[Dox]

There are a few things with the current ACL format that I may need to adjust in order to improve the overall fairness & enjoyment of players.

1) Online rounds
For our first league, we had 1 online round. It was there to support people like yang, EdgE, YoonYJ and other such players who are unfortunately disadvantaged by geographic location. We applied a bonus modifier to the participants who were unable to attend a regional, helping them keep up with the rest of the pack.

For our second league, we broke the online round into three separate components, which yielded less individual points than the regionals, whilst rewarding participants who competed in all three. So it still encouraged people to attend regionals if absolutely possible, but there was a fallback.

So why do I want to change it again?

• The scene is actually pretty heavily saturated right now. Anyone who has taken a glance at my schedule knows this. It would be practically impossible for me to squeeze in 3 online rounds before ACL Melbourne with all the things that are going on.
• Being forced to attend more and more events and give up more and more weekends just to ensure you can participate is not healthy. We're putting too much pressure on players, and I'm having trouble justifying the positives here.
• At the end of the day, people like yang still aren't benefiting from this system because the people who are attending the regionals are also participating to sweep up whatever points they can.

So my ideal "solution" in this circumstance is to schedule a single online round somewhere around the 28th/29th of June. This event would only be open to participants who have not competed in a regional event, and reward just as many points as the regionals. Of course, the Brisbane regionals are a week later, so that opens up another whole can of worms. This is also terribly inconvenient for the winner, since you have less than a week to book flights/accommodation if you win. So essentially this event would be for people who intend on coming to ACL Melbourne regardless, and looking for a means to bypass the Open Bracket. Thoughts?



2) Swiss Style
There's not much for me to say here. It's a cool system, it gives everyone value for money no matter what league they're in, and it's a more stable, rewarding experience. However, we've seen people get screwed by it a few times too - and this may only be due to the way Challonge manages matchmaking. We've seen two people advance to a round with 4-0, and for some reason they don't get matched. Instead, it matches one guy with a 3-1, and the other with a 2-2. So - do we ditch the Swiss system entirely? Or would you prefer we run it manually to ensure fair and correct match making?


3) Open Bracket
At ACL Gold Coast, participants who successfully advanced from the Open Bracket to the Championship Playoffs (Group Stages) were automatically placed into pre-determined groups before they had even completed the bracket. And although the weighting was technically sound (we put the Open Bracket winner and Runner up into the "lightest" groups) - this isn't necessarily rewarding to the player. They might prefer to pick the group full of Zergs because they only want to play 1 matchup. They might prefer to pick the group which doesn't have a teammate in it. Whatever. There's a billion reasons. But the point is, there were flaws in this system.

So at ACL Sydney, we changed the format. We allowed the Open Bracket successors to pick which groups they would join, starting from 1st through to 8th. We even broadcasted this group selection live, making for a more enjoyable viewer experience. Personally, I thought this was a hit. But there is of course - a downside. Why go to the trouble of competing in the Regionals/Online rounds, if you're confident that you could just breeze through the Open Bracket and pick your ideal group? Now keep in mind that when the groups are created, we do so by ensuring that the average weight (ie. overall ACL points) is distributed evenly. But problems occur when an extremely good player decides to make his debut with 0 points. So how do we manage this? Do we continue allowing people to choose their groups? If so, should we just limit it to the top 4 - whilst 5th through 8th are automatically placed? Personally, I'd like to extend this concept even further. See below.

Let's use Sydney as our example. If we refer to this list, we can see that our top 8 players were MaFia, mOOnGLaDe, Rossi, Ninja, deth, tgun, SenSei, and Light. So what if we allocated 9-16 into groups automatically - whilst keeping them as balanced as possible, and then invited our top 8 to pick which groups they want to join, (live broadcast) GSL style? This SLIGHTLY resolves the whole issue of "I won my regional, but I still got stuck with a bullshit group", but could potentially create groups which are horrendously and statistically disparate.

So what are your thoughts and suggestions? Keep in mind, that stuff like this requires more resources, more overhead and demands more time and effort from a very busy and limited number of individuals. But at the same time, we aim to please, so if we can bring more enjoyable content to the players and fans, then we're happy to do it.

That's pretty much everything I'm focused on at this stage, so please - take the time to read carefully, and respond to the suggestions I've made. If you dislike the original format, or the suggestions I've made, please also ensure that you make suggestions of your own. It's fine to acknowledge that you're not happy with something, but you need to be prepared to suggest alternatives as well. Be part of the solution!

Also, if you're happy with the current format - please, say so! Otherwise we can only assume that the silence is a good thing.

Quick Comments

	Another:	more tournaments need to be run by people like dox <3
	VoxMSI.Rogue:	<3 man how do you even exist, you are a god among men sir!