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Out of interest, if we get over 64 teams will that mean we get 32 teams in the knockout phases – it works this way for css at iseries

Quoted from kaidus

I dunno what the problem is in honesty. It’s really not that uncommon in esports or regular sports for the group stages to be a snooze fest for the top seeds. The knock-outs will be absolutely gold. Honestly I don’t know why people are talking about when the “top 4” will face each other, because as far as I can tell there is a strong top 6 pushing even as far as a top 8 that will be genuinely competitive with a handful of teams sitting further beyond that who have a legitimate shot at upsetting this top 6-8.

The only thing I will say is that it would be nice if there could be harsher rules regarding late teams. It’s one thing if you have technical problems, that can’t be avoided, but what is really fucking annoying (especially for top seeds) is when you have to sit and wait 20 minutes for a team that you will most likely beat in less than 10. It’s already bad enough that you have to play a game that’s over very quickly and then twiddle your thumbs for 40 minutes (a period of time that really doesn’t allow you to do anything, but is long enough to be a tedious wait) waiting for the next match.

Just call a default on them? You know as well as i do its almost impossible to control drunk finnish teenagers time keeping ;)

I’m throwing my lot in with F2.
It makes absolute sense for the greater good of TF2 and it has nothing to do with the boredom of the top teams.

I don’t want to overhype it, but we’ve never had such an amazing opportunity to promote competitive TF2 to the world…

The quality of the teams, the massive community turnout, the fantastic story of the fundraising and the large number of VTV and eXtv staff on site are all factors that make this a unique event in TF2 History.

We need to put on the best show possible and take full advantage of the exceptional circumstances and I have no qualms about sacrificing anyone’s dreams of taking a round from Epsilon or getting an airshot on Darn.

The group stages are always garbage from a casting stand point. Even at i43 there were only two good games, Infused vs TCM and the final. It’s not only a waste of player’s time but a waste of the coverage staff’s time; the people who are coming to work whilst everyone one else has the fun!

If we have this awesome TF2 Casting Stage in the hall and Arx & Beta et al there to man it, I don’t want the staff or the fans (online and off) to have to endure hours of energy sapping shit games, with the promise that we might catch a glimpse of some actual TF2 before midnight.

We need to milk every ounce of greatness from every hour of i46, anything else is just aspiring to mediocrity.

P.S. If kaidus reckons that there are potentially eight top teams then that makes it even easier to implement this seeded round robin or even two “high” groups?

Quoted from Admirable

I don’t want to overhype it, but we’ve never had such an amazing opportunity to promote competitive TF2 to the world…
?

Mix^
LG
In England
First ever International TF2 LAN

IS OVER HYPE EVEN POSSIBLE?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

but in all seriousness, Ads puts it best here I think, the reality is that a lot of money, time and effort is being put into this by not only extv but also vtv who are all desperate to get sponsors, and pulling amazing numbers by having lots of amazing games all throughout the event will not only be good for us, but also you and multiplay as their sponsors get bigger and better coverage. Plus, the better this event goes off, the better the coverage and production is from all sides of the field, the better chance we have of being able to do this again, maybe next time without needing to beg every tf2 community for anything they can spare.

You and your event have been chosen for the greatest honor that a TF2 event has ever seen. The ability to say that i46 was the first Intercontinental TF2 LAN is kind of a big deal. Your format works fine for a normal big LAN party that the iseries typically has been. But now we are talking about big time casters, big time players, big time sponsors and the most TF2 talent ever gathered in one place. This is the only chance to claim these honors because alienware is going to have an event in SEA/AUS that is going to be a pretty big deal right after i46.

Quoted from instag1b

[…]

Something similar to this: http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/2012_MLG_Pro_Circuit/Spring/Championship except with only 2 pools?

Yeah, basically like we said on the forum a bit earlier and as I was explaining on steam.

The pro circuit format is a little complicated because they typically have hundreds of participants, but we can scale it down a bit. Make two pools, the open bracket and what we could call just “the pool”. The agreed upon top 8 teams or whatever play a normal group round robin in the upper pool, none of them playing for elimination, but rather for seeding into the championship brackets later on.

From there, we take the rest of the teams and put them into your normal groups, doing the seeding into a normal championship bracket. I will assume you will take the top 16 teams and put them into the championship brackets, but it works just as well with 32.

