The Active Gamers tourney (In Southern California) just confirmed for HDR only players, they just have to pay the Spectator Fee and the entrance fee.
http://forums.shoryuken.com/showthread.php?t=210556
So who’s going? Let’s get our attendance higher than the BlaHzblue folks!
I haven’t read through all of this thread, but if I understand correctly part of the question here is how to attract more players who visit these boards, but never attend offline tournaments, correct? I can’t speak for everyone, but personally as some one on the west coast that loves HDR but has never gone to an offline tournament, here’s some things that would greatly increase my odds of attending one:
**Having one in my area. ** The west coast is a large place, gas is expensive, and I’m not a big fan of driving for more then 2 hours (4 hours round trip) to get anywhere for any reason, let alone to play a video game with strangers. I just don’t see myself ever going to a tournament outside of Arizona unless I happened to be in the area for something anyway.
**Free or extremely cheap entry fee. ** I have absolutely no expectations to win a tournament, so large money prizes hold no draw for me. Steep entry fees, however, present a big barrier. I’m a very poor man who currently can’t even afford x-box live to play HDR online, and I’m not the only one, the economy sucks right now. An entry fee might not seem like a big deal to those of you who are well off or have hopes of winning prize money, but for the average Joe its a big deterrent. Personally I’m not sure I could see myself spending more then 5 dollars to enter a tournament.
Way to find tournaments easily. It seems I never even find out there was a tournament on the west coast until its already happened. It’d be really nice if there was a single website people could post their west coast tournaments on that I could check every now and again and see if theres one in my area. Even better if some one made one of those sites that you can register for and then they email you when there’s a tournament posted in your state or something.
You mean like this? 
I guess some easier way of at least filtering this info would help somewhat ( [x] Only show HD Remix tourneys – Sort by [1] date [2] distance), but the info is there and fairly centralized.
Hmm seems I just got schooled. You’d think I’d feel worse, and yet instead I’m just filled with pride for having been directly responded to by a player as great as Thelo.
But yeah, having a section just for HDR tournaments, especially one that was in the HDR area of the forum, would help tremendously both for ease of finding relevant tournaments and having people notice them.
Also, going back to my other comment, did a search on that tournament section for the “AZ” and not a single tournament came up, HDR or other wise. Lots and lots and CA tournaments, but even to drive to some where like bakers field CA would be a good 16 hour round trip for me. Theres no way you can expect anything but a very small very select group of the most hard core players to go those type of distances for tournaments.
What about here?
http://forums.shoryuken.com/forumdisplay.php?f=17
If you subscribe to the threads that most pertain to you, you can then check your “User CP” and your listed subscriptions will be highlighted anytime there’s a new post there. Getting hooked up to your region is a good place to start, IMHO.
I’ve been busy with school and finding a job, but now that I have my shit together I’ll talk to damdi, chris doyle, dsp, and nohoho sometime and see (IE:beg) if they’d be willing to cultivate a strong hdr following in NY. I definitely have seen the numbers peopel ARE interested…sometimes they just need a little nudge in the right direction.
Any tips on how to get local hdr scene going would be appreciated.
3 of my friends who have BARELY a passing casual interest in gaming at all enjoy the hell out of hdr when they come over and when we play I can see the competitive spirit drive them to not put the controller down. I believe many people are out there who do have an earnest interest in hdr but it’s their lack of confidence in excelling that kills what motivation they had to enjoy the game in the first place, however this can be overcome by gathering people who will then drive each other.
Yes money is essential to get a scene going but first and foremost IMO the collective competitive drive within a group of people is really what gets people into it, like sweetjv said the main reason people play sf4 is because everyone else is playing it.
Heh, found this video by Jeff Schaeffer, apparently he shares my sentiment:
[media=youtube]g8f6ejrHnxU[/media]
Quick question: What’s the WWL exactly? I keep seeing it mentioned in this thread.
