The x6 is how many pieces you will get, so if you win you'll get one of each, if you come second you'll get x4 four pieces enough to equip the set

The rewards have (imo) got worse and worse for both events and tournaments, gear used to be legendary for winning but now it's epic and often not a good set, I've been lucky to win two arena tourneys lately and yes I go relentless epic gear but mainly useless, flat stats and out of 12 pieces only one had a speed substat

i know x6 is item count. I wrote about the stars. These are another tournament rewards:

i

1. place 6 star x6

2. place 5 star x6

Star counts different. If it looks like this you expect 6x 6 star items, not 4-6 random star items.

The rewards are really poor, i somehow managed to win the dragon tournament (i pumped all my hoarded energy in for speed gear)

I got useless gear, all vendored.

The gems for coming fourth are actually more useful.

For me top rewards are not worth the effort

This is false.  If you win you get ALL 6star artifacts.  Most tournaments are only 5star, but the picture always has accurately depicted the prize I was awarded.  Usually 1st is decent, 2nd hit or miss, 3rd crappy rare 5star, 4th gems.  I am the king of just missing 1st or getting 3rd/5th instead of 4th lol.

The gear rewards for most tournaments is crap. They really need to move to a system where it rewards with variable quantity rather than quality. A single 6* may be useful. 6 4* and even most 5* will never be. It's so bad that there are several tournaments where I deliberately aim to not get the top spots because I'd rather get 40-80 gems than the ~200k silver that the gear will likely represent.

I sometimes try and manipulate positions to get gems as well, invariably  i mess it up and get either nothing or the position i least want (5 star rare gear)

You must not be checking it right, the rewards ARE all either 6 star or 5 star (depending on the tournament, but you can see it in the picture). And they will ALWAYS be relentless and each of the items will be for a different slot

As others have said, the rewards are always what they say. The rolls might not be the best, but the gear will be 5-6 star relentless depending on where you finish. 

The problem is that the #2-4 rewards are garbage. I don't want janky 5* relentless gear. I *prefer* to get the lower-tier rewards, and that is super contradictory.

I would suggest one of two things - either replace the rewards for the non-1st place with 6* gear in lower quantities/rarities, or allow me to pick *any* reward from a lower tier than the one that i reached.

I came third in tag team today, i really would have preferred to have been ranked lower as third place is junk gear

Regardless of whether the rewards are generally good enough, it is a problem that places 2-4 are trash and fifth place etc actually has useful rewards.

Given that top spots in tournaments are the only way to get relentless gear and that it's not actually that game-breakingly great, making all the tournament gear rewards at least give potentially useful items seems reasonable, even if in numbers less than 4 at a time. Between the fact that only a handful of people will get any at all and that even most of the 6* gear will be trash due to poor luck with stats, I don't think we're in any danger of causing much harm to the game...