Tournament 1 Feedback

[scrangos]

Most of my concerns have been already addressed so I'll put those at the bottom.  The two things that worry me still are that we have maps in the map pool that, at least on discord, have been mentioned to be considerably race imbalanced.  This interacts with the second concern that map picks are done before race picks, and if people are playing to win then it would lead to who can abuse the map imbalances better if the other player does not know or ban those maps.

If I recall correctly the main reason most tournament lock races/factions is that often when players are playing only their main race it leads to higher skill matches which end up being more entertaining to watch.  Races in SP3 tend to be one dimensional though with not that much variance in viable strategy, so the same matchup / strategy over and over might be a problem.

For the future it might be worthwhile to look into tournament map making, much like the korean leagues did for SC2 in order to lead to more entertaining matches and help correct inbuilt balance problems by making the maps make up for the race imbalance.  Often this way done through safer/unsafe expansion layouts and base to base distances and width of paths.  But for SP3 this would look different and I'm not knowledgeable enough to know what map features give advantages to which races.

I'm glad to see additional matches for the first round, not being constrained to a one day tournament and a variety in tournament layout which helps add novelty to the content.