Season 3 World Championships

[Sir Bruce]

Those games were great! It's too bad there's no loser bracket.

[Dantski]

Those games were great! It's too bad there's no loser bracket.

Only way you could do a losers bracket would be to scrap the best of 3's and make all the matches hinge on one game instead. I prefer SE for this tournament.

After seeing some of the OMG group games I felt like they held back some of their early aggression in those 2 games (or perhaps Royal was just countering it better than other teams) and once it hit midgame Cool was the only major threat on OMG (I think he played pretty damn well) while Royal had Uzi, who impressed me immensely, providing a double threat with their mid laner. If Uzi was on OMG I think the match would've swung the other way.

[Sir Bruce]

Those games were great! It's too bad there's no loser bracket.

Only way you could do a losers bracket would be to scrap the best of 3's and make all the matches hinge on one game instead. I prefer SE for this tournament.

Why? Dota's big event The International had Bo3s and a loser's bracket and I thought the format worked great.

[Gustaran]

Why? Dota's big event The International had Bo3s and a loser's bracket and I thought the format worked great.

I personally think the loser's bracket format is boring. As Sullla has remarked, why does basically no other major sports event in the world use the double elimination format?
The worst thing is when you hit the finals and one team wins the best of five, but comes from the loser's bracket and then you basically play a second final. It takes away so much from the excitement if you know that team A can afford a loss in this game, and maybe another one in the next game and even in the game after that, if they come from the winner's side.
Compare that to this years quarterfinals, when it comes down to a last decisive game and it's advancing or knockout - much mor exciting.

You maybe could argue that a loser's bracket is somehow fairer, but if that was your goal we would always need to play a giant round robin format. I feel best of 3 or 5 is plenty: One bad match is not going to eliminate you, but if you lose 2 or even 3 you deserve to go home.

[Zargon]

I think single elim is fine, but they could significantly improve the average match quality by having the quarterfinals be a second group stage. Something like a 4x4 group stage with each matchup played once, followed by a 2x4 group stage with each matchup played twice. Same tournament length (actually 0-4 less games), but flush out the GG.eus and Mineskis relatively quickly instead of sticking around for 16 boring games, and then have 24 really high-quality matches between the top 8 teams.

[Sir Bruce]

Why? Dota's big event The International had Bo3s and a loser's bracket and I thought the format worked great.

I personally think the loser's bracket format is boring. As Sullla has remarked, why does basically no other major sports event in the world use the double elimination format?
The worst thing is when you hit the finals and one team wins the best of five, but comes from the loser's bracket and then you basically play a second final. It takes away so much from the excitement if you know that team A can afford a loss in this game, and maybe another one in the next game and even in the game after that, if they come from the winner's side.
Compare that to this years quarterfinals, when it comes down to a last decisive game and it's advancing or knockout - much mor exciting.

You maybe could argue that a loser's bracket is somehow fairer, but if that was your goal we would always need to play a giant round robin format. I feel best of 3 or 5 is plenty: One bad match is not going to eliminate you, but if you lose 2 or even 3 you deserve to go home.

Fair enough. I definitely wouldn't argue for the format based on fairness, just more excitement and opportunities to see the quarterfinalists. Most major tournaments don't have such extensive byes either. Perhaps this is just wishing we got to see more of C9 and GamaBears. I'm even worried that I'm not going to see very much of NBS. Having the teams who qualified the highest play markedly fewer games seems like a poor decision to me.

Another option that would highlight the quarterfinal qualifiers is to have a round robin among those 4 teams to determine seeds for the single elimination bracket. Then the best teams get to play for something during the early rounds and the audience gets to know the teams a little better.

[Sullla]

We already discussed the solution to the tournament format on previous pages of this thread. The basic problem with this tournament is not the group stage (which was tremendous) or the format of the knockout rounds (which is also fine), but a combination of two factors:

* Four teams didn't take part in the group stage
* Seeding for the knockout stage was a complete random draw

Those were both major errors, since viewers had little chance to watch those four teams that placed into the quarterfinals, and it was totally random who would draw which opponent in the knockout stage. For example, Fnatic had no advantage over Gambit despite crushing their shared group; Fnatic had arguably the tougher matchup against Cloud 9 as opposed to Najin Black Sword. You would think that winning your group would mean something, but it didn't. The logical solution is to adopt the format used by the World Cup: four groups of four teams, each one playing out a round robin group stage, with the top two teams in each group moving on to the knockout rounds. Then best of three matches from there, with the winner of Group A playing the second place team from Group D, and so on down the line. There's a major incentive to win your group (easier quarterfinal match), everyone gets to play in the group stage, and so on. No random draws, every team gets at least six matches - it's all much better.

