I agree entirely and just noticed the same thing in my tournament where I was #2 out of 5 and got stuck playing #1 and 5 while the other group was #3 and 4. Agree that your proposed snaking makes way more sense, but don't know how to get the powers that be to figure that out.
Bottoms Up! Bracket-filling at Chess.com
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It just happened in round 2 in this tournament: https://www.chess.com/tournament/we-love-fishing-and-chess/pairings/2
It will do so every time the number_of_players modulus max_group_size = 1
Here, 2 advance, so it's not *that* bad for the #1 and #2 seeds.
Does anyone else notice that the bracket filling algoritm seems a little broken? Consider the following daily chess.com tournament with 7 players left with a max group size of 3. 1 advance.
Players:
1 2200
2 2000
3 1800
4 1600
5 1400
6 1200
7 1000
The brackets are filled at chess.com starting at the bottom with the last group and going up in a snake format (3 2 1 - 1 2 3 - 3 2 1 - 1 2 3 - etc):
so you get three groups
7 -> into group 3
6 -> into group 2
5 -> into group 1
4 -> into group 1
3 -> into group 2
2 -> into group 3
1 -> into group 3
that results in the following groups:
group 1: 4 5
group 2: 3 6
group 3: 1 2 7
So the 1 and 2 seeds have to play each other in the penultimate round. I've seen this devalue the quality matchup of the finals - and disadvantage the higher seeds in more than a few tournaments as they approach the last rounds.
It makes no sense to do it this way. Instead you would want to fill the brackets top down and snake back up. The groupings would be as follows:
group 1: 1 6 7
group 2: 2 5
group 3: 3 4
Of course, the chess.com system works ok if your players are divisible by max group size, but that is not a common occurance. (if 9 players, groups would be 1-6-7, 2-5-8, 3-4-9)