Alright so, before I begin this post, I would like to say thank you to the TO-Cup staff for hosting this tournament, I had fun.
I'll divide this post into two parts: Opinions that don't matter and constructive critisism
=Start opinions that don't matter=
I really liked the ro16 mappool, it was the most fun part of the entire tournament, composed of maps that focused towards my skillset (alternating). There was even this great map that was in OWC 2014 finals that no one else in my bracket could do well, an AR8 HD pick, and AR7 DT pick, and a ridiculous HD pick (Ba Ba Ba). These maps are the best kinds of maps and you guys should put more of them in. The only way that the pool could be better would be if you included a KIRBY Mix pick.
The rest of the mappools (except some in the finals/grand finals) were trash farm maps. I hated playing them and having no variety in map selection for them.
The staff was against me in almost every round. Literally, I go and watch the VOD and hear the staff rooting for my opponent each individual time, except my first match against Friendzone King, where there was zero bias (Reasons: PdPr0x_ was the only Spaniard, Tger had good acc, - Aki was #1 Serbia).
=End opinions that don't matter=
Alright, as far as constructive criticism goes, I'll start by saying that the biggest strength I saw in the TO-Cup staff was that they were extremely adaptable to fixing their mistakes. This tournament had massive scheduling issues when dealing with participants from non-EU countries (more so for NA, IMO), and i will get into that.
Commentary and stream quality were okay, although I would've like someone that knew their stuff paired with emanfman (He's mainly a hype commentator). There wasn't really enough from Tramorio and Circle, but emanfman does pretty well by himself, i'd say.
Okay, the biggest issue in this tournament was scheduling, as I mentioned. What I can gather from this is that TOC is lacking staff from a variety of time zones, and/or you are trying to get all of the matches back to back. This may be convenient if you are lacking staff, but it creates huge problems for the players showing up. My main example here is the group stage. Players in the UTC-8 Timezone (I knew a few) needed to play a match either at 4am local or 7am local because the matches were only going to happen between 12pm UTC and 3pm UTC. This is unreasonable to expect of players, which is why there were quite a few dropouts in the group stage. UTC-5 was able to get away with a later group stage time, but even then, the latest time available was 10am, which is slightly more reasonable to expect, but not fully. In my opinion, you should try to schedule a match between 12pm-8pm LOCAL time for the player.
Later in the tournament, there was a round where only three matches were played, and one player made it to the semi-finals while only playing one match in the group stage. This is ridiculous, and was also likely caused by the fact that times were placed within a block of time that worked for the staff, and not for the players. I may be completely wrong, players might not have showed up to the matches because they didn't care, but this is something you guys on staff side can work to fix.
And by the way, the amount of sleep someone gets does affect someone's osu performance, and "going to sleep earlier" or asking a player to change their entire circadian rhythm is absolutely absurd. So, do some recruiting and find alternative streamers and refs so that you can offer match times that don't suck, and things will likely be more successful.
Next, the mappool. Many consider Ro16 to be your biggest failure, but in reality, each mappool has something in common: They are all themed. This is very bad for a tournament, where you should be including a variety of maps around the player's skill level in each pool. Ro16 was full of alternate maps (or fast single, if you prefer), quarterfinals were very acc heavy, monster was jump heavy, and the finals were very stream heavy. This created a massive lack of balance in each mappool, which is why i was so personally disappointed. Another thing is, you only have one chance for a mappool. If players hate it, oh well - they can ban the maps. If they're really maps no one will pick, then no one will pick them. Please don't consider changing a mappool post release again. The main thing is that you guys should balance your pools to cover a diverse set of elements each time: Technical DT map, speed DT map, Alternate DT map - Long, combo heavy Nomod, "generic" nomod, alternate nomod, stream nomod, slider heavy nomod, etc.
Also, 5 minute maps suck for non-tiebreakers, and tiebreakers should always be 5 minutes. This is mainly for tension factor as a tiebreaker, and causes matches to drag on if 5 minute maps are played.
Finally, Tournament flow, which falls under scheduling, I guess. The tournament was structured as follows: group stage, ro16, r1 losers + quarter finals, r2 losers + semi finals, r3 losers + finals, rest of losers bracket + winner bracket finals. This was thankfully corrected, as the error had been realized, but essentially, you need to break it down so you don't have players with so many consecutive matches and you go through matches at a reasonable rate. Outside of group stage, you should try to hold 8 matches per day maximum. Here's an example of something that works a little better in my opinion, but feel free to try something else: group stage, ro16, r1 losers + quarter finals, r2 losers + semi finals + r3 losers, finals + r4 losers + r5 losers, losers final + grand finals. This way you can get through things at a rate that doesn't suck and you don't have a player doing, say... 3 matches in one day.
One last thing: Don't even bother with the mappool in the thread, just link the google docs and update it there. It would also help to put the difficulty name in brackets and list the mapper's name so that people with bad internet don't have to download as much.
This has been a fun tournament, congratulations to the winners, and I hope you guys take some of this advice and apply it to your next tournament!
