This means someone who just finished their first season of Iron won't be placed against b4nny for their first game. Even if you don't end up in the top 3, I want you to be able to have fun against equally-skilled players.

Then how would the bracket be seeded? Would it be random seeding? That would be pretty garbage tbh.

Losers bracket exists so that people who get seeded poorly (in this case the Iron players) have a chance to play people more around their skill level. Removing losers and using random seeding - especially for a cash tournament - isn't a very good idea.

also allowing spy/pyro/etc in MGE is not going to be fun for anyone involved.

yeah i would rather not fight a pyro or a spy or even a med in mge

(I honestly don't know a lot about this, so if this is a totally trash idea I'm all ears for a better one.)

My idea would be to seed people against roughly equally-skilled players for the starting brackets. Say, 1 is the lowest skill level and 10 is the highest:

10/10 - 9/9 - 8/8 - 7/7 - 6/6 (and so on) would make the bottom bracket, with everyone matched as evenly as possible for their first round. Whoever moves up each bracket will widen the skill gap, so ideally it'll be fairly challenging for anyone who enters and this tourney won't be a thinly-disguised Froyotech donation run. It'll also leave room for upsets.

I'd prefer to leave that up to the competitors to decide. I feel like restricting Heavy, all Sentries and problematic-for-MGE weapons would keep things interesting enough, even if some guy decides it's time to pull out the Spy ditto for Round 2.

Eh, picking dumb classes won't be an issue further down the road because the people that make it that far won't be pyro/spy mains or whatever. The problem is, less people will sign up for your tourney because no one wants to actually pay to play in a tournament where pyro v pyro on spire is a possible scenario

Sure, if it was a tournament with a prizepool and no entry fee, people would be motivated to put up with the rules (as evidenced by sigafoos cup) but the way you're proposing it now, well, that'll just detract a lot of the "serious" players who'd be willing to pay an entry fee in the first place and I doubt you'll get a lot of pyro/engie that'll be willing to pay the fee so you've got nothing to gain by allowing dumb classes

Why not just play 6s classes, bo3 or bo1 with 20 round limit? The biggest issue I have isn't that people can play dumb classes but that I might be forced to play dumb classes too

Tournaments are seeded so the best player plays the worst at the start for a reason, if you pit the best players against eachother early on the end of the tournament is just going to be boring as fuck 20-0s.

it wouldn't make any sense for froyo to play evl in their first match of playoffs and my team in grand finals

That does sound incredibly silly, but the only reason that would happen is, again, if one of the competitors chooses a Pyro ditto and the second one decides that it's best played on Spire. Class- or free class choice- is decided before the map, so nobody is going to be unexpectedly put into Pyro v Pyro Spire unless both people want it for some godawful reason. In which case, why stop them?

Like you said, it's not like the top players are Pyro/Spy mains who'd make it to the higher brackets are going to do something like that anyways. No reason to restrict something that'd be a non-issue for serious/strong competitors and a potential advantage for creative ones.

I see your point. Do you have a better recommendation for seeding/bracket?

Also, remember, this is MGE. It won't be teams playing, just individual players.

There's a good reason - reputation. If your tournament gets the reputation of being a meme then less people will want to pay to be in it

Multiple. quick rounds is so that there are multiple maps and potentially multiple classes in play, depending on what the competitors choose. I want to keep it interesting to watch, and frankly I don't believe stock MGE meets that challenge.

At worst, you'd be forced to play the class for a single round. If you have superior aim/DM, you should be able to overcome them anyways. If, say, you win the first round as Soldier and they choose a Pyro ditto for the second round, the third round is always free-choice and you can counterplay any class they pick if you're truly the better player.

Just do the seeding so 1 plays 16 2 plays 15 etc. make it double elim if you don't want people to get knocked out right away but there's a reason that's how every playoff/tournament bracket works. close games at the end and the best players go deep in the tournament

Got it, thank you.

Make it first to 20 kills, 10 is too quick for mge I reckon

It's multi-round, and I want to keep it fast-paced and interesting. 3 full rounds of MGE would be a pain to spectate.

mge is boring to watch and apart from scout duels, soldier duels, scout v soldier and demo v scout/soldier every other matchup in the game sucks

plus only scout mains like scout v scout anyway so you're left with not many choices

this is probably not a good idea to go through with

in-game and with first-person view while waiting to figtht, yes.

but third-person and casted? I think it has the potential to be entertaining, especially with shorter-rounds and counter class-and-map-picks

People will play in anything if they have a chance at money.

