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Some of the kids were grousing about a recent Rev2 Intermediate tournament and the cutoff point for 'intermediate' is and how it's discouraging to get bopped by experienced players in a lower skill setting.

The problem is, this is unavoidable. It's almost impossible to make a clear, good cutoff and players only a little better than someone can give a beating just as discouraging as the best player in the world. Sometimes even a worse beating! So what do you do for a tournament designed to give new, returning, or mid tier players goals and experience? You move over that ol' double elim bracket for some motherfucking Swiss.

Now, Swiss is by no means a 'beginner' format. It's used in pro sports and gaming everywhere. The TL;DR on swiss is it's 'round robin without the whole round part'. 64 player round robin would be infeasible. But swiss uses results driven matchmaking to determine a winner after a TO determined number of rounds (for some context, 6 would be considered the minimum number of rounds for a 64 person tournament). People play every round, win or lose. This format is a staple for a game like MTG that doesn't require a 'station' in the way fighting games do. It makes sense the format never caught on in the FGC. But we're in the online era due to COVID and all this Rollback, so 'how many PS4s do we have??' is no longer a factor.

What are the pros and cons?

Pros

• More games for everyone. This is great for lower skill tournaments where you want to give people experience.
• Matchmaking formula groups players of like skill The deeper you go, the more likely you'll be to play players of your skill level.
• Determines the skill of more than the top two players Double elim can only reliably tell you who the top 2 are. Placement otherwise is a lot more luck based.
• Fast This shit moves. When we used it on Warmrock the rule was to stream one game from each round and that shit flew by. 6 rounds in an hour is not unreasonable.
• Engaging Part of the reason the format is fast is there is little downtime. No waiting an hour to play your match.

Cons

• Not Hype You can fix this by adding a second stage bracket (by say, taking the top 4 players and doing a playoff, which is what we did on WR), but fundamentally, Swiss isn't very hype, sometimes with winners being determined early or through unsatisfying tiebreakers.
• One game can hold up the whole bracket Strict DQ policy is a must. The next round cannot be generated until the previous round is completed. This is easy to work around, especially when players aren't bored, waiting for their matches, but it IS a negative.
• Needs Software You're probably not going to understand the matchmaking formula and doing them on paper is possible but annoying. You must trust the machine. Luckily, both startgg and challonge support it.
• Not as Stream Friendly showing two matches from a round can really hold things up. You kinda gotta make that sacrifice for your players. Also mitigated a bitby having a playoff.
• No Downtime Positive, but also a negative. It's go go go for an hour or two. Sometimes it's nice to go 0-2 and then streammonster.

It's not FGC culture, which is also a bit of a hangup. But most of these can be worked around, it's fast and it gives people a lot of match experience. If a player is too good for most of the pool? Whatever, after 1 or 2 rounds they'll be with players that likely won't be as discouraged. No one is going 0-2 cause of bad luck. You get your games, and you get a semi accurate skill rank you can compare week to week. It's not perfect, but it's more reliable than Double Elim rankings.

Sometimes it's better to sacrifice some hype and the stream to support the real point of all of this, playing the game. In my experience, most people, once they try a tournament like this, even if it doesn't become their PREFERENCE, end up liking it way more than they thought they would. A lot of people just flat out become converts. It's a sick format, especially for smaller/community level events. And again, tweak how you do your Finals for the fun if your community and stream, it's fine, just try and also provide an awesome baseline experience for the weaker players in your community.

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