From there, just do a double elimination bracket with the first round not containing the pro teams. Instead of alternating seeds meeting up in the next round, just put the pro teams against those 8 that make it through. The losers of those rounds go on to face (in reverse seeding) the players who lost first round in the championship bracket for the first knockout rounds. This has the advantage of providing more fairness to the way seeding was done (you cannot mathematically know the ranking of teams before a tournament, so it is impossible to make the fairest possible bracket with the teams who are the best making it the furthest, reverse seeding second round LB makes it a factor of two more fair for those 16 teams) and providing unique matches every round (it is only possible for teams knocked out to play each other again towards the end of the tournament, here in the LB ro4 or beyond). From there, run it like a normal double elimination.

This system has a number of advantages. One, more games between pro players (in pool alone, it is n/2 * (n-1) ). Two, it still allows those teams who make it into the championship bracket a chance to play the pro teams. Three, it is mathematically more “fair” to the non pro teams (since we can assume with reasonable certainty that the teams chosen are indeed the best teams) because it will allow teams who would have otherwise lost early a chance to progress further and show their true skill against more evenly matches opponents. Third, it removes all aspect of the American teams being too tired from their flights because all of the games that risk their being knocked out are played after the first day of competition and fourth, it will take only one round longer than the previous arrangement (there is an extra round in the Championship Bracket this way). The only disadvantage is that whatever bracket system you guys use is probably not coded to handle something like this, as it is a method only really seen in the MLG Pro Circuit.

The only way it could be argued that the system is not fair is questioning whether or not the 8 teams deserve a free pass through the open pools. This is more of an opinion question, one that I think can be answered with a yes. The teams are all champions in some way, either by being in your Premiership or in our Invite rosters, or winning qualifying tournaments. Plus, even in the MLG Pro Circuit pools, some of the players are just invited in (we saw this with koreans being brought over and when the system first came out when the pro players didnt have enough league points accumulated to qualify for the pools) so that point is kind of null.

It is 2:30 am here so I might not have explained everything perfectly clearly, but I can make up a spreadsheet bracket that explains exactly what I mean by all this.

edit – I did the math and assuming 30 minute games, a pool play like this with 8 teams would generate 14 more hours of awesome content (for live and post production) that is a lot of sponsor hours of gained quality entertainment.

Again, stop saying “yeah we should definately have an invite group of 8 teams!!” and then fail to deliver a clear and concise plan that will allow it to work with the tournament software and time scales we must deliver on other wise its no help to me ;).

Thanks to shadow there for trying to explain and i think i understand, but the Clanforge tournament system isn’t setup for that much of a custom tournament unfortuantely.

Here is a google doc i have created to show you the current, very tight time schedule.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AggTOqzLxwvwdGF6ek9ONFVWN0N3TXhMNENqRkd5OXc

Remember, this is not an ideal world, people do not turn up on time all the time, people pc’s do crash so we cant just say lets have lots of 30 minute games in a row! It never works out at 30 minutes, we all know waiting for people to get 6 on a server is a nightmare.

Also be aware i have to schedule in actual health and saftey breaks so you kids don’t go and do a korea and die at your keyboards having drunk only beer and had no breaks.

We could do 8 groups of 8 and have 1 of those groups with just the “pros” in it however with all those getting promoted we would then have to promote a further 8 from 7 groups? And 8 from 7 does not really work.

We could expand the tournament to 32 promotions for the knock outs but then we’d need to find another 3 hours from somewhere, and as you can see we dont have that, and we’d still have to promote a non mathmatically divisible amout of teams.

Alternativly have 16 groups of 4 with the top 2 in each getting promoted, Then there will only be 3 hours of group games and theoretically we’d get rid of more of the 5-0 games. but again people would moan they just spend 90 quid to play for 3 hours ;). Also this method means we would definately need 64+ teams. However we could move the highlander tournament forward to placate these people upset about the amount of games as the teams going out are probably the more community friendly teams.
However again this last method still means there is no pro group of 8.

Basically please take into account the time restrains, the fact the tournament software is not very user friendly and i can’t just make up random tournament formats.

Quoted from Tapley ❤

[…]

Cheers Califax, best presentation of an idea so far, but still its adding lots of hours we dont have to the tournament :(, and i don’t think our system can cope with randomly adding in another 8 teams all of a sudden into the knockouts ;). I’ll speak with MPUK and see if there is anyway to bodge around this but their system is very temperamental.

I don’t know what this schedule does with the time for pool play, but for the bracket you can see it will take 10 rounds (9 if you play the Winners final and losers final simultaneously) and you got 9 rounds scheduled in your document. Are these all still BO1 games including all the finals?