K i u i wrote:
Probably just forgotten to edit the Wiki. Loctav seems unwilling to qualify two thirds of the participants after group stage.
When's the schedule coming up?
Oh, we discussed that forth and back and forth and back. One point is that Group Stage is a huge effort, making it a bit of obsolete to host it when we keep majority of the participants.
On the other hand, we found that it was a bit unfair to only let the top 2 ascend, when we have two top seeded teams in each group. This results in frustration for majority of the participants, as they assume that they know already the ascenders of their group, anyways.
We came to the conclusion to consider the groupstage as true-seeding for the knock-out bracket. Even if majority of the group stage may ascend, the position your own group determines your starting position in the double elimination bracket. A raw-pp seeding is not the way to determine that.
Considering that, it seems also fine to kick 2 players per group and let 4 per group ascend, yet knowing that in the knock-out bracket, we will have a 1v4/2v3 setup, as Tasha suggested last year. So even if it is easy to ascend to the knock-outs per se, your position in the group determines the "supposed difficulty of your first knock out encounter".
Sorry for the huge confusion, I decided to go
with doing a Round of 16, not cancelling it. Especially since we have evenly sized groups now (yey, 24 teams!), this is acceptable for me now.
Schedule will be released in a few minutes, I am rechecking all time slots now to avoid double-placements.
