Thanks to all the competitors who came to Evo 2005. This “props and oops” thread will shed a little light on some of the issues you all had. But first, some props!
MrWizard and s-kill for taking the reigns this year and handling the 6-months of planning before the event. There’s a ton of behind the scenes work to every Evo, and these guys did a fantastic job. Despite a few glictches, our experiment with the MLG went very well, and we hope to work more closely with them in the future.
EVO staff and volunteer judges once again worked long and hard to finish the tournaments on time. The staff gives up pretty much all their “fun” time during Evo to run brackets, setup game stations, fix A/V issues, and fight the dozens of other fires that crop up over the weekend. It’s a thankless job, but once again they did it extremely well. Thanks to all volunteer tournament judges for taking time out of your game-time to run tournament pools. An extra shout out goes to “Stephanie,” who ran CvS2 pools literally all day Friday, non-stop.
3s players for turning out in droves. The 3s tournament had 340 players, which is just insane. You guys really, really, really like Third Strike.
Duc Do for injecting life back into Marvel and proving that there’s more to that game than crack-induced Magneto rushdown. No props whatsoever for anyone who plays Spiral next year. Get off Duc’s nuts.
Kuni Funada for babysitting two dozen Japanese players.
Random White Guys NKI and DSP for making top 8 in ST.
Seth Killian for predicting Random White Guy domination in ST. It’s in the program, read it!
The players for (mostly) behaving like adults and just having a good time. No props for booing Halo players – you should know better. No props for the few bad apples that couldn’t resist breaking the law, thereby putting the whole event at risk (yes, The Law can shut us down over that kind of crap).
Ok, enough with the props. Here’s my personal dissection of Evo2k5 and some of the issues we encountered. Overall I think the event ran very smoothly. We finished 7 tournaments and 4 special events (2 exhibitions, 2 movies) on time, nobody died, and most players had a good time. Of course, there are always glitches – my job is to identify them and make sure that they don’t happen next year. So here they are, as I see them:
The friday morning line. Yeah, so here’s what happened with that. Our original plan was to have 800 copies of the schedule, so players could just walk in and take one. Then Friday morning, one of GVR’s copiers died, so we could only print around 20 copies and distribute them around the hall. We will fix this with a better pool system next year (more on this later). The video waiver also should have been handled online for pre-reggies.
Pool scheduling sucks. The problem with our current pool system is that it requires all 5 players to show up to a particular place at a particular time. A single late player can hold up a pool, which will hold up the whole schedule. This is why 3s had to be moved to one game. We did lots of advanced calculations before the event to determine how many TV’s we would need to finish 3s on time. Then two things happened: hella more 3s players showed up (the '05 tournament was 50% bigger than '04!!), and we underestimated the inefficiency of getting the pool players together. We actually had enough 3s stations to run all the pools 2/3 games, but we couldn’t find enough pool players to use all of them. The pool system we use in '06 will fix these issues.
These were the two major issues that we will address next year. There were lots of smaller issues, like the layout of the TVs, but those are obviously fixable. Thanks again for everyone that turned out for Evo '05.
