Yesterday on a promotional stream for the AT, Fozzie was one of the guests and expressed a rather glaring misconception of how most double elimination brackets work in relation to the grand finals. He suggested that normally the team from the losers bracket would need to win two full series in the grand final in order to claim the victory, but this is not how other games like cs:go or dota handle things. The grand final is one single series with no benefit coming from the winners bracket other than having had to play fewer games, thus showing off fewer strats, to get there. In our finals we give the team from the winners bracket not only the benefit of having shown fewer comps, but they also go in one game up.
In previous years, this was an already heavy bias, but with the way the rules are set up this year, automatically banning any ships fielded in a match won, I think this warrants reconsidering. Especially since the expressed intent with the new rule is to have the finals run the full series for the entertainment value. Should the finals go the “full series” and a deciding “match 5”, the team from the losers bracket will have to face 20 auto bans plus the standard 3 (assuming they only ban ships from the pool of 20 they already can’t field themselves) compared to 10+3 for the team from the winners bracket, who can still potentially use one of the winning comps shown by the other team. This on top of the “1up” rule seems a bit excessive to me, which is why I would suggest the grand final be played as a straight bo5. In that situation both teams will have to bring something new to the final match and truly rewards diversity in the theorycrafting aspect, if that is what you are after.