After extensive community debate, the decision has been reached to reform the Time Trial knock out stage to a ‘Last Karter Standing’ format, effective immediately for CDM 2019. The paragraphs below will outline what these changes will entail.
First of all, the group stage will remain completely unaffected and will be performed in exactly the same fashion as in previous editions. The same number of people (16 to be precise) will qualify based on the same rules. The entire knock-out stage will be played in a ‘Last Karter Standing’ structure, wherein one track is randomly drawn (and taken out of the competition thereafter) per round; each round the slowest karter gets eliminated, until there is only one karter remaining to claim the gold medal.
If you can count, that means the KO stage will consist of 15 rounds/tracks. In previous years the KO stage was only 8 rounds (including the 3rd place match). To make room for this extra number of rounds the breaks will be a bit shorter (or practically non-existent). The way this will be accomplished is that once the top-16 starts, every player will get a designated SNES + TV and won’t leave that seat until they are eliminated from the competition. So there won’t be any seat changing / shifting to different TVs, between rounds. This also holds for the stream TV. We will see if we can get a (ghetto) mobile cam feed for the TT stage once the player on stream is eliminated.
In addition, the KO stage bonuses will also be handled a little bit differently. With the format of last year and previous years’ the players eliminated in top-16 all got the same nr of bonus points, reflecting the round at which they were all knocked out. With LKs we actually have a distinction between #16 to #5, so the bonus points will be reflecting this.
Bonus points will be as follows:
1. 1000
2. 750
3. 550
4. 400
5. 363
6. 325
7. 288
8. 250
9. 231
10. 213
11. 194
12. 175
13. 156
14. 138
15. 119
16. 100
Where #8 and #16 get the same amount as players eliminated in QF and Top 16 last year respectively.
When Lafungo originally proposed this format a few months back (in this topic:
http://www.ffsmk.org/forum/index.php?topic=6381.0), he already outlined some of the advantages that using this sytem will bring. Just to restate:
-No more issues with players walking around the room to check others' results between a set of races (which we don't have an official rule about, but people have complained about it; last year everyone could see Sami messed up on GV3 on the giant projection as an exaggerated example of this flaw in format).
-It reduces variance, whilst keeping the spirit of the event (no more mass elimination from GV3, but mess up on one track and you're likely to be eliminated).
-It increases the number of tracks played in KO stages (one of the major criticisms of the current format is that it's too short).
A drawback will be that we will have to wait longer for ScouB to enter the results into the FFSMK database in the aftermath of the event, since the database structure currently does not support this kind of tournament structure and this was decided and announced so close to the actual event.
In summary, we expect and hope that this change will bring more excitement to the TT tournament, whilst at the same time fixing some issues present with the system that was previously used.
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