Let me sum up this argument real quick.
IF the top 8 results of this tournament were to be used for seeds in future tournaments, points for some sort of SF4 season, or money, then yeah, seeding would be important.
SINCE the only results that really matter in this tournament are 1st and 2nd, then seeding doesn’t matter so much.
Once we have an established point system or more prize money, the seeding isn’t as important.
Unfortunately, I have to throw my hat into this discussion and agree with Cool-Breeze on this one. While Street Fighter isn’t NEARLY as taxing as something like Tennis or basketball, you have to take into account the toll that playing tough matches takes on your mental and physical health.
Let’s create a very theoretical bracket, here. This has NOTHING to do with what happened at Devastation, just to clarify that immediately, before people start yelling at me about what happened at Devastation. This is pure imaginary bracketing here.
So let’s say Wong ends up in a bracket where he has to play Ed Ma, Combofiend, Arturo, Daigo, and Valle. But let’s say he makes it through. He gets to the winners finals. Then he faces John Choi. If Wong had 3 games, 3 rounds each matches with all five of those players before Choi, mofo’s gonna be tired. Sorry, that’s just the truth. And if Choi fought no one particularly good, he’ll be pretty relaxed and ready to go by the winners finals. It’s not balanced and not particularly fair.
Yeah, Justin still made it to the winners finals, but this IS Street Fighter, folks. Shit happens. A Combo gets missed, someone gets lucky… if you face against Ed Ma, Combofiend, Arturo, Valle, and Daigo, ONE of those people WILL take advantage of that mistake and kill you. Meanwhile, if Choi played no one of note, he could make 5 of those mistakes and still make it out. Surely you can’t expect someone to play 100% perfectly the entire tournament! That’s just inhuman. Wong makes mistakes just like anyone else. Expecting him to win against all 5 of those guys just because “he’s the best” doesn’t make it so that what he had to go through wasn’t unfair compared to what Choi had to go through. What happens throughout the tournament DOES have an effect on what happens late in the tournament.
Also, let’s approach this from the entertainment aspect. No one wants to see Roger Federer play Rafael Nadal at any point before the Finals if they are the two best players in tennis. You want the finals to be some kick-ass match-up. In fact, you want the top 8 of a major to have the greatest players you can. If 6 of the greatest players end up eliminating each other before the top 8, you lose entertainment value.
Now, the biggest problem obviously comes from the fact that seeding will jut be a matter of opinion. You have Triforce and Gootecks trying to seed, and it isn’t right to just go on the opinion of two fairly biased guys. THAT’S the biggest issue here, and that’s what makes what happened at Devastation not really a problem. The advantage of Tennis and NBA and what-not is that they DO have the ability to seed people. They have systems in place to allow for this.
So IF Street Fighter had such a rankings, OF COURSE Devastation would have seeded! Why wouldn’t they have? Even those arguing against seeding would most likely be 100% in favor of seeding people if a valid rankings existed. So there’s really no point in arguing it anymore.
tl;dr version:
If we had a legit ranking system, almost 99% of the people would be in favor of seeding. Without one, however, means Devastation did nothing wrong.
Major props to DJ Wheat and crew, I can’t thank them enough for what they did.
I wont be at evo.And i fixed it already lol.I just didnt feel like taking it with me
where are the results?! no results thread?
They’re still at the convention center breaking everything down. The results will be posted asap.
Physical health?
If someone misses a combo that could be nerves, didn’t get pussy last night, religious beliefs are challenged because he had a vision right before the match, etc. That’s all BS. If you play all nobodies who suck you might not warm up and then get your ass handed to you. Stop just making up irrelevant arguments.
Who cares when the big guns fight as long as they fight? If you are just spectating, you will see them play at some point so you win no matter what. If you are a player who can’t beat the top but just want to rank higher, tough shit. This happens all the time in team sports where one conference is just beating shit out of the other and the championship is a little league game - the other conference just needs to get better, that’s it.
I have had the pleasure of listening to djWHEAT’s shoutcasts since the haydays of Quake3. I just recently began listening to him again with his LO3 podcast. I, like he, was very underwhelmed by the current state of coverage on these big tournaments. What an amazing event this was! The games were great, and the coverage was great. We did not miss a single beat.
Thank you to Devastation crew, the players, and djWHEAT’s crew… 6,000+ online viewers!
ATTENTION: PERSON WHO THEFTED THE X-BOX 360 FROM THE CASUAL AREA
I just got confirmation from the security there they do have the person who stole the X-Box 360 from the casual table on video, and they’re working on matching it with the person who bought the badge. They told me I’ll know by the end of the week.
IF you know who did it, or if the person who did it reads this thread, this is your absolute ONLY chance to return it no questions asked. We’ll even consider it an honest mistake. (You thought it was your friends X-Box 360, for sure.)
Send me a PM if you did it, or you know who did it. They WILL get a “Get out of Jail Free” card this time.
NOTE: If Security gets back to us before someone does turn it in, we’ll just prosecute and let the jail time be your time to reflect on what you did.
who was that guy who brought his home PC set up?
i swear, that guy…
heh, my thoughts exactly…
Just want to say, much thanks to everybody that showed up!!
Was a busy weekend for me but a fun one as well. In the end, you can never please everybody, all you can do is try your best to please as many as possible, your always going to have a few people that dont see eye to eye.
