Which was the Best Trio FNCS Format?
Whenever someone said "Easy/Hard lobby", or "Easy/hard region", I often wondered if you could somehow quantify that with numbers.
A year ago I created a metric that allows me to put a single number on difficult a lobby is, using the player's past performance to give each of them a rating, and in turn see how difficult the lobby is as a whole.
Here I will use those ratings as a basis to see how good the 2021 FNCS Formats were.
Overall Results
I calculated the lobby skill number for each region and for each Trio FNCS (the 4 seasons and the Grand Royale) and here are the results, firstly averaged across the regions and then shown in detail for each region.
Overall, S16 is the winner in terms of the format giving us the best players in Grand Finals, while S15 and S18 were poor. While the 32-game reboot format for Grand Royale was much maligned, it actually gave quite good lobbies in the end.
Let's have a look at the formats for each season and discuss them. This is mostly focus on the process of qualifying for Grand Finals, and less so on the qualifier formats themselves (which were fairly similar each season anyway).
In the 4 regular seasons there were 4 ways to qualify for Grand Finals:
Top X in a Qualifier Final
Top X in Semi Finals (Heats)
Win a Reboot Round game
Top X from previous season's Grand Finals
At the start of each one, I give you the format in basic terms through these numbers
Season 15
From Qualifier Final: 0
From Semi Finals: 32
From Reboot Round: 1
From Previous Season: 0
This season produced the 2nd lowest lobby skill in Grand Finals. This is because too much emphasis was put on Heats. There were 132 teams in Heats and you had to finish Top 8 in a Heat to qualify. This resulted in some lesser teams who had only finished around 100th in any qualifier pulling off a lucky performance to get to Grands.
The single Reboot Round had a lot of hype for spectators at least, and while the team qualifying would be fairly random, it was only a single game so it didn't affect the Grands quality much.
Season 16
From Qualifier Final: 9 (Top 3 in 3 qualifiers)
From Semi Finals: 18
From Reboot Round: 3
From Previous Season: 3
This format gave the highest lobby skill of all the Trio FNCS this year, including the top rating on 4 of the regions. This is because the balance between qualifiers and heats was executed well.
Top 3 in a qualifier final is extremely difficult. Firstly you have to get Top 33 in the qualifier, which cuts out most of the lucky teams, and then Top 3 in the high-quality customs lobby would totally eliminate the possibility of a "bad" team getting to Grands this way.
The addition of the having the top 3 teams from the previous season also qualify meant that in the first 12 spots were guaranteed to be extremely good teams, resulting in a high quality lobby in Grands in the end.
The 3 Reboot Games added some randomness, but with the other improvements, it was the best lobby overall.
Season 17
From Qualifier Final: 9 (Top 3 in 3 qualifiers)
From Semi Finals: 18
From Reboot Round: 3
From Previous Season: 3
Same format as Season 16, so nothing to discuss further. It gave the 2nd highest lobby skill and the top rating on 2 regions.
Season 18
From Qualifier Final: 10 (Top 5 in 2 qualifiers)
From Semi Finals: 8
From Reboot Round: 12
From Previous Season: 3
This format gave the worst lobbies in Grand Finals overall.
The Top 5 in the 2 Qualifier Finals would be of very high quality (as discussed in Season 16). But the big change was the decrease in Semi Finals importance, and much more on the Reboot Round.
While Semi Finals don't always guarantee that good teams qualify, the Reboot Rounds are much much worse at doing this. Everyone who made Semis had 6 Reboot Games to try their luck in. This meant that teams who could just about place Top 66 in Qualifiers would just have to get lucky in a single game to get to Grands.
The hype of Reboot Rounds was also ruined as there were just too many of them - the whole fun of the Reboot Round is that there is only one chance. When you have 12 winners the first game feels rather unimportant, and when you combine this with the randomness of the winner, it's a complete flop from a spectating point of view.
With only 2 qualifiers and then the Semis, Reboots and Grands all played in one weekend, there was no time to build any hype for Grands either. The season was over before we knew it.
Grand Royale
This format was very different as it was a one-off event.
It was criticised almost unanimously by the community and thought to be extremely unfair and uncompetitive, as everything was put on winning a game (32 Reboot games). However, it actually produced lobbies almost on par with Season 16 and 17, and much better than Season 15 and 18.
Anyone who had made a qualifier final or a semi final in 2021 could play the tournament. The Top 33 qualified to the next stage, where they would play 32 Reboot games to get to the Grand Final. Every 8 games the lobby would be re-filled by 8 more teams qualifying from everyone who hadn't gotten Top 33 initially.
Why did this produce surprisingly good lobbies?
Well firstly the quality of the initial 300 teams was quite good - it was certainly a higher quality than e.g. an FNCS Qualifier Round 3.
Therefore to get Top 33 in that first round was very difficult and there were not too many lucky teams getting through that. Sure, some good teams missed out because it's so difficult, but it prevented the worst teams from having any chance.
Equally, to join the next stage you needed Top 8 in the reload sessions. This was even more difficult and the only teams getting through that were very good ones.
The Reboot games themselves also helped to filter out the best from the worst. Because there were so many, and the better teams tended to be uncontested, it was only a matter of time before all the very best teams made it through, despite needing to get that bit of luck to win a game.
Unfortunately the magic of Reboot games was lost in this format as there were so many of them, so that was a big downside from a spectating point of view at least.
Conclusion
We must have a balance between:
Fairness - getting the best teams to Grands
Entertainment - pleasing the spectators by providing some important moments where "anything can happen"
Overall, Seasons 16 and 17 are the winners for me by far.
They were quantifiably the most fairest format, and I enjoyed each qualifier, semi final and reboot round a lot because they all had just the right amount of importance and hype on them.
I hope that Epic can learn and stick to the better formats in the future too, as it has not always moved in a good direction. Experimentation is sometimes required, but after that stage, we should stick with what is logical and has worked in the past.