Going to add my own personal thoughts on the shortcomings of the recently used MKU format. Some of these have definitely been touched on already, but I'm going to elaborate.
1. The format is confusing to new players.
It should be our goal to expand the community, attract new players, and keep players active as much as we can. I'm confident that there were many new players who enjoyed their experience, especially if this was their first dip in competitive MK, but i think it could have been a lot better for them. Let's start with players who may not even be members yet, and are just casually watching Primetime on twitch. (I won't even get into the fact that primetime suffered this season because of the format.) The issue is that someone who has no familiarity with the format will have no clue where in the grand scheme of things the match they are watching comes into play. If they see that a match is the 'semi-finals' or 'finals', or better yet, realize that it's a best of three, this is pretty obvious what the stakes are, and what they are playing for. But instead, we have a format that has two sets of playoffs, so an uninitiated viewer may come to the conclusion that "this is it" when there is a whole other half of the season remaining.
The best formats for tournaments aimed at new players, are those that somewhat resemble some sort of familiar sports event. The old MKU format closely resembled an American sports league, with two conferences, a regular season, followed by playoffs. Even if you're European, this would probably still make sense. Tournaments that follow a quick group stage followed by an elimination bracket are immediately familiar to players as resembling international team tournaments (FIFA world cup, IIHF ice hockey tournaments, some Olympic events, etc). Of course, that's not to say we can't play with these standard, common tournament formats to make them better for our purposes. Using double elimination instead of single elimination is a prime example, as well as introducing consolation brackets for teams that don't make the cut. Unfortunately, MKU's most recent format went way too far, to the point that it doesn't resemble anything anyone knows. (Honestly, that in itself should have been a red flag that it may have been a bad idea to begin with.) The fact that MKU is the main draw for new players to our site, having a tournament that just confuses them is a shame.
Not only that, but new players may not understand whats going on every match day, other than what the schedule has said. Instead of seeing some form of continuity, and understanding why they are ending up where they did, they're nearly blindly playing match by match having fun and hoping to win, but not seeing the big picture. It's closer to playing scrimmages for fun and trying to rack up win counts, or grinding MMR in lounge even, than an actual competitive tournament where you want to have the title in sight, if you don't know what is going on very well.
2. Teams didn't try their hardest.
There are many indications that some teams didn't try their hardest, and that's a problem for MKC's flagship event. I'm going to go into detail why I think this is.
- Splitting the season in two was a bad idea.
The idea with a split season was that it gives teams a chance if they are mis-seeded. What actually happened in a lot of cases, is that teams who tanked day 1, may have not really tried to perform their best in weeks 2-4. The reason, I think, this happened, is pretty simple: if you know you're struggling in the division you're in, it would seem like a good idea to just bomb the rest of it, especially knowing you'll go down a division, and honestly, if you knew you were better than you are actually performing, you'd probably have a better time in the lower division in the second half, with a legitimate shot at a banner. And that's one thing with our community, to a lot of teams, the banners matter more, even if you could get a better placement by performing better (despite not getting a banner). The banner gives teams a lot more clout than a +2 or +3 placement higher, even if on paper it's a better result. Now, in traditional MKU this isn't possible. If you got a banner, you got the best placement you could possibly get, automatically. The "new" format presented two distinct options for many teams: a chance at a banner or a chance at a higher placement. Unfortunately, I think many teams went for the former option.
- Consequences aren't important if they're not understood.
Rookie made a good point that it's important for matches to have consequences. In theory, each match having a consequence drives teams to try harder. In addition to what was stated regarding this issue in the last paragraph, I also go back to the fact that this tournament format is confusing. It's important for teams to be able to envision a clear path to success, so they know what they need to do to get there. If teams, especially new teams, can't see that path, they also don't see the consequences of winning or losing. As a result, they don't try their hardest, which defeats the purpose of having a tournament format with bigger consequences of each individual match. Instead, results that weren't representative of the teams' skill levels get "amplified" (no pun intended), and teams get pushed further away from where they should be on the ranks. This is obviously a bad thing, since we now are left with results that are not indicative enough of the teams' potential.
Honestly, given these points, I'm not sure it was a good idea to publish placements for the first half of the season, especially if many teams weren't trying their hardest. I'd say the first half results are even less accurate to teams' actual skill than the second half, and this was almost by design, as the whole point of the first half was to establish better seedings for teams. Unfortunately, even that didn't go as planned, so we're left with broken first half results. It may be too late to remove those placements, but I wouldn't repeat that idea again.
Where to go from here?
As for MKU, I think we need to revert to something more traditional, maybe with some minor tweaks, but nothing more than just "minor". Even if the old format wasn't perfect, it was still better than the season we just had. I almost feel like Season 15 will be seen as a joke to some in a while, and once that fades away from recent memory, it'll be seen as a bizarre oddity in MK history, like we look at some stuff that's happened in sports many decades, or even over 100 years ago. That's actually not the worst end result, cause having history with lore is a good thing in the end, but it doesn't mean we should repeat our mistakes.
