[TC_Halogen]

Since the start of this tournament, I've been incredibly torn with how I want to run the D7 division. The concept of cumulative scoring was brought in the last official, and it did work pretty well. Initially, I opted into doing an elimination tournament if the number of players in D7 exceeded 16, and it has done so. However, this makes me feel terrible for the new D7 players/low D7 players that will likely bow out early and not have a chance to engage themselves in competition. While at work today, I did come up with an idea:

Concept: Have D7 play the first five rounds cumulatively, then take the top 8 for a playoff round and eliminate normally from round 6 and on.

How this would work is quite simple: D7 would play the tournament just as they would have last year -- however, cumulative score will be the determining factor for who plays the quarter-finals, semi-finals, and finals (top 8, top 5, and top 3, respectively).

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I am interested in applying this particular concept to all divisions, but the rule would be applied at round 5, allowing the top 16 to move on (this is linear for all divisions).

Pros:
- everyone will be allowed to play a minimum of four rounds, regardless of performance!

- a weakness in skill may not spell elimination; for example: consider player A (strengths: speed, straightforward/stamina-heavy charts - weaknesses: technical charts/vast rhythmic structure) and player B (strengths: technical charts/strange rhythms; weaknesses: speedy charts). In this case, player A has a tougher time getting past the first few rounds because of the technicality involved in the lower-level charts, which don't present much in terms of speed, but do present structural challenges. This is frustrating for player A because they have a strength in speedier files, and would likely be able to put up scores that would keep them in the tournament -- if they could survive the easier level files. Player B will survive early on, but get slaughtered mid-game when faster files come in. In this differing structure, both players would the chance at both types of files, and their excellence towards their strengths would be coupled with their ability to fight against their weaknesses.

- competition is encouraged more firmly; skillful players may opt into being lazy early on just to make it by simply because they know that they can survive if the threshold nears them -- however, the first three rounds won't have any sort of definable threshold! Round 4 will put up a threshold that chops the field by a HUGE amount; in fact, it chops the field by x - (x -16), where x is the total number of competitors. D1 could see upwards of 200 people getting eliminated in a single round! However, all of those players would be able to play the four rounds that they might not have been able to play in the current structure, and results might be considerably more interesting, as players will actively have the opportunity to improve since they will be in the tournament for at least four rounds.

- tournament song structures would not need to be changed; for a structural change that is this vast, the song structures would not need to change at all -- they can gradually increase in difficulty like they always have, as round 5 will cut to 16 players for D6 and lower as it did before.

Cons:
- implementation; the dashboard would need a little bit of reworking so that it could add the scores of four rounds and seed based off of the total

- involvement; being away from the tournament for a round can be fatal (then again, this is true normally as well)

- I really don't have anything else, but it might be because I am proposing this idea and can't entirely assume impartiality?

EDIT: For the record, I only plan on implementing this concept in D7 for this tournament, but would consider the idea for the next official tournament if it received really well; it seems like a great idea to engage more community members.