So, after playing in last night’s Balthazar’s Brawl, which was an unusually long tournament (it took around 3 hours to get to finals), I noticed that there are still two teams listed as contenders in that tournament. How can this be the case when the finals are already finished? If they aren’t eliminated, why didn’t they get a chance to play in finals?
I think this has to do with the sequence of rounds. What I noticed yesterday was that, in contrast to the earlier tournaments, this Balthazar’s Brawl didn’t have a strict order of rounds. In all previous tournaments, the 2nd round would only start when all games in the 1st round would have been played out. In this tournament, lots of teams started out in the 2nd round and got a game before teams that were still in the 1st round. This led to quarters and semis having been finished before lower-tier rounds and thus the higher-tier teams having to wait out those lower-tier games. Is this really how it’s supposed to be?
I personally think the sequential approach of previous tournaments worked way better. Tournaments lasted a maximum of 2 hours (even with 64+ teams) and matches were almost instantaneous (because you would only have to wait out the difference between 15 minutes and the length of the game you just played yourself) as opposed to waiting almost an hour for your next game.
Are tournaments really working as intended right now?
