I love the idea of playing against several other players in one afternoon. But I rarely get in 3 matches at my LGS tournaments. The system FFG has in place seems to be a bit whacky now and even less matches are being played. I had an idea that would let players get more games in and eliminate the TO's discretion to ranking and pairings.

"Elimination with Benefits"

1. Assign pairings randomly.

2. Each round the top half move up to a higher "grade"... randomly paired and compete again to cut to the top half, repeated until there are 4 players. Then the finals can be paired based on MoV or something.

3. After each the first 3 rounds, the players that lose, go down a grade and compete against each other for a smaller prize.

So we would have 4 tiers of prizes outside the top 4/8... and people can still play and win.

I know there are plenty of details to work out but I think I would be more likely to attend future events if the system made more sense.

I'm not sure where the "I want to get some games in," problem comes in unless you happen to have an odd number of people playing and thus happen to get the bye. You should only ever get that one time in a tournament so if the bye is the issue...

Maybe you'd like FFG to have more rounds of swiss but the only reason you wouldn't get a game in is because there is an odd number of players and you happen to get the bye.

If you've got a small tournament that only does three rounds of Swiss then just play some "pickup" games while others are running their elimination games.

I say....just get some games in. Just play a whole bunch of people. No need to organize a tournament.

If you have odd number players, than play some missions with 3 players. Or do an Epic or Cinematic game.

You basically described how tournaments are run using swiss+cut system

so.. pair the winners with the winners and the losers with the losers? revolutionary!

what will you do when the number of entrants is not 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, or 128? Maybe some sort of way to even up the numbers so you don't end up with more byes. A tiebreaker system of some kind, maybe based on points killed vs points lost?

ahem.

what you're suggesting actually creates more byes unless you have the perfect number of players.

17 people show up to play a normal X-wing tournament: play for 3 rounds. someone gets a bye every round.

17 people show up to play your format:

round 1: 1 bye, then we have 9 winners and 7 losers.

round 2: 8 of the 9 winners continue to play (including someone who advanced to this tier by sitting around). one of the winners gets a random bye to the 2-0 bracket. 6 of the 7 losers play to see who gets into the 1-loss bracket. one of them gets a bye.

round 3: we've got 5 people in the 2-0 bracket and 8 people in the 1-1 bracket, and 4 people in the 0-2 bracket. one of the 5 2-0 players gets a bye while the other 4 fight it out to cut to a top 3, which means we have to give someone else a bye for the elimination games, or go to tiebreakers to establish 4th place. 8 people are in the 1-1 bracket and 4 people are in the 0-2 bracket, so that works out fine.

The main issue is that with certain numbers, the bye will float upward, allowing the winner to be decided by a final-round bye amongst the top players, instead of how swiss drops it to the lowest ranking as a sort of consolation. The only way to remove byes altogether is to only run tournaments at even numbers of players, in which case you have a 50% chance of telling the last person to arrive that they are not welcome.

after 3 rounds, someone who was 2-0 and loses gets last place in their tier, while someone who was 1-1 and wins will be first place in their tier. They had the same record. They might have both lost to the same amazing player. how do you separate their performance? your system separates them arbitrarily by which one played Mr. Amazing first, which hardly seems right.

when I set up a local tournament, I think I will go for one of these here french style double elimination type things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repechage

We are free to use whatever system we want. private groups can pool resources for a tournament and prizes that vastly outshine acrylic cluster mine tokens and a car wash coin.

1st- bottle of scotch,and a x-wing expansion

2nd- bikini car wash

3rd- `get your picture taken with a cardboard chewbacca and a 3 pack of white V-neck t shirts

3rd- ` get your picture taken being eaten by a cardboard chewbacca and a handful of sand that resembles the sand used in the ACTUAL filming of star wars.

its going to be great.

anyone choosing to take an intentional draw must spend 60 minutes drawing a picture of the rancor using a local newspaper to clean its butt. this drawing wil then be lit on fire and used to ignite some jasmine incense near a hippy.

And then everyone decided to take an intentional draw.