A swiss system for qualification has been tried twice now, and while it might be good to use as the entire tournament (though I'm not convinced), it doesn't work well for qualifying into a main draw.
In an everyone-vs-everyone system, the distribution of wins/losses is generally a nice line. There are a few people with 1 win and 14 losses, all the way up to 15 wins and no losses.
With a swiss system, there is only one person at either end, and huge bunching of people in the middle. If you have 16 people in the qualifications, and want 8 in the knockout, there is almost nothing between players 7 to 10. The have all won the same number of matches, and then because the matchups are different, it can come down to if you won or lost your first match if you are at 7 rather than 10, in the knockout or out the knockout.
This is what happened at Hamburg last year, and I wasn't very satisfied. It worked better when we tried it again at Tropical Islands this year, but that was because we played more qualification matches compared to the number of people in the tournament. In the end, everyone playing everyone is the fairest way to do it, but if that can't happen, reducing the number of matches using a swiss system isn't helpful at all. Experimenting is good though, so if you can make it work, go for it!
by lukeburrage, in response to this post 2015-09-30 09:03:19