* * * * *

Riot shouldn't use the format from DOTA's The International because it's poorly suited for the type of event that they want to run. Riot wants to mimic traditional sports to draw in the widest audience possible, and that means creating an event that's relatively easy for anyone to follow. The International used a massive group stage, with 16 teams each playing 14 games apiece (a total of 112 games in all), and then sent the top 8 of those teams into a double-elimination tournament where each contest was a best of three matches. Here's a page showing their bracket.

The problems are fairly obvious here:

* Way too many matches
* Confusing format that's difficult to follow
* All of those matches were largely pointless in the end

Riot wants to have a single stream that viewers can follow, which is why they are only running one match at a time. DOTA's The International had so many matches running on multiple streams that it would have been all but impossible to watch. The tournament had over 150 games in all, I went ahead and counted. That's fine if you're going for the traditional esports audience, teenagers and college students, but it's way too much for a broader audience. Ditto for running that confusing double elimination bracket as well; try explaining something like that to your non-gaming friends, or your boyfriend/girlfriend. If they have trouble understanding what's going on, then it's not a format that Riot wants to use. It's also a barrier that esports are going to have to cross if they want to gain mainstream popularity. No one outside of kids with too much time on their hands is going to sit and watch a loser's bracket full of best-of-three matches. I've struggled to keep up with the much smaller number of games Riot has been running, simply because I have to work much of the time. The International's format is not suitable for mainstream audiences.

And finally, what was the point of running all those matches anyway? If you look at the page I linked, the top two teams from The International's group stages ended up meeting in the finals anway. Giving all the "bad" teams extra chances accomplished precisely nothing. People like watching sports tournaments because there's a sense of finality. The teams that win move on, the teams that lose go home. If you can't win a best of three series, then sorry, tough luck. Upsets are part of what makes competition exciting. The notion that a team can lose 2 out of 3 games, and then deserves ANOTHER chance to lose 2 out of 3 games strikes me as ridiculous. Esports won't become mainstream in the West until they get rid of these formats and start adopting stuff that every other competition employs.

I will probably put together an article on this for the website later that explores these ideas in more detail.

[Sir Bruce]

I wasn't suggesting copying the whole format - just pointing out that double elimination for the quarterfinals bracket would be better because I want to see more of the bye teams. A DE quarterfinal tournament wouldn't have any of those problems you listed for TI3 - not that many matches, simple formula (admittedly more complex than a SE tourney), every match matters. Gustaran is right that they may not matter as much and that could detract from the excitement.

[Sullla]

I wasn't suggesting copying the whole format - just pointing out that double elimination for the quarterfinals bracket would be better because I want to see more of the bye teams.

Right, we all wanted to see more of those teams... which is why they should have been in the group stage like everyone else. All of the calls for double elimination format are attacking the wrong problem. The issue was randomly picking four teams and sticking them into the knockout round where they barely got to play any games. There's nothing particularly wrong with the single elimination format itself. We should be careful to address the real problems if we're discussing how to change the format.

[Sir Bruce]

I wasn't suggesting copying the whole format - just pointing out that double elimination for the quarterfinals bracket would be better because I want to see more of the bye teams.

Right, we all wanted to see more of those teams... which is why they should have been in the group stage like everyone else. All of the calls for double elimination format are attacking the wrong problem. The issue was randomly picking four teams and sticking them into the knockout round where they barely got to play any games. There's nothing particularly wrong with the single elimination format itself. We should be careful to address the real problems if we're discussing how to change the format.

That's why I like the bye teams playing in their own group for seeding! Then winning regions matters a lot and we can seed the group stage winners intelligently. I like the World Cup format too, but if Riot wants to give regional winners byes I like this option.