Hey,
I took a few minutes to write down my thoughts on Evo2k4 from an organizer’s point of view. Here’s my list of some of the new things we tried to do, what went right, what went wrong, and what we might try to do for next year. If you have any thoughts on these issues, I’d love to hear from you (just followup in this thread).
Registration
This year we tried something new with registration. We used an account system on evo2k.com so people could log in at any time and change which tournaments they planned to sign up for. We also tried to build the brackets dynamically as signups were occuring. This let us tell you the exact time you were playing, so you wouldn’t have to wait around all day Friday.
What Went Right
The printouts telling people when and where to play seemed to work well. I’m not aware of any incidents of players getting lost from a bracket, which is a good thing.
What Went Wrong
Registration took WAY WAY too long. The line was up to 4 hours at one point. There are a few reasons for this. First of all, the printer provided by CalPoly could not be made to work with the Ethernet setup, which meant we could only have 1 computer running at a time. This doubled the registration time. Secondly, almost everyone showing up at the tournament either didn’t register online or wanted to change their games. The person who registered correctly online usually took about 20 seconds to process (2 clicks on the website and printer lag). Everyone else too over a minute to tweak their game preferences.
What To Do For Next Year
Registration at the event clearly doesn’t scale. In the future, we’ll probably do what other large conventions do and take registrations online, via credit-card or PayPal. Once you register, we’ll snail mail your your badge, registration information, and bracket assignments. If we accomplish all this, we’ll completely eliminate the registration process for people who care to do so.
Consoles
The reason we used consoles this year is really quite simple. The writing is on the wall: competitive fighting games of the future will EITHER move to console OR die. Upcoming games like GGXX #Reloaded and Capcom Fighting Jam will either have very very limited US arcade release or no release at all. By Evo2k7, none of the premier games in our lineup will have arcade releases state-side. By moving to console now, we can help iron out the bugs in our system for next year.
What Went Right
Consoles let us move to round-robin, which was a great thing. We also learned a lot about how a console tournament needs to be run, which will help a great deal for next year. Console tournament which were run on PS/2’s had very few issues and finished mostly on-time, with the exception of VF4 which started late.
The velcro system worked well for keeping stick from moving, although many people elected to sit on the floor.
Console are designed to drive an NTSC signal. This made capturing easy as pie. We got an awsome, crystal clear image on the recording equipment, which will make for a really slick DVD. This year’s DVD should be the best ever with regard to the capture quality.
What Went Wrong
Dreamcasts or horrible, horrible pieces of equipment to deal with. All SRK Dreamcasts (the ones with the blue tops) were prepped with the resistor-mod in an attempt to prevent the bluebox issues. Unfortunately, we still ran into many of these. I don’t think there’s a good solution to this problem. What you basically have is components made by 4 different vendors (Dreamcast, Convertor, P1, P2). All of those components are designed to be manufactured as cheaply as possible, and therefore contain the minimum spec’ed parts to get the job done. When you combine them all, there’s no hope in getting them to work with any amount of reliability.
Superguns are almost as bad as Dreamcasts. They’re sensitive pieces of equipment and people cannot bring their own joysticks. Future tournaments won’t use Superguns.
I remember reading someone complaining that consoles were horrible because people were missing their moves, giving several missed dive-kicks by KO in the finals as an example. I found this one hilarious, as (1) 3s was on a supergun, not a consle and (2) the joystick we gave to the japanese players for 3s was a cabinet setup ripped up and wired to the supergun. It was arcade perfect. Just shows that people will complain about anything.
The height of the tables with respect to the chairs could have been better. It would have been nice to have chairs about 4" higher, IMHO.
What To Do For Next Year
Don’t use Dreamcasts. Period. The cannot be made to run correctly.
If anyone has any suggestions on how to make better use of consoles or how we can improve the console setup for next year, please followup on this thread. Your input is very important. Please don’t responde with “use an arcade cabinet”. That is not an option we’re interested in pursing.
Brackets (RoundRobin + SemiFinals)
This year we tried a new system: round robin brackets moving into a semi-final
double elimination bracket.
What Went Right
Round robin brackets were a huge win in 2 ways. First, it let us schedule people’s matches at a specific time so they could play all their matches together. Secondly, it gave people and opportunity to play against more people then they would have in a double elimination bracket. I saw one poster complain that round robin sucked because he only got to play 3-4 matches for his $30. In a bracket system, you would have only gotten 2. Peace out. 
