i've been on both sides of the fence re: being seeded at majors vs. being a random unseeded player
you know what? my view hasn't changed one bit. i still stand by all of the following:
1. regional seeding is an absolute must, by far the most important part of making a bracket. at seasons beatings 3, a friend of mine had 2 matches in guilty gear and they were against the very 2 people he drove with. this was the legendary marn rigged bracket, fyi...makes for an absolutely godawful experience and is so easily avoidable. luckily everyone seems to be on top of this nowadays!
2. the other top consideration in my view: NO FLOATING EXCEPT IN *EXTREMELY* RARE CIRCUMSTANCES!!! we just had a controversy with this at final round, where neo & fchamp convinced the person in charge to change their spots in the marvel semifinal bracket, and there have been other instances in recent memory such as powerup. i would say evo does this right: if the cannons & wiz don't personally recognize a top player and throw him in a death bracket, they will and have moved said player elsewhere if people point it out to them soon enough. the only time i would ever consider floating acceptable is for a case like this, where you're trying to do proper skill seeding and made a mistake. and even then, only BEFORE the tournament starts! after the tournament begins, just suck it up and deal with your bracket.
3. the eventual goal re: skill seeding should be an OBJECTIVE, statistically-based system (e.g. evo points). period. i have posted stories on here before of how (both intentionally and unintentionally) biased seeding can be when people just try to go by reputation. i truly believe that bad skill seeding is worse than no skill seeding at all (for at least the latter is honest), though good skill seeding would obviously be best. the problem is that we aren't at a point where we can use truly good seeding, though - if communities are serious about this, they will need to develop their own ranking-point system. and furthermore, even with such a system, you still can't half-ass the player distribution part of it; even evo has had issues with this in the past when using evo points, putting 4 seeded players in some pools and 1 or none in others.
really i think this is where a lot of the issues lie: people trying to do skill seeding without the knowledge to pull it off well. there aren't any good options here...either you create really unbalanced pools trying on your own, or you listen to top player opinions in making brackets and potentially screw people over in a different way (and get accused of rigging after the fact!). i think if nothing else, we at least need to agree on proper definitions of "Majors" & "Regionals" so we can objectively seed the top 2 players in each pool without too much trouble. until then, this isn't going to go away.
