Proposal: Have higher seeds enter the tournament in later rounds

[Thrar]

With the KOTOW tournament going on right now, I've been wondering if a different seed type would make the tournament more encouraging for lower-ranked players to join, while at the same time eliminating some of the pointless games for high-ranked players.
To my knowledge, in KOTOW and most recent tournaments, seed 1 would get matched against seed 64, seed 2 against seed 63, and so forth. As a result, often more than half of the first-round matches are a foregone conclusion and the bottom 30% of players enter the tournament knowing they'll just be cannon fodder to be destroyed in the first round in a boring match for both players involved. For top players the coin is flipped, they have to go through 2-3 rounds of easy wins before getting an interesting game.

I'd like to propose a tournament format similar to sports competitions for teams at vastly differing levels, for example the English FA Cup. There, the lowest-ranked teams enter the tournament first, then mid-ranked teams get inserted a few rounds later, and finally the top-ranked teams come in. It's clear that a low-ranking team will never win the cup, but they will nonetheless get to play some good games rather than get thrown to the wolves right from the start.

For a tournament the size of KOTOW with about 64 participants, I could imagine something like this:
32 lowest seeds enter round 1 → 16 go through to round 2 and 16 next higher seeds enter → 16 go through to round 3 → 8 go through to round 4 and 8 next higher seeds enter → 8 go through to round 5 and 8 highest seeds enter → remaining rounds play out normally.

Within each round matchups could be seeded as they are now or they could be randomized like they often are in sports. Of course this could also be extended even further if it turns out that within the bottom 32 the skill gap is still too large, especially with first-vs-last non-random matchups.

I think this would make the tournament more accessible and more fun to play for people who are new to competitive play or who are intimidated by the prospect. The total number of games isn't even that different; there are more rounds but the rounds are smaller. It might even be interesting to cast some of the round 1-3 games between unknown but evenly matched people, gameplay will be full of mistakes but it will be encouraging for more casual players to view and learn from.

[Ardeshir]

A qualifier actually being a qualifier? Well I never

[robo]

The biggest problem with this type of system is that it increases the length of the tournament, as more rounds are needed.
This becomes more of a problem for Asia/Oceania players in particular but does affect all players as they need to be somewhat available to start their matches if they are needed, and any lower-seeded players who have a good run as they need to play more matches than their opponents.

I would suggest simply having the top 8 or 16 all join at once, instead of staggering it out over multiple rounds

[Thrar]

Makes sense, for a one-weekend bracket just two rounds of injecting higher players might work better for timing.

A longer tournament could perhaps be run staggered, with BO3 or even BO5 right from the start to give lower-ranked players a shot at the full tournament experience. We could have the lower 32 play the first weekend, those that remain play with the next 16 on the second weekend, and the top 16 join the tournament on the final weekend (in one or two waves).
Obviously that makes the tournament last longer, which to me is a good thing too. We'd get streaming content of close-fought matchups at different skill levels over 3 weeks and breakout storylines of an unknown player or two making a deep run.