EPTThis is a bit of an ambitious idea and would require good will and (I hope not too much of a) time commitment from the players. But the important thing is that we all know something like this can work. Let's move past talking about how bad things are and find a solution.
From Reddit:
With the lack of events for North American StarCraft II players (yesterday's announcement of Fragbite notwithstanding) and the future of SHOUTcraft in doubt, I decided to theorycraft how I would organize a tournament based on the American sever Grandmaster ladder.
Click for tournament illustrated
My concept starts with 96 players: the top 24 Protoss, Terran, and Zerg Grandmasters plus the top 24 overall remaining. Players are divided into 16 groups of 6 with seeds for the top 5 of each race and 1 additional seed based on the highest ladder rank among the 6th-place representatives. (see the infograph for details)
Group stage is round robin. The top 2 in each advance to a single elimination bracket with seeding based on a combination of group results and race. Tie-breakers would include head-to-head, map score, ladder points, and ladder wins.
If this were held as a one or two weekend tournament the Group stage would likely need to be Best of 1. Allowing players to schedule matches at their convenience over the course of a week would make a Best of 3 format more feasible.
Because there are three races, the bracket structure gives a slight potential advantage to one race since if favorites win, the semi-finals would have one match between two top seeds while the other match would be a top seed against a second seed. I think a fun way to determine which races correspond to A, B, and C in the bracket diagram would be either a 3-player FFA or 2v2v2 team game with the top players of each race.
A big prize pool is the best feature of any tournament. Unfortunately I don't have $10k or more to sponsor this. I've seen talk of kickstarting prizepools and would love to see how viable that would be but it might be a good idea to hold the first just as a proof of concept, offering only the rewards of pride and practice. If however people wanted to jump in and donate who am I to say no?
I'm inclined to forego a region lock though perhaps a minimum win requirement of 100 or 150 would ensure everyone unquestionably earns their spot.
Maphacking could be an issue but perhaps community policing would be enough? I have a few ideas on other workarounds but don't want to get too carried away yet.
We would need volunteer casters which I'm guessing wouldn't be too much of a problem. The weekends in September look clear of official events and TI4 isn't until next year so we're all good there.
Thoughts, comments, and does anyone think this could actually be done successfully?
