The following decision is from the TD team as a whole, as it reflects the overall format of this tournament and does not benefit any specific team. After realizing some issues with the original format, we have made an edit to how the latter end of the tour will operate.
Ark said:
The 6 remaining teams will face off in "weeks" as we know them from SPL for the second stage. Here, rather than total wins, winning weeks against other teams to accumulate points will matter. Winning a week is worth 2 points, drawing it is worth 1 point, and losing it will yield no points. The top 2 teams at the end of this phase will advance to the final, in which they will both play each other again.
The top
3 teams will now advance to the playoff stage, instead of the previous 2 teams. The 1 seed will get a bye as seeds 2 and 3 face off, to determine who faces seed 1 in the final.
While this may seem like an unfair advantage to grant the 1 seed, there are notable perks to this format. One of the main issues of the 2/6 advancing format was that there was a high chance one or more of the teams was already out by the final week. So, we'd get a situation where essentially lopsided stakes exist between teams because one can make the final and their opponent cannot. It would be entirely luck based to be paired with one of the already out teams and thus an undeserved advantage in that sense. Moreover, with just 2/6 advancing we would go straight from a weeks stage right into the very final round of the tournament, basically a 1 round playoff. This not only has less hype and an awkward progression, but also is exacerbated by the fact that the week leading up to finals can be an essentially illegitimate one via the lopsided stakes.
So, changing from 2/6 to 3/6 lets us address both of these primary issues. We greatly increase the odds of every team having a chance in the final week of stage 2, and allow for a 2 round playoff as we're used to in SPL instead of jumping right into the final. The 1 seed's advantage is also non-problematic in the sense that it is entirely deserved - it is solely based on the 5 week stage 2 that contains a higher degree of competition because of its selectivity and every team always having a fighting chance until the end. It is preferable to have the 1 seed getting an advantage it worked for than a random team getting an advantage because they're paired with the team that's already out.