. I like having that matchup there because I've been experimenting with giving prize money to 3rd place in groups. I also think it can be a good opportunity for the 4th seed to get solid tournament experience. It doesn't really cost the tournament any time and if the worse seed doesn't want to play it, they can just forfeit. GSL format has bigger advantages when all the games are being casted and eliminating that 1vs4 is good for the viewer experience.
Ending your day 1 stream coverage of the tournament with "oh I guess he forfeited haha" or "b-but he's playing for honor!" is quite the buzzkill to the supposed biggest event of the year. The point of GSL format is that every game has stakes and everything matters. Even better when you need to bring out the tiebreaker sheet to go and calculate who actually won on some whatever technicality. That tiebreaker system doesn't even exist for this round-robin group stage and can only hope we don't run into a situation of needing to make post-hoc rules because nobody thought about them again.
For example, tiebreaker game? Who chooses the map? Just a random thing that was vetoed? Some map outside the pool? TD gets to do it? Lots of room for lame decisions determining the event already.
My system also does this sort of snake seeding instead of snake draft. This is done mostly for time and organizational complexity, but it also acts as an activity incentive/reward for tournament performance. The only cost is you sometimes get imbalanced, although often the fact that subs sometimes need to be brought in last minute usually leads to certain group being weak anyway.
Then just do captain drafting. I hardly see the organizational complexity, I organized like 30 people to become 3 player teams in the span of 48 hours for another tournament. This is orders of magnitudes easier, even if you let each person pick. Literally set a date and if you can't make it submit a list of players you would want to pick in order of priority. If you do neither, it's picked for you based on whatever seeding you want. Process wouldn't even take an hour.
I'm not sure Group D is the worst for Yudi even. I think Yudi has the highest 1st place chances in Group D than any other group. Under snake seed Group D is typically the Group of Death but also the group that typically has the greatest potential for any player to take 1st. Perhaps Yudi should weigh in with what group he would've picked if he had the choice.
I would put like any person of C and D into the 2 bottoms of A or B and I would say it increases the group quality.
Also great to see that the whole group stage is going to be one day again so only 15% of the games get covered and nearly all potential casting manpower is busy playing.