That being said, without any “official” seeding methods and or ranking system which isnt based on region, the best you can do is try to be as random as possible and split people up.
We absolutely would have abided by a seeding/ranking system if one was actually in place which was accepted by the ENTIRE community and not just for a particular region, would have made things much easier as well.
Dr.Dogg put alot of time into that bracket, and was trying to space out the cali players from having to face each other, but in doing so it seems it created another problem which was cali players having to face some NY players and others earlier rather than fighting each other. either way it seems like it was a lose/lose situation as the alternative would have been more cali players facing each other earlier.
Seems to me the logical thing to do is try and create a system of ranking that the community as a whole can agree on to apply at future tournaments to avoid situations like this.
The past is the past, it happened already, lets work on the future to make sure it doesnt happen again.
I’d rather talk about how we can fix it for next year and future tournies than to keep beating up this same dead horse, poor guy.
wow, you dont know shit about playing at tournament. especially Majors that run for 12 hours straight, even local ranbats that run for 8 hours, players get tired and that affects their game. Even top players.
Video from djWHEAT of the finals and a bit of commentary:
http://www.kineda.com/justin-wong-narrowly-defeats-john-choi-at-devastation-2009/
the guest commentator on 3s was the best one
“BOO BOO TECKS” ftw
Not trying to be mean, here, but I have to ask: how many tourneys have you played in? How many really tough, tournament matches have you actually played where you played your heart out? Close matches can really be physically draining. I’ve had tons of tournament matches where I’ve felt light-headed afterwards and had to sit down, even after winning. Your adrenaline gets really crazy during those things, and you tense up a lot. It can be physically taxing. I dunno, maybe you wanna label me a pussy or something, but that shit really can build up, especially if you have match after match after match of stressful matches.
100% agreed. Shit like that happens all the time. But you can always see how the reaction goes after something like that. Remember when the Cavs made it to the NBA Finals to face the Spurs? NO ONE gave the Cavs any credit because their conference SUCKED BALLS, and it was that year that started all the talk about “maybe we should seed the entire league, not just conferences, 'cause that finals sucked.” So it’s not just US that think these things, it’s everyone. Yes, in the end, the conference should just get better, but my point is that the reaction from a lot of people IS we need “better seeding”. So It’s ridiculous to lambaste the people who want proper seeding. It’s a very common practice, and the generally accepted norm in elimination tournaments.
The event was great and the seeding was too, there are a few player who think they can work their way into the finals through seeding.
IMO if you attend and plan to win a tournament is because you are good enough to beat every body in the tournament and not to rely on other people to beat other players that you are AFRAID of.
I don’t know if this was the case at Devastation, but in my experience with tournaments, one advantage of having top level players face off at later stages is the number of sets played.
When we’re talking about the upper echelon of players, there’s a BIG difference between 2/3 (first round) and 4/7 (grand finals).
WTF are you talking about? NAPS has proven he’s arguably the #1 player in the US in T6:BR. He’s won two of the three US T6 Majors. The only one he didn’t win, Help Me won, who is one of the Top 3 players in Korea. Granted Kane wasn’t there but DJ Kor, Filthie Fucking Rich, Crow, Ricky O., and Suiken were there among others. How the hell is NAPS win not legit. STFU. Who else from the west coast was going to show up?
About the physical health thing…a tough match can be mentally and even a bit physically stressful for me but it’s never so stressful that I’m like winded or have to sit down or nothing. Maybe it’s just because I’ve been playing games all my life and even a really tough competitive game is still just “playing a game” for me. Like I don’t get hand cramps much even when I don’t exercise or anything like that. It’s like my body just knows that this is what I like to do and accommodates for that.
I have a tendency to get nervous in tournaments but even then I don’t really let that show in tournament. I’m usually always smiling or really friendly even right before the match starts. Deep down inside during big fights I’ll have the jitters though. :lol:
The only time I’m ever truly physically drained is when I don’t get enough sleep. The quickest way to make playing fighting games feel like a Decathalon is to not get enough sleep. That’s when you truly realize what mental and physical power you actually need to compete correctly. That’s why sometimes I’ll catch my Z’s before the tournament starts while everyone else is playing casuals. Getting your snooze on is important to making sure your body is ready for the tournament. I actually took the idea from watching old Evo Daigo videos where he would sleep anywhere he could on the Cal Poly campus. Picnic tables, sofas, chairs…if he could lay on it he would sleep on it. At first I thought he was just being lazy or anti-social but now I see how much resting your body can help before an event.
the brackets were fine… everyone who was in top 8 deserved it.
choi and ricky had to play each other right off the bat in top 8. They’re both from Norcal. both have a legendary status. they didn’t complain. though from what i understand they havent been playing as long as the top socal players, its clear their skill is on par.
yeah it sucks mike ross and justin had to play first thing, but if it wasnt mike ross, it’d be somebody else just as good, and people would still be mad.
plus everyone saw the match they wanted to see… edma vs justin… when that was over its not as if some random nobody snuck into the 2nd place spot…
Choi kinda beat down everyone in his way really bad (lets not forget the fact that it was justin himself who put choi into losers early on!), and put up an amazing fight vs. justin. 2-0, 2-2, then justin switches to abel last game and wins … i think thats pretty sick, personally. and i feel, aside from the international champions and daigo, choi is the only one to go toe to toe with justin (though id love to see gootecks and combofiend play justin again as well…)
I’m REALLY looking forward to evo this year…