Evo2k4 Post Mortem

Evo Championship Series
41

Though emulation may be that ultimate pandora’s box that you guys would never have wanted to touch, consider keeping an eye on the state of Dreamcast emulation over the course of the next few months. Chankast has come a long way, and if it performs well enough and you can create a stable setup on those LAN-cafe type machines (as they are all identical), the only issue left will be getting enough appropriate input devices. While the issues of having console controllers popping out of their sockets and faulty wiring won’t really change, at the very least you won’t have to worry about memory card and console overheat issues. I’m hoping that the emulation isn’t going to be so faithful that it’ll go out of its way to duplicate those errors :slight_smile:

So really, this answer is not to not use the DC per say, just an alternative implementation :slight_smile:

(If people want to dice legality, then you should have no more issues than you normally have with running a console tourney, as you guys already have the requisite legal copies of the games to be played.)

42

i didn’t go last year but i read a problem was that people didn’t use deodorants.

I guess it was fixed this year cause I didn’t smell too much odor.

I smelled some stank ass breath though. So next year, brush your teeth, chew some gum

43

Spoony - Legality is of the highest concern for the tournaments… shilo/byoc not so much

PS2’s should replace everything that it can without so much concern. Their sockets dont fry, and there are way less problems with them.

I have not heard any issues with CVS2 ps2 vs DC, other than the images on ps2 looking sharper and the colors nicer, it still has roll cancelling… Marvel on the otherhand… since you can move everything else off DC, the problems it will face wont be such a burden…

Hosting AE on ps2 rather than CvS2 is IMO cooler yet more problematic as well. Even if you just tell them to only pick ST or HF characters, there may be several issues. Speed default is 2, so that needs to be done, and I dunno how many slowdowns DC has, but all of that is eliminated, so its probably not the same.
The new “standard” for 3s will be the ps2 version anyway, and its a way better alternative for the DC version or superguns.

Round robins would be better to be done in larger groups. When RR was announced, the chance at “more games” was certainly greater… doubled from going 0-2 to going 0-4, heh… I got my games in during casuals, but I would have liked a larger group to play, which would be more helpful for finding players, since theres at least less waiting to scrounge around the one last person to play with. Argh… with the delays and people running the brackets saying “come back in 30” I was the last person to play in both my brackets for ST and CvS2… man, next year, that speaker idea is a real good plan. Something to alert the people in the BYOC room or arcade…

Sponsors / Vendors -
More minigames are a nice idea, I didnt watch most of those trailers until I knew you were giving away prizes at the end.
And man, those BYOC booths had some nice stuff out there… too bad I didnt really care because I was there to play games not buy Morrigan plushies. The Counterstrike cutouts would have been better thrown into the corner, which was sectioned off for some strange reason.

BYOC room in general was real nice. Besides for some of the TVs sucking. It wasnt much of a matter of that converter in the back, its that they were flaking out. And the side with the windows had a wierd table setup.

Shilo Inns -
Everyone who didnt bring RF adapters got owned by their hotel TVs. The fancy shilo had a lock on their TV. There was too much fun to be had back there, that most people got DQed cause they slept off their hangovers. I wonder if things get prepared for better and things run smoothly, that you guys could at least wait till noon to start shit?

Gameage -
This years evo didnt have anything new for it, but for a first timer, I thought it was pretty swell. The new lineup will spruce things up a bit, though that #R part… eh… would have made THIS years evo a lot better… (or this years #R better if the BYOC room didnt close early). Id be happy to see some more on the SNK front if any of that picks up in the US. But thankfully thanks to consoles, it has a fighting chance. With regards to the state of fighting games around the US and other parts of the world (not that they have as many problems), you guys are keeping it interesting.
You know what you guys did right, you admit what you guys did wrong, so I have no secondthoughts about next years evo kicking ass.

(consoles rule!)

44

I had a longer post but it got deleted.

  1. The trailers sucked, and most of the people I was sitting with agreed. Play more combo videos instead, because those are awesome. WoW and EQ2 trailers just had people complaining and booing…and they were hella long. MGS3 was cool with most people though.

  2. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE split the finals up between 2d/3d. Jesus god almighty between evo 2k3 and 2k4 i’ve had to watch like 10 hours of tekken total and it’s the most boring shit ever. i wanted to cry after watching 5 hours of jin vs. jin and lame tekken tag pair play only to have the marvel tournament cut short. vf4 isn’t so bad because all the characters have their cool unlockable accessories. tekken sucks.

45

So what happend to all the Dreamcasts that were used at the tournament??? Would it be possible to sell them to people who would want them because my DC is fucked and I can’t find any other place to get one. If not, then it’s alright. thanks.

