I have not yet secured my own place in the GC, so I have no vested interest (yet, hopefully). I humbly suggest that each battle of the GC be decided by best 2 of 3. I look to the tournament format of another great strategy game, StarCraft. It just seems like there are too many variables and the stakes to great to decide each match with only a single game. I mean, as it stands, with 16 people we're talking about 4 games per person. If the first three rounds are 2-3 and the final round is 3-5, that's a total of 14 games maximum for the two finalists. I recommend one round each day, for a four day event, with either scheduled games or a 24 hour window for the combatants to meet for their games.

Maybe all this has been decided an just hasn't been outlined yet, or maybe I just haven't seen that thread. I think the method described above would draw more spectators, build more interest in the game over the short term, and would in general create a more dramatic tournament. Since you're investing so much cash for this event it seems a shame to have it over in two hours.

I really like this idea over having it be set up just like a regular tournament but I'm still not sure what the devs want to do so I wonder if they have anything fancy up their sleeves.

Right now simple double elimination tournament looks fine for me (more simple, fast and fair). And then may be one more step for 4 first places in this tournament. For 4 players it's ok to play many games (2-3 or 3-5).

Main problem that we have is time, because all players have different time zones, and many players can't play all days a week, so one round per day is too long.

put my name in the hat for thinking that more games is better. or, at least as altren suggests, for the top 4 spots. it'd be a shame if the final game kicked off and one player was on an island, for example.

I personally think best 2 of 3 is "enough" for at least the final round or two.

As far as fairness is concerned, may I also suggest that Jed/Altren generate 20 or so preset maps and review them for "fairness" so that getting completely terrain screwed doesn't cause someone to lose. And I also agree that 2 out of 3 sounds good.

Another thought, stemming from the March Madness college basketball tournament here in the U.S.--

Have you given any thought to how the bracket will be set up? We have these nifty "ranks"... maybe we should use them!

I personally believe that the Limited rank is the best evaluation of a player's ability, but if you wanted to use the average like you do for the Top 20 player board to organize the bracket, that's fair enough as well.

Do you mean using rank for balancing tournament tree or for making players have opponent with same rank?

Balancing the tournament tree. So if you were to list all of the players by rank 1 through 16, 16 would play 1, 15 would play 2, 14 would play 3 and so on. So it'd look something like this...

Yes, this is what I was thinking about too. This looks fine for me. Though, Players with lower ranks may see it as on unfair for them. That's the problem.

P.S. Changed your table a bit

Well, the thing is there are only prizes for the top four slots. So the lower-ranked people might not be pleased, but it's highly likely they'd have to play those players at some point anyway. However, I'm not exactly sure how a double elmination tourney is implemented here, so I don't know if pre-matching would make a difference on the result.

One thing further I might suggest, going off sun's suggestion of pre-generated maps (which I think is a very good idea). It might be a good idea to have each round have a designated map to assure some level of parity.