The tournament is shaping up really nice, I think it has a good chance of succeeding - and I was very doubtful, given how the community seemed to shrink; but now it's different
I'd like to ask you guys to discuss on two things. I already gave my opinion, driven by how the previous tournament that I organized with Mixons looked like, but I don't think Siem should make decisions based only on arguments from one person - even if I think I am right, because some things at my tour did, and some didn't work, and I'd like Siem to avoid my mistakes.
First: do we need losers cup? Just look at how it was in my tournament to know my opinion - out of 9 games (10 teams) that were meant to be played in my losers cup, 3 games (4 teams) were played, and it ended up unresolved. I made the losers cup as a test, despite players telling me it's gonna be a failure, and it failed. And remember that the community was much more active than now. I think less games is actually not that bad for us.
But this brings us to the second question: do we want to do something to prevent a situation, when the best 2 teams of the tournament, will play against each other at their first game? In the group stage, I used drawing seeds (which make it possible to make groups fair, by guessing the skill level of the players, and dividing the teams accordingly), and while it didn't fix everything (see group G, with 2 best teams possible and 1 really good third seed team which would win most of the other groups), and many players didn't like this solution because it's seemingly unfair to give opinions on someone's skill level, I think it was a good decision and the tournament would be slightly unfair if I didn't do that. However, that is not the only solution. Since this is a no-group-stage tournament, powah tournament's loser bracket would work well. Do you guys prefer to:
1. leave losers cup and not care about the "best teams eliminating each other early, making later games less interesting"?
2. delete losers cup and not care about above?
3. change losers cup into additional losers ladder, like in powah tournament, and make the winner of it advance to the semi-finals?
4. delete losers cup and seed the best 4/8 teams in a way that makes them play against each other later on?