Man, i am so sick of these pointless group stages.
I get that you gotta seed the brackets somehow but theres no spice in what essentially is two Bo1s between each team.
Its like the math people found a good way to seed, but forgot to make it interesting.
I believe it to be a bygone era of games. Because there are quite a lot of pitfalls with this style, both socially and techically.
Social:
Just like with social platforms, we have become acutely aware that locking people to a server (this has some benefits like creating an identity, making it hard/long to levelup so that you dont just leave the server… etc) was not the best idea.
Because it has the fundamental flaw of not being designed for the masses of the internet. If there is a threshold to enter something, people will use it against you.
Because games are not real life where we exist 24/7, they are virtual worlds and is accessible from wherever whenever, people come into games with any kind of emotions. Be it frustration or pure bliss, you can never control this, whereas in the real world, if you see someone wobbling through the street in the middle of the night, you’ve got a ton of options on how you want to handle the situation.
In a game, what choice do you have? a few, but you have the greatest escape hatch ever: to logout/go offline.
This is why in modern MMO-ish games, what do they do? Either phasing like WoW or random instance in a Town (and only towns, the rest of the game is for you or the party you’re in) like in Path of Exile/Destiny.
Because the developers want to leave it to chance (since the probability of a bad interaction is highly unlikely and the idea scales on the technical side) and if it still happens? Just logout and log back in, boom, a different shard/instance.
But what is the cost? The guy you just encountered in the game has less persistence than a creature/enemy in games.
Okay, sorry, i dont want to make a whole blogpost about this, but i enjoy talking about it.
Because i enjoy watching good dota being played but it fucking sucks watching a Bo2 that matters diddlysquat. They are even calling it Play-In Playoffs, what a bunch of numbskulls