I really wish this thread had taken place about a week for now after people got a chance to cool down a bit from a weekend where team internets largely didn't do very well, but I'll try and be rational here:
Pros: While this is going to go in both my pros and cons, the swiss format is much better than the old one for most players. I like swiss conceptually for regionals in a game like Pokemon where sometimes the RNG is just going to decide the game and get a less skilled player by a more skilled one. I think with how few events there are every year and how far people have to travel to get to them it's a really great thing that people are guaranteed to play 6-7 games. My traveling buddy ended up losing his first game to getting Pokemoned and then won five in a row and ended up another flinch away from 300$. In previous years his tournament would have ended at 0-1, and I know he had a much better time because of the format change, so I appreciated the change a lot for that reason.
I was really impressed by how smoothly our event ran in Ft Wayne. It felt really mechanical(which I'll whine about later) but comparing my experience in this to the swiss rounds at Nationals a few months ago, I thought this may actually have been the more efficient event. There's little negative I can say about the staff's performance: they were friendly, organized, and efficient in what I have to imagine was a really difficult tournament for them to administer given the short notice and the fact they're all TCG people first. I had expected things would be a little messy given the situation the PTO and staff were put in but that wasn't the case at all -- I was really, really impressed. While the lack of VGC knowledge was certainly obvious(I was a little worried about what would happen if a difficult hackcheck like the Dark-Pulse-Hydreigon-in-Ultra-Ball-thing from last year occurred, and apparently tragedy ensued in RI), it didn't end up mattering at our event as far as we can tell, and I imagine the staff will brush up on things a bit before next time.
Cons: While the format was better for most players, swiss no-top-cut is dramatically less advantageous for established players than the format we had last year.
To describe what I mean here, there a handful of problems I have with this:
- Obviously, if you want to win it all you're not safe losing at all as before, and if you want to win money, you can only lose once and even then need help from your tiebreakers in the current system.
- The tournament is completely unseeded, which ended up compromising the integrity of the tournament a bit in Ft Wayne while making it potentially more difficult to go undefeated than in previous years for some players. In Ft Wayne, we had I think five competitors from Nationals last year(evan, tyler, alphabet123, zachdro, me) and 2 worlds competitors(sixonesix, tad) in the Masters division. The two Worlds players ended up matched together in the very first round, and two of the nationals competitors were matched up as well. Every single round after that at least two matches contained battles between those seven players or between those seven and the two other people in our group(who somehow managed to go 5-2 and 4-3 anyway). I realize there were pretty significant fairness issues with letting us dodge each other when we knew each other under the previous format, but with this system we ended up all having to tank each other's records before we even got out of the first four rounds because of all the inter-internet play which led to some people near the top of the standings that didn't get tested quite the way they should have been. I feel pretty confident if you took those 7 people and put them up against highest placing 7 outside of that group we'd get 5 or 6 of those wins pretty easily barring anything particularly bizarre occurring. A top cut would only have half fixed this(more on that later), but given that we're apparently keeping track of points now anyway I'd love for that to tie into pairings in the first few rounds to try to avoid this sort of thing happening in the future.
- Deciding money on strength of schedule is incredibly stupid. I realize that like Paul posting ahead of me I'm probably just a little bitter about the Opponents Win% thing after what happened at Nationals, but I'm really deeply confused by the fact someone, somewhere thought that running Swiss without a top cut was actually a good idea. I think my biggest fear going into these events is that I lose to something out of my control. I can accept situations where I could have played better even when luck is part of the equation(which covers what happened to me in Nationals some, since 5-2 is still weak, and say my loss to Sixonesix in Ft Wayne, where I had an untimely flinch but could have played a lot better), and the current system basically guarantees that money is going to be determined by something completely out of our control because of the Opponent Win %fest at X-1. I think the fact Paul was the last undefeated player at his event and lost to a 5-1 with pretty ridiculous "Pokemon" yet somehow didn't win is completely ridiculous, and I think that money being decided between people with the same record is a really bad way to go about doing things given that it's not like even the oft-mocked BCS where we could have picked harder opponents early in the season to make our schedule stronger and mitigate the problem some. It's not fun for a competitor to have prize money or tournament progression come down to factors we didn't get to control. I would love to see a top cut that's based on record to avoid strength of schedule mattering at all, putting fate back into the players hands, preferably with byes given in situations with uneven numbers -- ie, looking at nationals last year, it'd have been nice for the 5-2s to be required to play off since it didn't create a clean cut at 16 with the 6-1s and 7-0 earning the right not to play in that round. I think if TPCI is serious about regionals actually meaning something beyond an expense for them it is important that the events emphasize the best players finishing the highest, and while the swiss format change was massive step forward toward improving the events by helping the bottom half of the field and mitigating the effects of a game with a lot of dice rolls, the top needs to be attended to as well. This bullet doesn't solve the problem without also doing something about the previous one, but at least assuming the cut is 5-2 our fate is more in our own hands -- it'd have kept 3 more of our group of 9(in addition to tad who won, obviously) alive in Ft Wayne in spite of all of our interplay and bizarre luck-based losses, and had evan and I taken care of business in our 4-2 games we'd have stuck around with a 5-2 cut-off as well.
