how about a best of 1 instead Kappa

if the teams are close in skill the upper bracket team is almost definitely going to win the finals with a bo3 in hand, a bo5 would be better if you just want to make the finals longer

bo5 > two bo3 > bo3
because some teams will win on certain maps more often than other teams
and give UBF winners a map pick/elim advantage

yeah just like ascent just won the finals..oops. Best of 5 is great as well.

2 bo3: max 6 maps, min 2 maps
1 bo5: max 5 maps, min 3 maps

Cba working out the actual expected number of maps.

For some reason I had the idea that if lower bracket winners takes the first bo3 then it could potentially go into two more. My bad.

1 bo5 with the upper bracket winner getting a 1 map advantage leads to a minimum of 2 maps

no map advantage is nice

Bo5 with a strawpoll vote for fifth map.

bo5 with 1 map advantage would make the most sense imo

bo7. See who the REAL best team is.

fuck it.
do it aggregate bo8

Makes a lot of sense. Solid advantage for the upper bracket winner, but going 3-1 or 3-0 shouldn't be impossible if the lower bracket winner is truly the better team.

If you need a 1 map advantage to win you are not a true champion imo. Make the advantage map pick/elim, and have a bo5 grand finals.

upper bracket winner would only need to lose 3 maps to lose the tournament, while lower bracket winner needs to lose 4 or 5, depending if there is a 1 map advantage

Even two best-of-three series is technically disadvantageous to the upper bracket winner if the two series are not independent from each other (e.g. can pick/ban the same maps for the second series).

For having only one combined series, I believe that the "fairest" method was a best-of-seven series, where the upper bracket winner had a two-map advantage, so lower bracket would have to win four maps and upper bracket only two. The maximum number of maps played in such a series would be five.

As a side note: when the first post says the final is 'independent from insomnia' and on its own stage, does this mean that we, as a community, have more say than in previous i-series summer events for some reason? This seems to be implied, did I miss a thread or something? Multiplay's website isn't giving me much info here.

Correct - the entire tournament will be played in the tent with production being organized in the stage area allocated in the tent. This will likely result in the schedule of the tournament being spread out more over the three days (since we are not allocated a specific time for the grand final on the main stage), but there are still some time constraints that have to be followed. More details will come out soon probably.

Basically, all that whining and complaining about a 10 am final has resulted in this. We've been given our own freedom here, in exchange for not being on the big event stage. There are the only two elements you should notice: timings, and the finals being located around our production area and not on a big stage. Everything else will remain the top notch stream of awesomeness you're used to by now ;)

I will be putting a rough schedule out soon but the main features will be that all group games are Friday + first two rounds of elimination (BO1). From Saturday onwards all games will be BO3, but stopping fairly early on Saturday to enable potential finalists to have plenty of rest and make any preparations they would like. Consolation final on Sunday morning followed by the finals Sunday afternoon. A BO5 is possibly on the table but it may only go ahead with certain finalist combinations as we're stuck with time where players have earlier flights back.

We're looking at a finals time of around 14:30 BST currently (although again, that's subject to change).

On a side note, how would you deal with crowd ruining spy plays :) ?

SOUND-PROOF ROOMS!

Not that it will happen, that's just my suggestion

Was always fine at old iseries where the main stage was, more or less, what will happen for tf2 at i55. Even at i42 which was a small lan by comparison you couldn't make out anything but generic noise, and it will be a lot louder for i55.

can i make a suggestion that playoffs either all have set maps or all vote/ban?

iirc the upper bracket finals we played against froyo at i52 were set maps, but then the lower bracket wasn't? we were forced to play 4g on our worst maps... we dropped 1 map at i52 that wasn't badlands or gully which was our very last game against mixup. i'm not saying we would have won but some consistency would be nice..

edit: i could be wrong my memory sucks so ignore me if so

Upper bracket finals were map picked, it's the round before it (UR3) that wasn't (and where you played froyo). The upper and lower rounds were on the same map sets or picks, it's just after your loss you're into round 4 then which had picks. I'm considering map picking for UR3, but not lower 3, as it's only two matches to keep tabs on there and they should be big games. There is an overnight break before UR3 this time so it shouldn't cause any delays and messing around.

I don't want to have all play offs as set maps as I don't think that will go down well and as said, luck can play a bigger part with the draw. Too many games and too time intensive to do picks from the start though. The number of games drops significantly after round 3, and theoretically none of the big teams drop out before round 4 which is why it was run as it was last year. But yeah, UR3 sounds like a decent shout for picking.