I think I can offer a fresh perspective on the situation. I have been involved with the Magic (the card game) tournament scene for almost a year now. For those of you that don’t know, Magic is pretty huge compared to Street Fighter. Without going into huge details on how they operate, it’s safe to say that it’s sort of like APEX, except run by a company and taken much, much more seriously. For more information you can check out www.wizards.com/dci , but I’ll just get to my point.
Each year, there is a National Championship for Magic in every country. These tournaments are more or less equivalent to EVO. Now, Nationals is not a tournament you can just show up to and play, you do have to qualify for it by:
-getting top 8 in a regional qualifier tournament
-getting top 4 in the previous year’s Nationals
-having one of the top [some arbitrary number] otherwise unqualifed highest rankings
-getting top 4 in one of the “last chance” qualifier tournaments, typically held the day before Nationals.
for an example, see this link for this year’s USA nationals.
Now, I believe that this format can be adapted to Evolution. APEX will have to be used, but there has to be some way of policing it better. How they do it in Magic, is that there is only one person per region allowed to run “Premier” tournaments. I think if there was only one or two people submitting results for each APEX region, that would cut down a lot on any sort of fraud. Also, the way they do their rating is sort of a chess system. You gain or lose more points depending on who you beat. If you beat someone that has a higher rating than you, you gain more points and vice versa. I don’t know how feasable this would be for APEX, but it’s worth considering.
Here is what I propose:
-Run regional qualifier tournaments that qualify you for EVO. Since the APEX regions are quite large (for instance, Magic has one Regional tournament for each State/Province), maybe 2 or 3 regional qualifiers per APEX region would work.
-Have a cutoff for APEX points where if you are above a certain threshold, you automatically qualify.
-Last chance qualifiers the day before EVO. Should be single elim IMO.
The reason for all of this is to take advantage of what I believe is the fairest tournament format, the swiss pairing system. How it works is that you play a certain number of rounds depending on the number of people (17-32 is 5 rounds, 33-64 is 6 rounds, 65-128 is 7 rounds etc.). After the rounds are all done, the people with the top 8 records (or some other arbitrary number) play in a single elimination finals. The first round is completely random. After that, the people with the same record play each other. So the 1-0 people play each other, and the 0-1 people play each other. The pairings within each “bracket” are randomized, as long as the following rules are met:
-on a best-effort basis, each pairing will have two people with an identical record
-in cases where you have an odd number of people in a bracket (2-2 bracket for example), one person gets “paired down”, meaning he plays someone in the next lower bracket.
-the pairings are done in a top-down method, meaning the people with the best records are paired up first, and if there is an odd number of people overall, the person with the worst record gets a bye.
-a player may drop out of tournament at any time. Usually this is done when a player knows he cannot mathematically make top 8 or top whatever.
-players are allowed to intentionally draw. This is usually done in the later rounds of the tournament if both players are guaranteed top 8 or top whatever due to a good record.
-players cannot play the same opponent twice.
Obviously, this works a lot better for chess or Magic, because all you need is a table. However, by using the qualifier tournaments, the amount of total participants in EVO can be kept at a more managable number, this making this format feasable.
In any case, I think I’ve covered it in enough detail to give a feel for it. I hope I’ve made a strong case for this format, but if anyone has any questions, please ask.
Thanks for reading