I thought the players were scrambling just as hard as the PTOs were with the short notice for regionals which contributed to the kind of strange results we got as much as anything, but I don't think Swiss without a top cut emphasizes either the best players winning or excitement at the event, only getting some players to play more games. I know time was probably a big consideration going into these events which probably contributed to there not being a Top Cut, but our event ended at like 2:30, much sooner than my 2011 regional, and I imagine as the feedback in this thread makes obvious the players would certainly rather stick around to get better results.
The environment was pretty disappointing. I wish I had brought this up to Kaleb on the ride home, but I remember when we were like 11 we used to go our local Toys R Us to playing trading cards with like 10 other people in their weekly Pokemon thing. We had like half an aisle in the store, shoppers were tripping over us, and most of the people there were creepers who never talked. This regional was way closer to that feeling than to the 2011 regional I attended. I knew that there would be some drop off without the excellent Nick McCord(please, please bring him back for Nationals), but something in the atmosphere just felt missing even ignoring that part. The lack of music made everything eerily quiet and the lack of televisions meant there was never a crowd, so the energy and excitement that usually carries Pokemon events just wasn't there this time. (Yes, I realize the irony of this complaint after whining about the staff-led screamfest during the last round of Worlds LCQ) It's like, we were playing Pokemon at an event but it didn't feel like a Pokemon event.
I feel that compared to more widely accepted "e-sports" I follow, Pokemon is an exciting and easy to follow spectator game, which is completely wasted in this format, since no one ever gets to watch anyone else, and even if there were TVs competitors wouldn't be able to use them since we're all always playing. Given the option, I would rather have just forfeited my game when I was at 4-2 and watched Kaleb vs. tad, since that actually mattered for something and would have been exciting, and I imagine I'm not the only one who was pretty apathetic about the irrelevant games after I got bounced. It's like, there's a reason the events are still fun at Nationals and Worlds after you're eliminated: because we still get to watch and cheer people on the TVs, and that element wasn't here this time. I think that related to my last complaint, the events would be greatly improved by having TVs available and showing top-cut matches on them. The games that matter the most would still be witnessed by many, everyone would get to play six or seven games, and it would lead to more meaningful results. I missed the music building the atmosphere too, as horrific as TPCI's music choice tends to be. I got the feeling towards the end of the event that the staff just wanted to get through it and go home(they were cleaning up during round 7), which I dig, but it's probably not the best impression to give the players, either. Maybe Nick just fooled me into thinking everyone was more excited than they actually were in the past but I felt more like I was at work than play this time.
MARKETING MAJOR SYNRE IS OFFENDED BY THE THOUGHT THAT NOT ADVERTISING WAS A GOOD STRATEGY
The Sunday and November thing sucked, but I'm not confident there's a better solution. Kaleb and I spent a bunch of time on both drives trying to brainstorm ways the timing could have sucked less, and I don't think anything we came up with was actually an improvement for timing beyond just not having two regionals and going back to what they did last year, which I think would be a pretty obvious step back. If you move the November regional much farther backward you're getting dangerously close to Worlds -- and with how late the rules were announced for VGC 12 I think the regionals were actually dramatically sooner than we'd have preferred to begin with. If you move them farther forward you start running into issues with family holidays and vacations, though I imagine optimal attendance for a fall regional would involve moving it into winter and putting it between Christmas and New Year's in years where the calendar gives a usable weekend there. The April regional is tricky too unless you just want to move it into early June and knock Nationals and Worlds back(which I think is a pretty good idea) -- it's literally the worst weekend possible for many of us in college (I definitely want to drive 13 hours away to play Pokemon one day before finals) right now, but it's hard to move it too far and not interfere with the high schoolers and I assume the thought with the current location was Spring Break for the kiddies or something (but seriously can it just be early May next year this is horrible -_-). I'm rambling a lot now but the date of the regional is something that's going to be tough to please everyone with.
The Sunday thing is even less manageable -- unless there's a much bigger group of parents who don't want their kids Pokemoning on a Sunday I think being able to play both TCG and VGC is a much greater service to the community than letting VGC play on Saturday(but ffs finish TCG on Saturday so people who cut don't have to choose...), but I know I talked to a few parents in Ft Wayne while I was there and they all seemed pretty irritated about having to drive home and get the kids in school Monday so things are pretty suboptimal the way they are, too. I guess I'm just touching on this because while I agree with the previous posters that it is super annoying I can't imagine a way to fix it either so I wouldn't be upset if it didn't change.
I had a really great time in Ft Wayne even though it was by a pretty significant margin the worst performance I've ever put up in a real life event, so I think a lot of the issues are kinda getting exaggerated in this thread. I hope TPCI changes a few of the big complaints up for April to make the event even better. I think overall the changes TPCI made the regional structure were overwhelmingly positive, but there's just a couple glaring flaws keeping them from being as good as they can be.