How much is the real question.

have a round robin/group stage to sort people into different tournaments. The high tournament with the biggest prizepool, the mid tournament, and the open tournament with no prizepool so there isnt much incentive for sandbagging

I kinda wanna so a single-prize pool tourney, both for simplicity reasons and organizational reasons. I'd only consider dividing the tournament into tiers if a lot of people sign up.

this would be awesmoe and figuring out how to not get iron people placed against b4nny would be amazing

IMO the "class picking" design you have laid out is flawed. It has been attempted many times in the past and has always failed. 1v1's in a tournament setting must start each round with a level playing field for both players. The nature of 1v1 is proving which player is stronger or more skilled. Giving an advantage like picking a class that counters another class is unbalancing the 1v1 before it even begins.

I would personally limit class picking to Scout or Soldier for the initial tournament. Based on results, you can expand class picking and rules for future tournaments but keep the first one simple.
Allowing players to "pick a map" can work but you need to have a specific list of maps that weed out bad MGE maps.

Each round is listed as "first to 10 kills" wins. That will make for an extremely short MGE match since you can get 10 kills on mostly any map in like 2 minutes? maybe 3?

If you want to keep everything simple, consider this example of a typical bracket matchup:

Contra vs SpaceCadet (Best of 3)

Round 1 - Contra picks class and map -- First to 20 Wins
Round 2 - SpaceCadet picks class and map -- First to 20 Wins
Round 3 (if necessary) - Player with most combined frags in rounds 1 & 2 picks class. Other player picks map. -- First to 20 wins.

Classes available to pick: Soldier or Scout
Maps available to pick: Develop a List

Having reserved servers is not a necessity. Both players could play their match on any available server as long as the match is complete before a certain period of time so it does not hold-up the rest of the tournament. All that should be required is a recorded demo from both players to submit if there is a dispute.

third person is 10x worse than first person for spectating this game

i regularly cut myself after playing people on public mge servers who are competing to add 3 points to their 2000 mge score

i would not pay for the experience personally

i'm with this guy ^^

Give strong players byes into later rounds. Maybe stagger that so the first round or even 2 is open, then bring in mid tier MGE players for 1 or two more rounds, then bring in the final group of very strong players. Depends on how many rounds you expect to have, but at least that gives weaker players the potential to have a couple of decent games without being crushed by an MGE god in round 1.

Sorry but this makes no sense to me at all. If someone is going to put up money to play in a tournament, why would you give the ""very strong players" an additional edge? All players, strong and weak, pay the same money to compete in the tournament, they should both have to win an equal amount of matches to advance.

Nobody is forcing any player to pay money. If you choose to pay up and play in a tournament, you have to accept the possibility of facing an "MGE god" in the first round and possibly getting destroyed.

The only way to give players a "BYE" into later rounds would be if there were a round robin type of schedule before the bracket begins because they earn the BYE

There is no way I am going to pay and enter a tournament, then have to fight my way through 5 rounds of opponents when someone like b4nny would get a free pass to the semi-finals and only face 3 opponents because of his reputation.

Guys this all depends on seeding

If not an even amount of people sign up there will be byes for the higher seeds

That's how brackets work

and what logic would you use to seed players for an MGE tournament?

I'd play in it

To ensure players have a decent chance of getting some matches for their money obviously. There are numerous sporting precedent for this in esports and normal sports, open qualifiers into the seeded section are a regular occurrence. Nobody thinks Novak Djokovic should have to play people ranked 587 in the world rankings to qualify for the US Open. He's in already because he's proven to be an elite Tennis player.

If someone has played MGE often enough to get a reputation then if there's an MGE tournament there's no reason it shouldn't be recognised because a) they've already earned it and b) it means that if you run a tournament 2.0 you might get some people who were weak the first time signing up the 2nd time instead of having paid their money and having had a horrible experience for 5 minutes.

A serious alternative suggestion might be a group stage.

In case you hadn't noticed TF2 cup series in general fail continuously because people get sick of being destroyed in the first round when they had no chance. Cup organisers fail to account for this repeatedly so platforms like Razer, who were all for supporting us to begin with, die through lack of numbers.

Is he known for being particularly good at MGE?