Thanks in advance
This thread is dead, like HD Remix.
I dont know about you guys, but Sarah Palin gives me a boner. Oh, how embarrasing… this is a street fighter thingy. How 'bout those fireballs huh? Do I jump, Do I block? Crazy shit
Came across this thread just tonight-
Arizona doesn’t have a HD Remix scene as far as I know. SF4 rules supreme here w/the SRK crowd (and Sabre didn’t seem to like HDR much at all D:) and the AZ dustloop crowd thinks I’m crazy for liking this game.
I can barely afford to keep up with OOS Guilty Gear tournaments, but rest assured I will participate in any HD Remix tournament that happens to share an event with whatever Guilty Gear tournament I am able to attend.
MiloDC - If you want SF4 level complexity (combos, feints, setups, traps) without SF4’s god awful command interpreter, pick up Guilty Gear. If anything, it gives you more options than does SF4.
Guys I gotta say, I picked up Guilty Gear last night, and this game is AWESOME. Probably gonna be my next tournament game along with HDR.
And Im waiting for the day when someone says Im crazy for liking HDR.
Thelo’s Guilty Gear Review:
No decent netplay, 1/10
Look, HDR is a wonderful thing. When you don’t have massive numbers you need to maximize involvement from the people you have. GG is a great example, I don’t think GG is that large commercially, but amongst its fan base, its EXTREMELY well loved and the people who do play it are really dedicated.
I think HDR’s problem is that most people who play it, play it as a change of pace (from SF4), to have some nostalgic value (Oh SF2? AWESOME), or they play it because its their game of choice and they’re dedicated to it. The problem is 2 of these 3 categories don’t help grow the game competitively and the people we do have don’t seem all that interested in supporting the game in a visible way.
The last couple weeks have really been painful for me seeing the lack of participation in general. I mean without SB4 I think it’d be safe to say that for HDR, the last couple months have really been disasterous, overall players are down, tournament participation is down, and the level of involvment of the players we have is down significantly…
Of course much of this observation is based on a limited lens but I hope that things will turn around. I for one am still dedicated to the game and will do what I can to spark some interest… WWL Season 2 will be annouced soon for all you slackers who didn’t play in Season 1. :party:
For me, it would be Tina Fey AS Sarah Palin. But to me, Tina Fey is 100% win.
Haha. If you think SFIV had execution barriers, wait until you get to Guilty Gear.
Yeah, one advantage the GG community has is that it rather ACCEPTS its position as a cult thing. They would like GG to get bigger, but they kinda know it’s not gonna happen. Plus, the other thing is that Guilty Gear keeps evolving. You feel like there is a reason to learn the damn game because you’re pretty sure a new version will come out.
HDR is a dead end. If you learn HDR, that’s what you’re learning. There’ll never be anything really new about it. I mean, I think it’s probably more key to ST’s life span than we give it credit for that ST did, essentially, die at some point and made a COMEBACK. It made a comeback as an old game, and we knew it wasn’t gonna change. HDR is new, but at the same time… it’s not. AND we also know it’s never gonna change. So it doesn’t have the excitement of something new and it doesn’t have the solidity of something old.
If Capcom kept making patches for the game, I think HDR’s interest would remain. HDR is a tweak, and if it felt like the game would be tweaked more, it would give us a feeling like we had a reason to keep researching the game and figuring out what is good and bad, and more people would play it from that standpoint. The reason ST’s revival worked out is because someone (NKI) came out and said, “Here’s all the research” and gave everyone things to think about on an OLD game – told everyone exactly what to expect. So people saw it as “complete.” With HDR, I’m guessing a lot of people are thinking, “I could research this, but… why? Nothing’ll change.” I guess it’s just how people see old games vs. new games.
