3 minutes ago, Buhallin said:It's not hard to understand why. I'll agree that the system has notable flaws (more on that in a sec) but if you're going to get hurt rather than understanding the system, that's on you.
I do agree with all this, and even said as much in what you quoted The problem is... what do you do to fix it?
Elimination will suck worse - sure, it'll be a lot easier to understand what happened, but it's far worse overall results. Two of the best players end up in the same bracket and one knocks the other out, how is that any more representative? Still luck, unless you want to suggest some seeding system that would require full history and tracking of players. Plus you end up with people playing one or two games and then being out, which isn't much fun either.
Tiebreakers sound nice enough, but how do you actually handle them? He says there were 4 people at 4-1, that would be two more rounds to eliminate them, and that's just for third (second, maybe?) place, and in a small tournament. What if there are 3? Or (as is more common in a large event) 12? If I remember right, our regional last year had about 10-15 people at 5-2, and only one made the cut. Are you really going to run another full event to determine who gets that last spot in the cut, so they can then go into the cut? And there are prized for Top 4, and Top 8, which can be nice in large events. What do you do when 3rd-5th are 5-1, and 6th-10th are 4-2?
SoS certainly has its issues, but I have yet to see anyone suggest a better system that actually holds up to full implementation and is reasonable to implement. The one thing that can be done is to add more Swiss rounds, but even that won't solve all the problems. It's important to note that a cut doesn't solve it either - it just changes the SoS impact from "Why did I miss out on the Top 4 prizes, I was 4-1!" to "Why didn't I make the cut, I was 4-1!"
And Im not saying I KNOW of a better system to use than SoS. Just that there are tiebreaker systems used, such as what I said with X-Wing, that puts the tiebreaker much more into the players control instead of at the mercy of the RNG pairing.