[KenWittlief]

people have raised this issue before. Maybe its time to drive a stake through the random match generator and make something better.

You are right, during the seeding matches every team SHOULD play against and/or with all of the other teams at least once. So why do we assign matches at random?

Why not take the number of teams at the event, arrange a sliding schedule so the teams at the oppositie ends slide towards each other during the seeding rounds, and then assign the teams to those slots at random.

That way you wont have all the high number rookie teams at one end (together) and the low number veteran teams at the other (allied together). Something like a football pool - every team gets a slot, then those team slots are assigned to the sliding schedule at random?

The only way to verify the random-ness of the current system would be to collect all the data from each regional and do a statistical analysis. When you flip coins sometimes heads does come up 5 times in a row - if you are that team then it will not feel random, but the regional as a whole should average out to a random distribution.

maybe that kind of randomness is not what we really want? Maybe we want something more like the playoff tiers, except your team is not eliminated when you lose.