It was very nice that people were actually using showers throughout the whole weekend. It made the whole thing much better. You guys ran a good tournament. Maybe set up another projector if possible for cvs/3s because when they annouced that Japanese players were going to play and you weren’t in the general area… you’d be assed out and wouldn’t be able to see.

46

Besides console,which includes controls, comfortability and gameplay, and which plenty of people have complained about already, I was pretty disappointed with the bracketing. I’ll give 3 examples:

  1. Combofiend and Potter in the same pool. They place 1st and 2nd in A LOT of the tournaments they enter here in So Cal. That NEVER should’ve happened, and if it was random and it did, someone should’ve stepped up and changed it, just like they switched Paul Lee from Ricky’s bracket in 3S, if i’m not mistaken.

  2. Amir(a So Cal Top player, and 5th place at Evo 2k3), Josh Wong(an EC Top player and Captain of one the EC Teams) and LifetimeBoy (Seattle’s Best CvS2 player and Captain of Team Northwest) were in the same RR pool =\ All 3 of these players should’ve been seeded and placed in seperate brackets.

  3. Combofiend(So Cal’s Best CvS2 player) plays Josh Wong(See #2) in Winner’s 1st round of the Saturday Qualifiers, and after losing a controversial match, immediately plays LifeTimeBoy in his first match of Loser’s Bracket, where Combofiend loses a VERY controversial match, missing an EASY combo which costs him the match.

Maybe not enough seeds were given, but i think at least 4 players from each region should be seeded, in order to prevent lop-sided brackets.

47

The answer seems obvious: don’t let people use their own sticks. Just set up each dreamcast station with a pair of nice, working sticks and problem solved 100%.

The advantages even go beyond solving this crucial problem. It would save all the time spent setting up and configuring a new set of controllers everytime someone sits down to play. It would definately give the tourny a more serious, arcade-like feel (especially if they were mounted to a table/platform at arcade height.) Finally, it would save everyone the trouble of lugging around and looking out for their sticks.

Simply abandoning dreamcast, of course, is really NOT an option.

– tru3tn01
"down for the cause"

48

My favorite part was when they showed the Tekken 5 trailer after like 4 hours of Tekken matches.

49

A lot of people are talking about making sure not too many “good people” are in the same pools.

And in the past, people complained that SRK Staff is too “biased” towards certain players “they know”.

Note the huge conflict between these two issues.

So what should we do? Should we just pick players we “know” to be good and seed them apart from each other? What qualifications do we use to decide who is “good” and who isn’t? Because the tournmanet scene has dropped off significantly (the best players don’t play in tourneys a lot anymore), even using Apex won’t be as useful as it was in the past. What if some players think they are good? Would they be insulted that they aren’t getting “seeded”? Would people get mad at the SRK staff for “favoritism” again? If we have 32 pools, do we pick 32 players we consider “ranked”? 64 players? What if there are 70 really good players? Which poor guys do we “leave out” as “not quite the best”? Will they get offended?

And what about next year, when we have Tekken 5 or Guilty Gear Reload? We have no clue who is the best. How is it possible to seed players in those games?

As a result, the only really truly FAIR way to do it all is through random brackets. Keep in mind that I was part of the Black Bracket of Death in ST in Evo2k2. So believe me, I KNOW how it feels to have a shitty bracket. But C’est La Vie and I went through it anyhow and dealt with it. But of course, the complaint isn’t that people are mad that they themselves get PUT into brackets like this (it’s an honor to get to play against Daigo, for example… only a small handful of people will actually get to do it through the course of the tourney, so I’d be proud to be able to fight him and get slaughtered), the complaint seems more to be that people you wanna see in the Finals get put into the same bracket (like the MvC2 Pool of Death I had to oversee that included Randy Lew, Chikyuu, and Viscant) so they have to eliminate each other. But what is the proper way to solve this issue? When we go 100% random (except for territory), we are fair but end up creating “uneven pools”. The other way (by creating seeded players), we are being biased.

If someone can actually come out and offer a solution that bypasses BOTH of those problems, by all means, let’s do it. But that’s the thing: please, when you complain about something, try to see it from the other side and acknowledge the other problems that are being solved by the current method. We’re definitely doing the things we do for a REASON. We’re doing things because they solve their own problems. If you can find a newer solution that solves the new problems while STILL AVOIDING THE OLDER PROBLEMS, that’s gonna be the most helpful.

  • James
50

A little suggestion from me if it’s not too much trouble, would be to host a mini mock EVO before the actual EVO for the cali players (or whoever wants to show up from other regions :slight_smile: )to test the setups you have come up with. I mean I’m sure enough ppl would come to support this because they all love EVO and want it to run flawlessly. Basically this would just be to see whut glitches COULD come up so that you can remedy them before EVO time. I know there’s probably no way you can take care of every single problem that might come up but it gives you the opportunity to take care of some of them so you won’t have to deal with them later. Hope that helped.