I keep thinking what Capcom should do is create a patch, and then, and I’m serious about this, release some useless gamer pics or themes or something and charge 10 bucks for them, and call them “HDR Patch Donation Themes.” Or release the background music from SFIV for each character as an alternate music option as individual tracks and charge, like, 2 bucks for each track, so people can kinda “choose” how much they’d donate to the patch. That way, I can buy one song and donate 2 bucks if I’m a broke college student, or donate 34 bucks for all 17 tracks if I’m a working professional with money to spend. Things like the recent World of Goo anniversary giveaway and other similar models (like the Radiohead “free” album) seem to work (I was talking to UltraDavid about this a couple of days ago). I know I’D buy the themes pack AND the music for 44 bucks if they were for donation. Yeah, a lot of people who play the game wouldn’t and would benefit from the patch free of charge and get all up in arms over why the music costs so much (if they don’t read that they arefor donations), but there’s enough dedicated people to HDR that I think you’d make a decent amount of change off the donation Themes and songs to help, at least, alleviate a lot of the costs of making a patch. I can almost guarantee that EVERYONE on this forum would buy the Donation Packs in a heartbeat if it meant a patch to tweak balance and fix really dumb bugs, especially the PS3 netcode problems.
And that way, I think more interest could be garnered into HDR. It’s set a precedent that things can be tweaked, so if it can be tweaked a bit more to make it MORE what it was supposed to be promised (like a balanced Akuma and more even match-ups for things like Cammy vs. Honda), I think HDR’s longevity improves drastically.
^^ I agree with so much of this… It makes me want to cry :sad:
I would definitely buy some useless pics or songs if it meant that HDR would be patched. I am very commited to this game, and that’s part of the reason why I’m stalling getting a 360. What happens if I get the 360, and something happens to the netcode that the game is no longer playable? Will Capcom support this game if the 360 version starts getting buggy or glitchy? I don’t think they would. Considering they didn’t support the PS3, why would they support the 360. But if there was a way to contribute towards a patch, by buying stuff (even though we really shouldn’t have to), I am definitely open to that idea.
Now, I have to say, I’m not sure what the difference is between paying 10 bucks for some stupid gamer pic or paying 25 bucks to join a league / tournament with prizes. I mean according to your model, if we understand that a vast majority of players are in theory ‘doners’ in a tournament because of skill limitations which will prevent them from making money, then in theory people should be signing up en masse for a league which has an entry fee, gives prizes and then donated proceeds to Capcom to get a patch released…
Wait a minute… do I smell business model? WWL Season 2 with entry fee and prizes? Who’s with me!?
Entering a tourney and donating a few to a patch are very different things. Donating to a patch is acceptable because you are getting 100% of the benefits: you are paying for the patch. And entry fee in certainly giving you what you pay for: entry into a tournament, but some people see it as paying to go 0-2. And a lot of people don’t think that’s worth their money.
Now, if you created a tourney that generated cash to give to Capcom, that’ll probably get a few more people willing to pay to enter. But, in the grand scheme of things, the amount of money you could get from such a tourney would be bordering on insignificant. What would you charge for the entry fee? 10 bucks? If we had 100 entrants, that’s a grand. That doesn’t even pay for a week of salary for one employee at Capcom.
The reason the model of donation gamer pics would be more viable is because it’s in the face of everyone who plays the game, even the people who have NO clue tournaments even exist. If you download the game patch, and a new option shows up on the menus, or a one-time message pops up on the game that says, “Hi, we at Capcom know we cannot charge for a patch, but if you would like to show your appreciation for the extra effort we have taken to balance this game further, fix bugs, and give you an overall better gameplay experience, please check out and purchase the few donation extras we’ve put up on the online store. Thanks! - Capcom,” everyone will see it and a few even in the non-tournament scene may feel compelled to donate.
But really, the point is virtually moot because this type of model will NEVER fly. You will never convince any of the brass at Capcom to even attempt this, 'cause it could end up being a HUGE financial disaster. I mean, they aren’t losing money right now, so there’s no reason for them to spend tons of money in HOPES people donate to continue not lose money. sigh