Thoughts on Genesis' "only one win per civ" rule?
Imo they should consider changing it for future events. Being able to win with each civ once is not ideal (both from a viewer and competitive POV), because it can make some games feel a bit irrelevant. To illustrate, an example: Say you have a best of 3 between top players in an RTS with 2 civs, one is OP and one very weak, with the genesis rules. You know both players will win with the OP civ, which makes every game that features it irrelevant. Ultimately only the weak civ mirror will decide the series, making it effectively a best of 1 and detracting from the viewers' emotional investment in the other games.
In this tournament it made wins with mongols and french feel less important. Series felt like they were decided mostly by players' performance with the weaker civs. And this is with an unsettled meta. With a settled meta, this effect will be amplified because people will know exactly what to abuse.
More fundamentally, in a competitive series players shouldn't be penalized this much for winning imo.
Maybe simply allowing each civ to be used once, win or loss, is better.
Pros:
Or maybe there's better alternatives?
Imo they should consider changing it for future events. Being able to win with each civ once is not ideal (both from a viewer and competitive POV), because it can make some games feel a bit irrelevant. To illustrate, an example: Say you have a best of 3 between top players in an RTS with 2 civs, one is OP and one very weak, with the genesis rules. You know both players will win with the OP civ, which makes every game that features it irrelevant. Ultimately only the weak civ mirror will decide the series, making it effectively a best of 1 and detracting from the viewers' emotional investment in the other games.
In this tournament it made wins with mongols and french feel less important. Series felt like they were decided mostly by players' performance with the weaker civs. And this is with an unsettled meta. With a settled meta, this effect will be amplified because people will know exactly what to abuse.
More fundamentally, in a competitive series players shouldn't be penalized this much for winning imo.
Maybe simply allowing each civ to be used once, win or loss, is better.
Pros:
- Doesn't have the problem described above
- More civ variety because players can't re-use civs in longer series
- Players will be more incentivized to practice a civ for each map, leading to more refined build orders
- Players will be "forced" to practice weaker civs that they may not want to play on ladder (more than is already the case with genesis rules)
- There will be more mirrors in a settled meta, when players tend to agree on which civ is best on which map
Or maybe there's better alternatives?
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