Randomized Tournament Brackets

[redbluegreen]

Seeing how scouting and counter teaming are such contentious and polarising points within the community I want to make a thread for discussion about it as well as bringing to light some possible concerns.

 

The Change being discussed:

Standard Tournament brackets will now be randomized between each round.

• (Players who are waiting for the next round are now paired together randomly.)

 

I'm in two minds about this change. I see some positives and some negatives to it.

 

Starting with the positive; The way I see it. If I'm in 2nd round vs random69 I really don't want or care enough to scout him and try and counter build his dumb fuck team with dumb fuck sets and if I do counter team them I don't feel good about it and neither does the other player. This change makes entering tournaments and doing well in them much easier for entry level players coming straight from matchmaking since they will require far less teams and will likely just use their matchmaking team throughout. As well as making it much more relaxing and less stress intensive for the early rounds since you don't have to constantly worry about changing your team or countering every player you face.

 

However, this change could be seen as problematic especially for later stages of tournaments, for a few key reasons:

Imagine you are in semis and out of your 3 possible opponents you have a team which you believe will crush 2 of them but isn't as good vs the other, you would be crazy not to take a 2/3 guaranteed victory. But as every pokemon player knows 33% chance things happen all the freaking time which could really fuck people over, making team building in the later stages especially weird and likely more luck than skill dependant.

 

Knowing how to adapt to opponents is a skill and with the current system it will not be taught to players unless they are able to make it to the very end. It is a huge part of learning to team build and is not something that should be removed completely. This basically comes down to general vs specific team building. While both are important I don't think it is good for everyone to just spam their MM team until later stages just for someone to get stomped in a very uncompetitive finals by someone who clearly has far more experience adapting to opponents than they do.

Better/More prominent players are at a disadvantage. There's no way in knowing what everyone is running and so your resources are very limited. When watching a battle between your matches or talking to other players you are far more likely to check up on what the better players are running and are far more likely to build around that. As a lesser known player you are likely to go almost completely unscouted throughout most of the tournament giving yourself a large advantage.

 

Separation of Tournaments and Matchmaking. This isn't really such a big deal but I feel like this kind of blurs the lines between MM and tournaments and makes participating in tournaments feel less unique.

 

 

Now onto the potentially scary thing:

(Players who are waiting for the next round are now paired together randomly.)

 

Depending on how this is implemented this sounds like it could be exploitable. If people are paired together based on who is waiting for the same round as a player, you can use this in order to be more/less likely to be matched against specific people. If have been playing slower and your matches lasting longer than the people you consider to be the hardest competition, you are not going to be matched against for that round them since they would have been matches for that round during your previous battles. This essentially encourages players to play faster or slower depending on what players they want to dodge. If this works the way that it is implied it should be possible to go through almost the entire tournament while avoiding players you think are the biggest threats or your friends/teammates. I'm hoping I am wrong about this and there is a system in place to prevent this.

[pachima]

3 hours ago, redbluegreen said:

However, this change could be seen as problematic especially for later stages of tournaments, for a few key reasons:

Imagine you are in semis and out of your 3 possible opponents you have a team which you believe will crush 2 of them but isn't as good vs the other, you would be crazy not to take a 2/3 guaranteed victory. But as every pokemon player knows 33% chance things happen all the freaking time which could really fuck people over, making team building in the later stages especially weird and likely more luck than skill dependant.

This was the exact problem. Past system made people rely way too much on matchup advantages than actually putting effort on skill into playing their game. Adapting to a specific person makes 0 sense whatsoever unless you are dealing against a bot. Any smart player would change their playstyle slightly so to mess up with whoever "adapted" to them.

It may be just me but I like outplaying my opponents to earn my victory and not: "Oh I get a good matchup I win" or "Meh, bad matchup team cuz I can't build effectively. Forfeit"

[iJulian]

On 7/29/2020 at 3:37 AM, pachima said:

Adapting to a specific person makes 0 sense whatsoeve

?????

[pachima]

16 minutes ago, iJulian said:

?????

I mean adapting to a player implies said player is unable to change any of their gamestyle, aka is a bot. Most often than not "adapting" a team against a competent player doesn't give you the edge  the other guy tried to make it do.

[iJulian]

1 minute ago, pachima said:

I mean adapting to a player implies said player is unable to change any of their gamestyle, aka is a bot. Most often than not "adapting" a team against a competent player doesn't give you the edge  the other guy tried to make it do.

You adapt against the players most preferred styles and cores not one single specific team. 
 

If it was useless why scout and prep in unofficial tournaments like psl? That’s a skill too 

[pachima]

4 hours ago, iJulian said:

You adapt against the players most preferred styles and cores not one single specific team. 
 

If it was useless why scout and prep in unofficial tournaments like psl? That’s a skill too 

Imo there is a clear difference between PSL matches and 10 min preparation, where you are only scouting specific teams (And no, you cant do more within those 10 minutes). In PSL you try to prepare for everything while being strong against their most favorite style. In tours, you have no time for such preparation and have a much lesser sample of the opponent's style to learn from. Hence why "adapting" in Tours makes no sense, unless you know your opponent from competitive accolades outside of said tournament, in which case this is irrelevant.

TLDR; Its never useless to "adapt" but not the way the OP made it sound to be. (read what I quoted)

[redbluegreen]

22 hours ago, pachima said:

Imo there is a clear difference between PSL matches and 10 min preparation, where you are only scouting specific teams (And no, you cant do more within those 10 minutes). In PSL you try to prepare for everything while being strong against their most favorite style. In tours, you have no time for such preparation and have a much lesser sample of the opponent's style to learn from. Hence why "adapting" in Tours makes no sense, unless you know your opponent from competitive accolades outside of said tournament, in which case this is irrelevant.

TLDR; Its never useless to "adapt" but not the way the OP made it sound to be. (read what I quoted)

 

On 7/29/2020 at 9:37 AM, pachima said:

Adapting to a specific person makes 0 sense whatsoever unless you are dealing against a bot. Any smart player would change their playstyle slightly so to mess up with whoever "adapted" to them.

I guess It wasn't clear from my post. But since I was specifically referring to later stages of a tournament in my post I was of course referring to better players who you likely have prior knowledge about and so was talking more about building around each players individual tendencies, as well as the common cores they/people in their team often run. Not about blindly hard counter teaming the last team that they ran.

 

In PSL it is often fairly easy to predict a large amount of your opponents team, in tournaments where there is far less time to build and test between rounds people will default back to their tried and true more often than not leaving less room for unique strategies.

 

The point I was trying to make is that although this new system helps new players with the transition from matchmaking to tournament play I think this actually hinders player growth in the later stages. In my opinion the ideal solution to this would be for tournaments to stay automated  at the start and then switch back to a standard bracket at either the ro8 or ro16 depending on bracket size.

 

 

Edited July 31, 2020 by redbluegreen