Here we go again! As I did with the May Melee, I set up a SAMP-based simulation for the Summer Showdown tournament to see which teams would land the various seeds. Even though OWL was kind enough to fill us in on tiebreaker procedures, they’re still a bit too much for me handle once you get past differential, so I’ll still be using a random number generator to determine positioning when teams are tied in wins and differential. At least we now know that the Vancouver Titans will only be credited with three of the four games they play.

Let’s start with the less interesting Asian bracket, which is slightly more spread out than it was last time:

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Shanghai is, unsurprisingly, still dominant here, though not quite as much as last time, when it nabbed the top seed 979 out of 1,000 times. New York looks like the clear #2 and London is still sitting on the bottom, while the other four teams are virtually interchangeable. In fact, London actually fares worse this time around, going from 504 bottom seeds in May to 520 in June. Sorry, Spitfire fans.

And here’s how things look in wacky North America!

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Where to start? How about with Atlanta, which looks to be to this tournament what Florida was to the last — a good but probably not great team that’s got a very easy three-game slate. The Reign play the LA Gladiators, who are decent, but also Toronto and Vancouver, who are … not. They’ve still got about a one in four chance of landing the top seed, which means that there are a lot of other teams with a shot at that honor.

The next two on that list are San Francisco and Philadelphia. They play each other in the final qualifying match, which means that one of those two powerhouses is guaranteed to finish no better than 2-1, meaning one of the two could drop to a #5 or lower seed. That’s probably why their spread reaches so far down the list — the Shock even fall all the way to the #13 seed on one simulation! — allowing teams like Dallas, Florida, and the Gladiators to sport not-impossible odds of landing the #1 seed.

Speaking of Dallas, how about the Fuel’s near-identical odds of landing anywhere between the #3 and #8 seed? And is that Boston with a #2 seed? Madness!

Things are probably going to be messy and chaotic this time around, and more unpredictable than it was for the May tournament, and I have to wonder if Blizzard planned it that way. I don’t know what goes into deciding the schedules for these tournaments, but since there’s no clear way to balance them, you have to hope they’re just going with whatever provides the best matches. That, or they really hate Houston for giving them a schedule that includes the Fusion, Gladiators, and Mayhem.