2014 Outwitters World Cup! [Grand Final]

[Alan Klaus]

Torbreck/Awpertunity: I'm actually Canadian despite having been in the USA a fair bit recently.

[blckace]

I prefer the elimination round to stay as is. Because of the number of good players signed up, I don't think any single player will have an easy way to the finale. Playing multiple games at the same time in the elimination round would at the very least decrease the quality of play.

[Thrutchy]

Near the final though, the interest drops off dramatically because of the number of players left. The 2 players left aren't in a big auditorium filled with fans watching the competition, so I don't think a big finale matters that much. Something I like about Elite tourneys that Magic has hosted is that everybody stays in and active until the tourney is over. I've seen some very high quality games in season 1 and season 2. Those were very big round robins too - up to 14! I was very skeptical at first this this would work with so many high level players, but it has. Compare this to previous Super-Duper Titan elimination tourney that just fizzled. Even for the big elimination tournaments that finished, most people probably thought the tournament died or was already over when the winners were announced.

With round robin, there is also less reason to do best of 3 or 5 games for each match. One game for each player pair should be sufficient. There is also no need to limit the number of players to a power of 2 - final round robin could be for example of 5, 6, or 7. Even a round robin of 6 would be the same number of games as a best of 5 finale. I also like the idea of each level being like the group stage where you keep top 2 from each group. Let's say you did this with groups of 6 (5 games per player per stage) so that each stage would have a 3:1 reduction in players. 3 stages would support 54 players and 4 would support 162. Seeding would have a much lower impact since you keep top 2 for each group at each stage. The group sizes per stage can be adjust based on the number of players.

Anyway, a hybrid of elimination and round-robin seems like a good idea. Magic has shown round robin works well even for high-level play.

[blckace]

That could be better indeed. I'm just not clear on how it works.
So it's just one game against each player?

[Thrutchy]

In the elite tourney, yes. In the group stage (also round robin) of all the world cup's, yes. For other stages of this world cup, we are just jabbering until Awpertunity and Torbreck decide what they want to do.

[lawtai]

Isn't it actually 2 games? Each as P1?

[blckace]

But in the groups stage isn't it 2 games against each player? 2 games against each player in the elimination round at the same time might be too much. One game against each player in the elimination round is good.

[Thrutchy]

Sorry, I forgot. It seems like 1 game could be sufficient though. P1 vs. P2 is much better than when we did the 1st world cup.

[Xerozen]

sign me up!

[awpertunity]

For group stages it will be 2 games per matchup, so you get P1 and P2 once each on the same map. Added with the race limitations this should make interesting matches as you both need to decide what race you would like to use as P1 or P2.

We are doing this for the group stages for 2 reasons:

1. While FTA has definitely been severely mitigated since the first world cup, there are definitely still some maps that have an FTA/STA and we don't want anyone getting eliminated early on because of an unlucky draw. Also this gives us a chance to throw all these maps into the group play rounds rather than have them being a tiebreaker map in the eliminations.

2. Another reason is to just give lower level players more games in the tournament! Groups are a bit bigger now so it's not as extreme, but it's still nice to have 8 tournament games instead of 4 before getting eliminated already.



As for the semi-finals groups vs elimination, we are going back and forth now. Obviously this was originally modeled after the actual World Cup (which is this year! yay!), but as thrutchy said there is no massive stage here for people to get to watch the finals, so round robin wouldn't be bad. However, especially with the awards given, it would also be a lot more fun to pit two people against each other and call it the $250 match.

People not really following the tournament who just want to watch how it turned out at the end are far more likely to watch the final best of 5 match between two people, rather than being given 6-12 replays from 4 people, with no real signature or deciding match.

For now I think we are actually leaning towards keeping the original elimination all the way through with the grand best of 5 final at the end, but it's not for certain yet.