What tournament style do you enjoy the most?

In lieu of the v enjoyable BRN social 3 tournament we anticipate some epic tournament action from Team Burning on the horizon (after uni exams in a couple of months ) My question to you is what tournament style do you prefer - Do you like a quick single player single elmination or the more rounded wholistc round robin? Do you prefer the middle ground that is double elimination?

Also team tournaments - have you had good experiences or bad ones and what made those experiences what they were.

What do you as a member of the PA community want to play in?

From my experience double elimination just takes much too long with enough players.

Perhaps it's viable with small regular tournaments though, I found that BRNs 6 team round robin worked quite nicely in that regard. It did take four hours but all the players were really into it and that did include a final 2v2v2 between the winners of the RR.

I really liked the thoughts present by extra credits in their youtube video on randomness in competitive esports. One motivation for this thread was just to discuss how tournaments would be best structured.

NB: there's already plenty of discussion on randomness in PA imo so I'm not making a big deal about that here

The Swiss tournaments PACE had were a lot of fun to play in, but not always as exciting to watch. Elimination tournaments are more exciting to watch because I feel like there is more at stake and it always comes down to the last game by design. With pace gone I hope we will still see some swiss games.

Well from a players perspective, and an organiser, I personally prefer double elimination as it gives everyone 1 chance to screw up also de only adds 1 round compared to same number of players in a se tournament so squishy I doubt you would have saved much time by going se? Obviously you should be running losers bracket simultaneously with winners. Also final brackets should be set on the day as invariably people don't show up. The usual etiquette is turn up 10 mins before start or be dropped from roster.

Well the organization could have been much better. One of the big issues was that the.. PACE ts was it? Was down. So suddenly we had to go to the NOVA TS and set up a new room, with subchannels. A lot of players hadn't shown up initially, we didn't know if it was just plain old no show, or because of the ts erros, or what. So yeah- I think that next time we'll try to do a single elimination- and hopefully get more players.

The big StarCraft tournaments usually did it well:

Elimination qualifiers, then round robin group stages, then elimination final round. RR can be skipped for smaller tournaments.

Only MLG did double elim and it usually was a mess, confusing both players and spectators and creating several anticlimatic finals.

DE worked very well for the weakest link tournament, and many of the best games were in the losers bracket. Perhaps de is better for teams?

I recommend telling everyone to show up a half hour early and then starting roll call 20 minutes before the start. If they miss it, they're out. You need time to update brackets, talk about the rules and structure one last time to players, and let people get their first lobby up. If that first round starts within a minute of the scheduled time there will be a lot less confusion. People watching on Twitch like it too!

I really think 1v1, team and ffa tournaments are all cool. I do think we NEED more FFA tournaments, that was a lot of fun and i want moar.

I really like the idea of team games. Shared armies allow you to do cool stuff. You can have one of your players as the dedicated micro guy, someone else can be the econ guy, managing multiple fronts and planets becomes more doable, and it has the potential to make for great replays, with the potential for so much different stuff going on between all the different players.

I really enjoyed PACE's swiss style tournaments, it let you play multiple matches even if you weren't good at 1v1. A big con was that it took a huge amount of time. (~6 hrs) I'd like to play round-robin in groups first, and then let the winners of each group go on to single elimination. That fills all my needs: I get to play a couple of matches + I get to watch the pros afterwards and see what they do better. (or keep playing if I'm good enough)
Personally I want to play 1v1 and 2v2 tournaments, but I rarely watch anything but 1v1 matches/tournaments.