A new tournament format for fighting games
While I love fighting games and fighting game tournaments, there's always one thing that has bothered me - how Double Elimination is entrenched as the default format.
Don't get me wrong. It just works. If I'm running a small online tournament, or a local, it just works. It gets things done, people don't go home after losing one match, and, most important of all, people understand it and expect it.
However, the further you get away from those kind of tournaments, it stops making as much sense.
Of course, the first thing you have to take in account are logistics for any given format - if you only have 2 setups and 50 people, you _probably_ should run double elimination to make sure people aren't taking 24 hours to go through their matches.
However, the more setups you have (and the less players there are), the more I think there should be an effort to have people not pay money and spend their time to go to a tournament and just go 0-2 and go home.
So what have people tried over the years? I'll list a few:
Round Robin
Specifically, round robin pools: I think everyone know running a round robin for 50+ people is _probably_ a bad idea. However, at least one big tournament that I know of did round-robin pools: Sonic Boom (RIP), the old Spanish major.
That's a TON of matches and you obviously more than get your money back. Obviously you need a ton of setups, venue space, and time to make this work. And there's obviously going to be a bunch of dead rubbers to play, but that's not a major issue.
This kind of format is obviosuly very tweakable (how many people are in each pool, do you start the double-elim bracket aftewards in losers if you're not 1st, etc) but at the end of the day, it's still round-robin, and there's still going to be a ton of matches at any given point. So what do you do when you want to simplify a round-robin tournament? Well...
Swiss System
Swiss is the format of many a chess and card game tournament alike. If you're not familiar with it, players are paired off for an initial round, and then the players that win that round are paired off with other players that have won in that round, players who have lost get paired with others that have lost, and so on.
It gives you similar results to a round-robin system, with a lot less matches, and you can just do a double-elimination top 8 right after the Swiss stage.
So why aren't we using it more often?
Every time I've tried to used Swiss, there's always one issue, that will happen no matter what you do. It doesn't matter if you're running an offline tournament with limited setups or an online tournament with "infinite" setups. It doesn't matter if you've split the tournament into multiple swiss pools.
The problem with Swiss in a fighting game context is that every game in a round needs to finish before the next round can be generated and the tournament can be resumed. Often what happens is that one game is having issues for whatever reason: maybe there's someone with controller issues, maybe someone went to the bathroom, maybe the console overheated... there's always something. The problem is that _something_ is going to delay the entire tournament.
Another problem is that you have to wait for each round to start to do things like call matches up to stream, you can't just pre-select them beforehand, and so on.
Well, it turns out UEFA also had a similar problem. They wanted to reform their competitions to have a system that allowed for more matches, more high profile matches, and, most importantly of all, more money, as always.
However, turns out that the system that UEFA devised also has a number of things that, in my opinion, work very well for fighting games.
So how does it work?
UEFA's Swiss-like thing that is not actual Swiss
Turns out UEFA has similar needs to fighting game players (yeah, that's a new sentence alright). There's no infinite amount of stadiums, much like how there's no infinite amount of setups, and UEFA also has to deal with the fact that they can't just use a regular Swiss system because you can't tell an entire club to move from Italy to Kazakhstan on a week's notice from round to round. So, how do we deal with this?
UEFA's solution is simple and elegant: just use the seeding to determine the matchups beforehand.
A very quick explanation if you don't want to watch the video: the seeded teams are split into pots (so, assuming 36 teams, in the Champions League and the Europa League, 4 pots of 9 teams, and in the Conference League, 6 pots of 6) and each teams plays against teams from every pot (in the CL and EL, 2 teams per pot, in the Conference League, 1 team per pot).
So every team gets to play a match (or two) against the highest seeded teams, the second-higest seeded teams, and so on. You get high-profile matchups at the very beginning, plus everyone gets to play against the higher seeds, which means more eyes on any given match.
But how does this apply to a fighting game context?
I found a Python script on Github that someone made for the Conference League, and with 16 players, split them up in 4 pots of 4, and like the UECL had them play once against a player from each pot. And honestly, the results were incredble. This "swiss" part of the format was done in an hour (pretty much the same amount of time it would take a double-elim bracket to reach top 8), since there was no waiting for rounds to be done like in Swiss brackets, or waiting for the bracket to progress, like in Double Elimination brackets.
Everyone just has these matches they can do in any order ASAP. And the good thing about this format is that it's endlessly scalable and tweakable. I just simply qualified the top 8 to a top 8 double-elimination bracket, where the top 4 started in winners bracket, and the bottom 4 started in losers bracket. But you can scale this to even EVO-sized tournaments, provided enough setups. You can have people play as many matches as needed (you can make everyone play any number of matches against any number of players in each pot), you can have it then lead into any type of format (for example, top 8 qualifies into a double-elimination bracket) and it just works in a reasonable amount of time. Faster than round-robin and faster than Swiss, at least.
It also solves some of the issues that can present themselves in a DE bracket: for example, you might know I run a certain tournament in Portugal called Skill Issue (next one is in September, come visit us!). Two out of our 4 PS5 setups had an issue in SF6: if you share the Deluxe Edition (well, the edition with Season 1 included, I forgot the name) it will actually share everything EXCEPT for the S1 DLC specifically.
There's nothing you can do, and AFAIK neither Sony or Capcom have ever acknowledged the issue.
Anyway, one of the PS5s with the S1 DLC overheated and had to be turned off for a bit, so the only setup with the S1 DLC characters was the stream setup.
And then obviously the bracket got stuck in loser's side because, of 4 available matchups, all of them had someone who used a character from the S1 DLC. Aside from the obvious solution, which is switching to PC to avoid this kind of DLC shenanigans happening ever again, this kind of format also helps alleviate that. Is there a matchup that can't currently be done for whatever reason? No problem, we'll just move to another matchup. The tournament keeps running because there's always something you can do to progress it.
Now, what are the caveats? Right now, there's no easy way to do this in any of the usual bracketing software used. In start.gg, however, you can select "custom schedule" as a bracket type, in which you can just do any type of format by just inserting the matches manually. I hope to have a solution in place for Skill Issue II in September as I want to use that format there, so stay tuned on that front.
Because of this situation though, I'm not using this for online tournaments as of yet. I will once it's a bit more convenient.
The last thing I need is to figure out a name for this. Something hopefully avoiding the mention of UEFA anywhere. Someone suggested using "Kashbracket" but uhhhhhh