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During MLG weekend. there were many posts about how extended series sucks or how its unfair or so and I decided to write my take on this topic.
Why I think extended series is better
Because it forces a player to dominate his competitor over the whole tournament, and not only on a single BoX match. Some examples
* MKP beats DRG 2-0 on winners. Later on the tournament MKP loses and fall and faces DRG again and then DRG wins 2-1. So whats the problem, MKP 3-2 DRG over the tournament and still got eliminated. Extended series would fix it
* Nestea coming from winners vs MVP coming from losers in a Bo5. MVP 3-0 Nestea. Double elimination forces a rematch and Nestea wins 3-2. Same problem and just more visible. MVP 5-3 Nestea and lost cause Nestea won the right sets and we are talking about 8 straight games here.
Its easy to argue that this is double elimination rules, Well. we could make so odd games grants 2 wins instead. its a rule but it doesnt make a system fair.
A tournament with and without extended rule, both have their flaws and I feel its more like who came first gets all the good stuff and praise from the public while I still think extended is a bit better.
The bottom line is that Double Elimination format sucks over a huge tournament.
Lets look at good and bad points of a Double Elimination format
1 - Gives players a second chance. This is a good thing. you dont want someone flying over the world to play a match that may have got a bad drawn and gets eliminated
2 - Huge and confusing brackets that its hard to predict potetential matchups. Thats a bad thing. but it forces you to relax and ignore brackets.
3 - Its punishing on players who got a bad match early on. Its a punishment that drags all the way the end. Yeah, you lost first round, dont worry, you still can win the tournament with someone using a whip on your back all the time. It also leads to some weird stats like someone being 7-2 and top 8 while someone is 12-2 and not even on top 15.
4 - Fill the tournament with worse matches. Well. let me explain this better. The best player or the players playing the best will eventually advance and crush people over the winner bracket and what it happens? They sit for a day while we watch the players who got crushed instead.
Taking a look over the DreamHack format. It keeps point 1 and fix point 3 (Well, you get punish for losing but as long you fix it fast, you will be even with other along the tournament) and point 4 (The players winning is that ones we will see playing more) while point 2 it depends how they manage the group draws but it still superior to a double elimination.
What the best format. No idea but its not Double elimnation for sure. I still would like to see some big tournament like NASL playing on a swiss system.
Ps:. English is not my native language, so apologizes for any grammar assassination over there.
 
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I'm not 100% sure, but I think the format that players like iNcontrol advocate for over the extended series is the format where the player A who had already beaten player B only has to win one more "best of" series, while player B would have to win two "best of" series. It's slightly different from extended series, but I think it works a bit better. For example, if player A was up 2-0, player B could go 2-1 in the first series and 2-1 in the next series and still win the tournament. In extended series, it'd be impossible because the total map score would be 4-4. But this other way, it'd be more like 3 separate BO3 series and the winner has to win two of them.
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I disagree on Extended series, it creates boring matches since one of the player has a huge advantage from the start. In any system both players should start on equal footing in every single boX series.
Also, besides extended series (which MLG seems to have a fetish for or something like that) I liked the format used by this arena. Two parallel double elim brackets allowed to have the benefits of double elimination, without the anticlimatic finals which plagued every other MLG so far.
That said, group stages into single elim is still by far the best format imo, but I find that the group system used by GSL is better than the one from Dreamhack. Dreamhack groups have to potential to create ties wich are then decided on map scores or other criteria and sometimes feel like they screw some people over (their advancement depends on results of games they don't play in)
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Blazinghand
United States25562 Posts
On July 24 2012 22:45 Mephyss wrote:
* MKP beats DRG 2-0 on winners. Later on the tournament MKP loses and fall and faces DRG again and then DRG wins 2-1. So whats the problem, MKP 3-2 DRG over the tournament and still got eliminated. Extended series would fix it
* Nestea coming from winners vs MVP coming from losers in a Bo5. MVP 3-0 Nestea. Double elimination forces a rematch and Nestea wins 3-2. Same problem and just more visible. MVP 5-3 Nestea and lost cause Nestea won the right sets and we are talking about 8 straight games here.
Let me come at you with some alt scenarios though in dis
Same deal with NesTea and Mvp, but MVP 3-0 NesTea in their first game. Then, in the next game, NesTea is down 0-3 to start off, and that's the score at the top of the screen there. How excited are you? How much fun is there? How intense and filled with anticipation are you as Mvp procedes to go 2-3 against NesTea, but wins anyways because of some series played earlier in the day?
I think that sucks and makes everything an anticlimax.
You know what's even worse? If you're up like 3-0 in a series you should just throw cheeses and shitty builds at your opponent until you win, because he just needs to screw up like twice and he's dead. You *KNOW* that's what Mvp would do in this situation, cause Mvp does what it takes to win-- he's a great series player.
And it'd suck and be anti-climactic.
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OP, all your "good" and "bad" points concerning the Double Elimation format can just as well fit if you use their polar opposities, so that kind of defeats your argument.
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The extended series is a very unnatural construct. Instead of starting at zero it involves a certain amount of the contestents' history in order to determine the overall winner.
However, once you do this you have to arbitrarily decide, how *much* history you want to use. In the extended series, this arbitrary choice is "within this tournament". Once you think this is a good idea, you could also think about going into the "XXL Extended Series" with a 21-19 start, because that is the player's overall score so far during the last year. So why "within this tournament"?
This alone does not make the extended rule inherently bad, but it appears very artificial.
In addition the first match within the tournament already sufficiently benefits the winner by staying within the "easy bracket", so giving a second benefit does unfairly benefit the winner in my opinion.
Edit: Playing a Swiss system cannot be done, since this would conflict with having a "final", which is by far the most accepted form of producing a winner for the viewers. I.e. Swiss system <-> less viewers.
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EPT
