[Wineandbread]

If the tournament organizers really didn't want sandbagging to happen they would make the tournament 1 divisional, such that only D6 players would even have a shot at the prizes. They wouldn't have to go through all this placement and sandbagging trouble if they didn't feel the need to reward lower-skill players. I can understand the divisions because they genuinely want to attract people into playing the game just a tad more seriously, to let players improve, and letting everyone compete and be rewarded for the time they put into the game. Why else would you feel compelled to introduce low-skill competition? (by low-skill, I refer to everyone not in D6)

FFR's tourney is designed with a very differing condition of competition compared to most tournaments for rhythm games, and games in general.. We can play the songs as many times as we like instead of going head to head live. It's a VERY forgiving system, and I imagine it has something to do with the fact that it's combo-based scoring. But even looking at osu! World Cup taking place currently, which is also combo scored (worse actually: exponential scaling combo-based scoring), they still play their games live (this comparison has some issues, but I'll leave it). I don't think I could name very many other tournaments (any off the top of my head right now for that matter) that have this kind of system that lets you continuously play and score your best. So don't let the rewards fool you: it's casual tournament gaming to a heavy degree.

Concerning sandbaggers, there's easily incentive to stay in the lower divisions because of the way the prize structure is set up, and also just because of competitive nature in general, like ironic mentioned. But you can't tell with absolute certainty the difference between a sandbagger and a person who is improving from an online standpoint, barring the extremely obvious. There isn't a clearcut point where you can objectively move someone up a division either- like hi19 said, it's punishing to move people around in divisions for those people who are midway (top of their division, but can't even place in the division above).

That being said, there's no reason why players shouldn't be able to complain, regardless of whether they are rational or not, because this is a system that you chose to endorse. You signed up for the whole package.


tl;dr Division tournament structure is inherently flawed for a game like FFR

$0.02