I will go ahead and take care of the
in the room.
Below I have listed some examples of why this particular format doesn't fit competitive Donkey Kong (from my perspective).
1. The early randomness of the game (first 14 screens) is FAR too varied for single or even double elimination to have any type of correlation to skill-sets; a "safe" start strategy involves multiple "coin-flip" situations that will ultimately change the way you play the rest of the game, especially if things go bad on these first 14 screens.
2. The time vested to learn a "KS strategy" is no more than 1/8th the amount of time it takes the fastest learning players to achieve 1.1M "paces", with enough reliability to survive to the end. It doesn't seem right that anyone playing for less than 3 months should legitimately have a chance at beating players that have 5-10x the time vested and 5-10x the "knowledge mastery" of the game, simply due to "event format"
3. We will be rewarding players for using elementary techniques rather than advanced techniques, and essentially be favoring the less experienced player (or at least the player with the most experience "running boards", wait and see! :-) ). IMO, this belittles the title of the Kong Off, significantly.
4. DK is already excellent for score-based events because of the "difficulty buffer", the game gets exponentially harder as you increase scoring rate (there's that much more risk to process); in a high score based event, the game already buffers against the best players while favoring a "safe" strategy.
5. People are traveling a long, long way, to basically flip a coin. A bracketed event does not reward players for pursuing "mastery" of the game and will likely be a turn-off for some of the big name players (understandable). I feel that the Kong Off should represent the "Best" players of the game, rather than those who feel they have the best chance of executing the first strategies we learned to play the game (everyone starts with running boards).
6. This format supports the players who don't actively play the game anymore or are just starting; I understand that's exciting for the audience and the newcomers, but It's basically a slap in the face to those who are putting in the time (or have already) to achieve some level of mastery in this game.
SUMMARY:
Brackets are a cool way to get new players interested in coming to the Kong off (+1), They're also a great way to let the "older players"(+1) or players who are "rusty" (+1) still have a reason to come and compete in the events and they seem exciting for the audience (+1). However, at the end of the day, week, month, year, decade, etc., the community is focused on ultimate HIGH SCORE, which truly IS a representation of ones acquired skills on DK. There is way too much variance in the game to decide the annual world champion with single- or double-elimination coin tosses; a few hundred coin drops really do a great job to buffer against the RNG variance in DK.
I support the idea of a bracketed event that would appeal to the audience and the newer or rusty players as an accessory event; in my opinion it's simply a coin flip, with little to NO representation of the skills of the individual. I definitely like the bracketed concept and think we should have one, just not to determine the Champion of the Kong Off.
tl;dr
It simply can't be the main event, it would completely belittle the accomplishment that is pursuing a higher score on this game, "how high can you get?". I definitely like the brackets and think we should have them, just not to determine the Champion of the Kong Off.
Realistically, we have 4 days of coin drops, we could easily slide this in as an accessory event and really keep everyone happy (the audience, the rusty old men
and the new players)
EDIT: I would like to again thank Richie for his countless acts of self sacrifice, I do not want to sound "ungrateful" in any way, I absolutely realize the amount of work that goes into these events, and no amount of "thanks" could ever express how valuable Richie is to the DK community. I absolutely see the benefit of brackets from the "spectator" standpoint and would be all in favor of publicly doing the brackets to help grow the audience (ie. calling out names of competitors, posting bracket times, covering specific cabs to entertain the masses and doing commentary during the matches) but the "crowned King of KO4" shouldn't be decided by this format, in my opinion.