Aside from that I would like to see some of the top players in their respective games try to become top players in other games (ala Ricky and Justin). I know Sanford’s picked up cvs2 a bit and combofiend can play hella games so yea maybe that would be interesting i dunno. Maybe even Choi vs Pyrolee dream match! lol:lol:

51

Bracket 6 (3rd Strike)

Adam Bulbulia Canada
John Sanchez TX, United States
Ricky Ortiz CA, United States (Evo2k3 finalist, MWC #2nd place)
Paul Lee CA, United States (MWC #3rd place, SBO qualifier)
Amir Amirsaleh CA, United States (SoCal top player, defeats Ricky in Evo 2k4)

Seems kinda silly to me.

Regardless, I hope next year all qualifiers next year are thrown back into winner’s bracket. That way, if 2 top players end up in a bracket, all they have to do is beat everyone else and they stay in winner’s…

52

People have suggested building your own stick set-up for the tournament stations. If you were able to use authentic DC pads for the internals, use switch-based sticks so you don’t mess with power, and wired the start button way on the back or something, you’d prolly have a pretty robust set-up. Even for a DC.

Of course the cost of buying all the pads, controls, and wood would add up. Nevermind the time spent soldering and building. You would be able to re-use them for other functions however.

People seem to forget you guys aren’t the IDGA. Like us you all have jobs, significant others, families, apartments, etc. I dunno how’d I’d build a dozen tournament stick set-ups, let alone where I’d store them. As you can see from the Thank You thread you do have a lot of support from the community however, and if you placed a call out early enough some portion would hopefully step-up and help. Thanks for trying every year. Good job, good luck.

53

Inkblot or ponder: why are not including SF2 AE(its way better then ST) for evo 2k5. please elaborate why?

54

damn :eek:

Running marvel on PS2 ?? What a joke that’d be.

All you’d hear is “Fuck I countered out and still died!”

55

jchensor, for SCII seeds, us SCII players had a Top Seed discussion thread made so the players could decide who was seeded.

http://www.soulcalibur.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=22679

And these seeds were separated pretty well in each pool.

There hasn’t been any complaints I’ve heard of that system yet. It’s just another idea to throw around :smiley:

56

I know you’re tired of hearing about Alpha 3, but I’m just wondering… lets say you wanted to put in A3, would it even be possible since you’re not gonna use super guns or arcades anymore ?

57

sure guy, you’re lucky i introduced dat shyt to “y’all” during my florida tourney.

i nearly threw out my voice, if i didn’t have my booze :evil:

58

The post mortem was a really good take on how things went down. All of my gripes were addressed and answered.

As for the Dreamcast stuff, I don’t think there is a solution for the problems that were experienced on DC. IMO you just have to live with it.

59

From running the CvS2 tourney pretty much all day, here are the things I’ve noticed:

1) We need more microphones
A lot of time was wasted hunting down shinJN for the mic. I must have went looking for him at least 15 times.

2) We need more speakers
I don’t know how plausible it would be to run wires down to the BYOC room, but some sort of communication with that room needs to be done. Speakers outside in the balcony area and in the arcade would be ideal also, but I’m pretty sure that isn’t realistic. At the very least, another pair of speakers at the opposite end of the hall would be nice. I got DQed from 3S even though I never left the hall because I never heard them call my name.

3) We need a LOT more volunteers
This is probably the most important one. Even with all the extra capital we have on hand from running a console tourney, we didn’t have enough labor to maximize the output from the extra machines. CvS2 could have easily been 2 out of 3 with the 6 machines available, but only 2 were running at any given time because inkblot was the only person running the semis. I think we should have an extra checkbox on the online sign up list asking if the signee is willing to help out or not. Volunteers would then get scheduled to help out in some way or form (usually running brackets) for 2-4 hours or so. They should get some kinda free entry/registration or evo t-shirts or something to help encourage people to get off their butts.

4) Configging controls takes a LONG time
There is no easy solution to this that I can think of. The only way to eliminate it completely would be to have pre-prepared sticks that everybody has to use, and I don’t like that scenario at all. The only thing I could do to remedy this was to have players that needed non-default configs to play all their matches in a row.

5) Non-slip pads are nice
A few japanese players put their sticks on some kinda sheet thingie to prevent their stick from sliding around. Seemed to work really well, and also eliminated the need of having to put velcro all over the bottom of your stick. I still prefer the floor, though. =P

60

Just wondering if it would have been possible to project on the big screen the pools and players that were needed…it might cut the need for more mics and speakers…just wondering if that would have been possible… i lost my voice brieflly from shouting people.