I actually recommend 3 player, 2 advance quite highly for a few reasons, all assuming the game works well in 3p compared to 4p:
-Reasonable game durations. 4 player seems to double the game duration compared to 3 player, which slows things down. Even with a higher portion of players eliminated per round a 3p 2q tournament will likely complete faster than a 4p 2q tournament with similar player size. For example a 60 player 3p 2q would be 9 rounds and a 4p 2q is only 6 rounds, but those 6 rounds would take longer since they are 4p.
-Only 1 player eliminated per table, per round meaning that a player getting skipped or reaching maximum game duration never negatively impacts the remaining players. 4 Player, 2 advance is a great structure in theory, but due to the way BGA multi elimination handles skips, it will always eject 1 extra player (always with youngest account) that did nothing wrong. Hopefully there a fix to this in a later update, at least an option on how to handle skips.
-Reasonable pace of player elimination, number of rounds compared to players for most game communities. 27 players takes quite a while to eliminate down to finals, but additional players don’t add too many rounds. For example, 1 extra round needed for each count, 40,60,90,135, 202.
-The table breakdown on the way to finals isn’t too bad (compared to 4p 3 qualified) It ideally goes 27,18,12,8 (2 skip), 6, 4 (1 skip), 3. All games have the same qualification (2 advance) unless there’s a really weird player count like 5 players instead of 6? 4p 3p will always have awkward semi-finals with 6 players remaining where 2 are skipped and the 4p game becomes only 2q order to make 4 for finals.
-Round duration gets shorter on average each round (compared to Swiss). This is obvious since timeout/skilled players keep getting eliminated. The slowest players are gone after 1-2 rounds. Stronger players near the end are usually online often and faster than average too.
4 player multi elimination with 2 qualified does have a really good purpose IMO, which is in the second stage of a group stage tournament with the first stage as Swiss. Group stage will always make a precise number of players for the second stage which makes perfect brackets with a power of 2 number of players (16,32,64).
Doing Swiss upfront is good for two things: making the brackets the perfect size and eliminating all the slow/inactive players that got skipped in the Swiss stage so they don’t ruin the multi elim portion. This should reduce the odds of skips or timeouts in Stage 2.
Just my personal opinion. I might be too fixated on the “getting ejected when another player is skipped “ issue for 4p 2q, but it is quite a fatal flaw that leads to feel bad moments for the wrongfully ejected players. If this issue were fixed or configurable then I would highly recommend 4p (3 min) 2q.