Many people have commented that their bracket was unbalanced or unfair in some way. With nearly 1000 people to fit into a bracket, it’s impossible to hand-tweak everything, especially when giving out people’s bracket assignments as they register. At any rate, the round robin bracket assignments are posted at http://www.evo2k.com/evoSoft/?root=results. If someone can find a bracket that’s significantly more broken than the rest, please point it out for me. I believe those brackets are near optimal.
What Went Wrong
We had some amount of trouble keeping the schedule. There are lots of reasons for this. Even though we gave people the exact time they should play, lots of people were still late. This holds up the bracket. Some games like CvS2 took so long to complete that it was pretty much impossible to stay on schedule. The hardware problems caused by Dreamcasts made this even more difficult (more on that later). Finally, even if everything was done to prefection, there’s no way to stay 100% on schedule using a bracket system. You can’t simply stop the 3:00 PM bracket at 3:50 PM to get ready for the 4:00 PM one. You have to finish it.
What To Do For Next Year
I’m currently brainstorming ideas on a new tournament format which would guarantee we could stay on-time and give people an opportunity to play more games. Round robin is a step in the right direction, IMHO, but we need a way to cut it off if it’s running over and a way to start the tournament even though some people might not be there. One such system (although probably not the one we’ll use) is one where everyone plays “arcade style” winner-stays for 2 hours and the 2 people with the most wins move onto the next round in the tournament. In that system, people who show up late simply don’t have as large of an opportunity to accumulate wins, and you can stop the bracket at any time. If you have ideas on this subject, please follow up in this thread.
Bring Your Own Console Hall
I only visited the BYOC room twice, but it seemed like players were having a lot of fun.
What Went Right
BYOC gave people something to do when they weren’t in the actual tournament. As far as I’ve heard, almost everyone had a good time there.
What Went Wrong
Nothing, AFAIK. If you think there was something wrong with the BYOC room, please reply to this thread with the specifics.
What To Do For Next Year
Obviously continue BYOC. What did people think of the exhibitors setup there? Do you want to see more? Less?
Tournament Finals
The finals this year were the same format we used last year. The Top-8 players in each bracket played on the bigscreen with a WWE style introduction. We added some extra stuff, too.
What Went Right
The intros went off well, again.
People seemed to really enjoy the video-game trailers we played between matches; especially those that didn’t make it to E3. We’ll definitely do that again next year.
Ode to the 2-Hit Combo. Nuff said.
What Went Wrong
We didn’t have pictures for some of the people being introduced, so they didn’t get an overlay on the bigscreen while making their walk to the cabinets.
The Soul Calibur 2 finals were staged, boring, and a complete letdown. Mick and RTD did that without consulting anyone on the SRK staff as to whether or not it would be a good idea (or even legal). We have a rule on the books which could be enforced to revoke their prize money, but it was written too vaguely to be implemented.
Marvel vs Capcom 2 finals were subdued compared to the other finals. I blame this mostly on the fact that the game hasn’t matured in over a year and everyone knew that no one had a shot to beat Justin.
What To Do For Next Year
Resolve the introduction problems. We need to take people’s pictures in advance to make sure we have them for the finals.
More mini-games! Paper/Scissors/Rock for prizes was fun. A lot of people seemed to enjoy 2 random people playing Tekken @ Evo2k3, but Tekken Bowl @ Evo2k4 didn’t go off as well. We need to invent some more, fun minigames that the crowd can participate in so everyone has fun.
Consider splitting the Finals up into a 3d section and a 2d section. I noticed many of the 2d games were bored during the 3d finals and vice versa. Grouping all the together makes it easier for people to watch only the finals they’re interested in and skip the rest.
Summary
Overall, I think this year’s Evolution was a great success. Only 2 large problems stand out in my mind:
First of all, Dreamcasts are a nightmare to deal with. There’s not much we can do about this aside from simply not using them. We also learned a lot about things you have to do differently when running a console tournament instead of an arcade one, and that should help make next year’s event all the better.
Secondly, Evo2k4 was basically a complete repeat of Evo2k3. No new games have come out. This one isn’t our fault. Some people have commented that the excitement level wasn’t as great as it was @ Evo2k3. This is the biggest reason, IMHO (plus the lack of innovation from the MvC2 front). I wholly expect this to be rectified in Evo2k5, which should feature an all new lineup of games like Tekken 5, GGXX #Reloaded, Capcom Fighting Jam, and maybe even Sammy vs Capcom (if they ever get around to writing it).
That’s about all i have. If you got this far, you have more stamina than most readers. 
Please post any comments you might have to this thread, and I’ll be sure to read them. Thanks once again to all the staff who worked hard to make Evo a success, and to the players who came out to support us!
