The low IQ conversation is "Well the tournament says rookie, and X isnt a rookie because he's played for years, therefore...". The issue wasn't so much the strongest players in the tournament, just that many of the "top players" were allowed to group together and form "stacks" like Renaissance, Stoiki's own team and to a lesser extent Lycoris. There are legitimate rookies in the comp scene (and this tourney), however, there's no way to make a tournament specifically catering to them on an individual basis without purposefully moderating teams - not so much players - who are/aren't allowed to participate. This way, you can ensure that teams including players like Raime, Fluxxy, Lebrun and Vegi are not all on the same team when the rest playing field clearly doesn't come close to the same amount solidity. Some of those players should be playing in these kinds of tournaments, just not all together.
So, organisers should just scrap the "Rookie" label and stick to "Low" or "Low/Mid Tier", then monitor the teams forming if they care about a competitive experience for all participants.
Incoming essay:
Some have unintentionally alluded to the following problem that came about in this tournament, so I'll speak on it here.
Stoiki is free to correct me here, as this is my interpretation of the whole thing.
When he started organising this tournament, he explicitly stated his intention to assess every team on both an (1) individual and (2) relative basis. Stoiki was purposefully (1) not allowing certain individuals to play who he deemed too strong for the tournament altogether (typical for this type of tournament), and (2) relative to other teams who had signed up already, or prospective teams he personally knew were about to sign up, he was effectively creating an "skill range" in which participating teams had to fit. For example, if Stoiki assigned a 5 to Assassins (referential "average" team), then ,from what I understand, he was planning to allow teams 5±2 to play, meaning the skill gaps between teams was reduced. A disparity would (and did) still exist, which is a reality in all tournaments, but the gap between the best and worst team would be 4 units difference (3 vs 7) instead of say 8 (1 vs 9). This seemed like a good idea to me, especially considering the choke rate within Low-Mid tier teams meant the possibly for upsets was a real thing under this more balanced playing field. This is also the only way you can ensure true rookies have a chance to properly experience a competitive tourney instead of getting wiped out immediately 0-4 in the groupstage, as they also likely play alongside other rookies by no fault of their own.
So everything was all well and good until he essentially loosened the restrictions, adding BlueWinx to his own team, allowing the Renaissance team with multiple competent "Low-Mid Tiers", and effectively creating a top-heavy, predictable tournament with little room for upsets. Look at the Semi-Finals and try to tell me you didn't expect those exact four teams to be there.
The major issue is this: when Stoiki loosened the restrictions, this wasn't explicitly stated to all teams from my understanding. So, some teams didn't improve their rosters (or even know they could) despite other rosters adding better players, causing them to climb above the prior 5±2 threshold for a team. Weak teams no longer stood a chance of exiting groups or getting past the RO16 once this had occurred. Stoiki's team and Renaissance were both IMO well over that 7 threshold alone, and Lycoris probably edged it a bit.
If you don't agree, look at the number of 5-0s and 5-1s during this tournament from the groupstage. Quite a lot for a low skilled tournament where players typically struggle to close rounds properly, and end up winning 5-2/3 despite an otherwise dominant performance.
The tournament was run well, so good on Stoiki for that, but let's not pretend this was a "competitive" tournament for the majority of players when it was initially designed to be so. We already have good examples of similar Rookie tournaments that were far more interesting and competitive for all of the participants (see the entirety of EGS L2 S3).
Cringe post complete
