For everybody who played competition before, you may have noticed that the most interesting matches to play are the ones when your opponent and yourself are close enough in term of skill, and when there is something at stake. The main issues with Urban Terror competition is that :
- Most groupstages matches are usually useless, because too many teams go through (there were teams during last NCs who went in playoffs without winning a single match), and because match can end in a draw (which means most close matches, the one that could be interesting, end without a winner).
- In NationCup specifically (that’s way less the case in regular season due to divisions), the skill disparity between the best and worst team is so wide that the best teams could probably win by playing 3v5 every round. A lot of those matches are a waste of time for both teams.
This has been a problem in Urban Terror for like forever (I remember when I started playing years ago on CB, the top teams were already complaining about the lack of challenging matches). Unfortunately, nobody decided to change it.
As I noticed earlier, there are exactly 16 teams involved in the NationCup this year (or at least there are captain applications for 16 different countries, so we can hope to end with 16 teams participating). This make it perfect for the Swiss system.
For those who are familiar with the CS:GO competitive scene, the Swiss system is the one that was used in the Main Qualifier for the major last weekend (as well as the last 2 qualifiers if I’m not making a mistake). For those who don’t know what it is, roughly, instead of having the teams put in different groups, you have one big group (of 16 teams in our case). Every match must have a winner (so every match is a Bo3). If you win 3 matches, you’re qualified for playoffs. If you lose 3, you’re eliminated. At every point during the groupstage, you’ll face a team that have the same Win/Loss record than you. At the end, out of the 16 initial teams, 8 goes to playoff
Here is an image (thanks HLTV) that shows how it works :
So the benefits of this system :
- The initial seeding don’t have much impact. In many NationCup, we’ve seen unbalanced groups because the seeds were done on last NC results, even though the team composition drastically changed. The seeds only have an impact on the first round here.
- The dropout of a team doesn’t have much impact. We’ve seen groups where teams qualify simply because others teams in their groups dropped out. It can’t happen with the Swiss system because of the weekly random match-ups : if a team dropped out, of course some team will have a free win, but that won’t have as much impact.
- You don’t play a match that makes no sense for one of the team. We’ve seen so much matches when one team was already qualified and the other not yet, matches with both teams already qualified, or even worse, irrelevant matches when one team was qualified and the other one can’t qualify even with a win (this team usually drop out). This can’t happen here, because you’re either already qualified (so no matches to play) or in need of a win. There are no useless matches for any team.
- Every match must have a winner, so each match is a Bo3. That makes every match much more interesting. Especially when the teams are close skill-wise. And at least you won’t have the classic match “One team is much better in CTF, the other one is way better in TS, and you’ll know this will end a draw before it starts”.
- Because you face a team that has the same ratio than you, the top teams won’t need to rape every “smaller” team in their group to advance : they’ll face interesting competition way sooner than usual. And that also apply to the weaker teams : usually, the last seed on each group either get smashed every match they played, and dropped out after a few ones. It’s not that those weaker teams can’t win a match, but the teams they would be competitive with are placed at the last seed in another group. But the Swiss system also allow those “weaker” teams to face each other in matches that are relevant for qualification. So the match-up are more interesting to play than in the classic groupstages no matter how good you are in the game.
What do you think about it ?
