[OC]Another improvement on current major group/playoff systems.

As some other posters have mentioned, our community is yearning for a more sophisticated and protracted playoff or group stage of major events.

While smaller events with ~250k prize pools benefit from the uncertainty that is the current swiss system, larger 1000k events such as majors cry out for more grandiose group stages with higher quality teams progressing. ELeague has the right idea of having group stages done over several weekends but this format doesn't work as well with official Valve majors. ELeague also struggled with scheduling having the quarterfinals to finals over four days.

The Extended Groups system.

Any groups system must take scheduling into account as well as competition length, tournament reputation, and entertainment value among others. The system I will propose will cater to the major events with longer durations akin to DOTA's TI, aiming to give as good a viewing experience for live and online watchers alike. It can also be merged with the Swiss system to provide a contracted schedule for smaller events which I will write up if this gets traction.

The Finals.

The theoretical best finals system consists of a Sunday with bo3 semi-finals and finals and a Saturday of up to three bo3s of teams vying to get into Sundays semi-finals. Why three? Because 4 games give little time for analysis and delays which hurts the viewer experience. The best way to achieve this is to have one team already seeded 1st and have four remaining teams compete for the remaining three spots. The ideal setup is depicted here.

The Groups.

The GSL system is the foundation of this extended system, with bo3s for initial as well as decider matches, this extends the group stage to a five day stage with four bo3s a day. Note that given that these matches will be played in a studio, arrangements can be made to accommodate a four match day without viewer experience suffering as a result. This eliminates eight teams from the competition and seeds the remaining eight teams, here is a picture of a basic group table with eliminated teams in red.

The Playoffs.

Next the eight remaining teams play for five seeded spots in the finals with the top of each group forming an upper group and the second placed forming a second lower group. One way of seeding is that 1st, 2nd and 3rd of the upper group are seeded in 1st, 2nd and 5th respectively with 1st and 2nd of the lower group forming the 3rd and 4th seed. However, there are almost an infinite number of combinations available to events’ organisers depending on their needs. My proposed system is depicted here, the qualified teams go into the finals brackets as was depicted earlier.

TL;DR

This is a qualifying system specifically aimed at majors with a protracted groups/playoff stage. The core of the idea is a 5 seeded team, two day finals with interchangeable lead up.