There was the idea of running this format, maybe with some changes, as a "side tournament". To second Rookie's opinion, I think that would be a mistake. Not only does that inherit many of the issues I just described, such as teams not playing as hard as they can, and also the format being confusing, but also, it goes against the original philosophy of side tournaments vs MKU. This discussion was originally had when planning MKC before launch, and has come up countless times again. Rookie mentioned that any team should have a chance to win a side tournament, even if the likelihood may be extremely miniscule, but the difference is that having that chance motivates teams to push themselves, even if they are destined to fail. There's something different about going into a tournament knowing you have a possibility of getting 1st (or even 2nd, 3rd, etc), even if it would take several flukes to pull it off--vs having your placement capped right from the start. Good examples of this would be in MKWC 2018, where Mexico pulled off narrow, unexpected wins vs USA and Germany, only to lose against Japan, while still taking home Bronze. Another good example is iF in Amplify VI, where they had an extraordinary loser's bracket run, winning 6 matches in a row, even against some very tough opponents, culminating in a win against wf star--who seemed untouchable at that time--only to lose against wf in the bracket reset. But they still got silver, which was more than I think anyone expected. It's possible that team Mexico and iF, if placed, at that time, in a format like MKU just used, would be placed in division 1 anyway, but there are definitely examples in history where teams have pulled off extreme upsets and outplayed the division they would have been placed in. And I can see this most happening at the bottom, where some new teams improve rapidly over the course of the season, more than even a perfect seeder could predict.
Speaking of seeding, I think we will eventually need something better. MKU relies extensively, more than any other tournament, on proper seeding, and was the motive behind the Season 15 format, which turned out to not work as intended. When the community was smaller, and players were more familiar with other teams and players, this wasn't as much of an issue. Seeding was a lot more clean cut and obvious in most cases, which it isn't now, especially at the bottom with tons of new teams joining each season.
I'm going to bring back to mind our Power Rankings, which a lot of people don't care about or hate at this point, and I think the reasons are somewhat justified. The idea with it originally was that it would encourage teams to try harder, and we have some evidence that originally, this worked in many cases. Unfortunately, the view shifted over time, and we've fallen back into a state where teams aren't trying their hardest in some tournaments, and this past MKU season is a prime example of this.
There are a few problems with the PR as currently implemented. First of all, they're updated way too infrequently. It used to be every 4 months, then it was every 6. When many teams don't even last that long, or you're planning on retiring your team before the PR evaluation period ends, the Power Rankings don't provide much motive, if at all. Not only that, restricting the PR to the top 30 or so, removes 75% of teams out of the equation of having any sort of reasonable chance at making the list. It also takes a lot of debate to decide the exact rankings, which is a source of human error, and at this point, it just got delayed so much because of being unable to come to a proper conclusion on how to rank the teams the last season, to the point where a lot of staff just stopped caring.
What we need is a PR system that automatically updates after every tournament automatically, and lists all active teams. This solves all 3 issues stated above: infrequent updates, excluding all but the top teams, and having to update manually. Having an exact numerical formula published would provide transparency into the workings of the PR for those who care, and wonder what they have to do to get where they are aiming. I see this as similar to how the AF rankings worked on the Players' Pages, for those who remember, since it made it clear what players needed to accomplish in order to rise in the global rankings.
There is one more benefit to such a PR system, which ties into my point from before. It can assist tournament staff in seeding teams, since they'll have more objective numbers to go by. The PR doesn't have to be used as the official seeding list one-for-one, but it would help, and I honestly think that with refinements over time, and maybe at some point taking into consideration individual match results (this is way down the road), it could eventually be just the official list for seedings, if it gets to the point where everyone trusts it enough. Having an objective determinant for seedings is a very good thing, not only because it prevents bias and mistakes, but it saves everyone work, and it also makes it easier to understand and predict what division your team will be placed in, and what it takes to make the cut.
There's one more thing with that, and that is that down the road, in many years from now, it opens up a fair method of offering cash prizes to teams in D1 MKU. Currently, it's tough to justify that, because you might be completely ruled out of winning any prize just because the MKU staff chose a certain team over you to be placed in D1 vs D2. Having a completely objective seeding formula removes this issue, to the point where you can say if you did or did not make a certain division, there was a solid, unarguable reason for it (other than claiming the PR formula was flawed, but then again, everyone is playing against the same meta here). While we had some team tournaments in the past with cash prizes such as Amplify and an affiliate tournament, MKPL, these ones were easier to justify because every team had some chance of winning. With MKU it's different because of seedings, but when you have a method of making clear how the seedings work--with an objective formula--in such a way that everyone understands and isn't hidden behind the closed doors of staff, you can now open the doors (at some point down the road) to offering these prizes for MKC's flagship event.
I'd like to add that MKU is an interesting tournament, because while it aims to be the pinnacle of team competition anywhere (D1), it also is meant to be the easiest for new players to get involved in. This provides a tough challenge, because it aims to be super competitive at the top, and quite casual at the bottom. Is it even possible to create a format with these characteristics? I'm not really sure. While I still advise going back to the older format for now, it may be wise to consider, at some point down the road, when we have even more teams than now, instead of having like 30+ divisions, using MKU as a major league for the top teams, and having smaller minor tournaments/leagues that serve as qualifiers for MKU, much like we did with MKWorlds. This isn't as bad as it sounds, seeing as MKU is already composed of a bunch of divisions for teams of different skills. The only difference would be instead of just divisions as separators, we'd have other tournaments too. I don't think we're ready to make that change yet, but it might come to that at some point, and if we go that route, we'll of course have to make sure that the lower ranked teams still have fun and enjoy the competitions we offer.
This past season was an interesting experiment, but it should be seen as just that--an experiment. We've learned a lot of lessons from Season 15, and I think we can use this experience and knowledge to our benefit in the end. Although constantly experimenting isn't really a good thing--we need some form of consistency--I don't think it was the biggest mistake we could have made. We just need to learn from this, and move forward, and try to be smarter in the future.
I'm looking forward to the future of MKU, MKC, and the community at large!