Disclaimer/Notes:
1- This is by no means to bash on the people who had been working hard in order to bring us this tournament. It's a way to improve the actual or future tournaments and avoid some of the problems founds on this last weekend.
2- I'll mention the 1v1 rank ladder. Not to polarize into good or bad players, rather than having more balance matches.
3- I don't think this would had change much the ending result, rather than improving the experience for a lot of players during the tournament.
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Bracket/Seeding:
As i've seen on the other thread, people mention the amount of games some players had to face during this last weekend. Fatigue affected all, players, casters and admins.
Regarding this, i think a more selected process of seeding could had been done and details regarding how the process was gonna be done could had been mentioned before in the rules thread. I'll go further with this point later*1 .
More than 256 players show up (http://binarybeast.com/xCoH21509201). We can also extract from the googledoc the ranks of those who showed up (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bUcGed7htUTzmIzlzGIuBk_jpnM6HvJuI2FIXETxCPo/htmlview?sle=true#)
IMO, top50 should had skipped to round 3/4 and top200 to round 2/3 at least.
People with lower ranks or no ranks should had play the qualifiers Bo1 matches. This is meant to improve the matches as people would had face similar skilled opponents early on. This would had also reduce the amount of game individual people would had to play as on average, those who had lower ranks would lose to "better" ranked players.
I don't know all players and this is not to praise or bash anyone ranking/skill. But for example: i saw Dusty facing Giap on 2nd Round (Bo1). I had to face (100avg) Koreanarmy on 2nd. Bananainpajamas (top40 avg) against Hans on 3rd round.
I'm sure there were a couple more of high ranked matches which could had been interesting but on the general aspect at R3 there were lots of one sided matches or rank300+ vs rank300+ match ups.
This also happened on several matches during R4.
*1 Would it had been unfair to have some players be seeded higher?
I don't think so. If it was specified earlier during the inscription, that players have a certain limit of time to rank as higher as possible with one Allied and one Axis faction, in order to be place in a better slot during the tournament.
Suggestions:
-First batch of qualifiers could had been run during Saturday with those with no ranking or rank +500
-Second batch of qualifiers would run on Sunday, with those who qualify from Saturday and higher ranked players.
-The "top50*2 " players could had skip a round or 2 depending on number of players.
*2 : Number is just arbitrary.
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Maps:
Something simple, but i'm surprised no one mentioned that the new maps (both WFA or TBF) can't be played in the case no one on that party has the respective DLC. I think this is a stupid move by Relic, but whatever. I thought it was worth saying since i saw this happening on R1 on the steamchat.
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TL;DR:
-Specify on the rules how the brackets were gonna be made.
-Make the qualifiers on saturday for those low ranked or without ranks
-Sunday would had less players, the top"whatever you choose" and those survivors from the Qualy. The "best" players (top 32/50) skip a round.