Positives:
The scheduling was amazing. Things ran right on time for the most part and the level of planning/discipline had to be respected.
Seating, compared to 2010 which had none.
Water cups - tons of water to keep players hydrated.
Negatives/Requests
-Costume contests
-More seating on the final day
-Signs with schedules/itinerary for panels. I missed all of them because I didn’t hear or see anything about when they were.
-Rotation on pool judges. I could see that some of them were just beat up, worn out, exhausted etc.
-Lower volume on audience positioned speakers
-Line place holders for players at stations so they aren’t cramped by observers.Like those poles with the felt line that guards or organizes space (like in a movie theater or buffet line).
From a stream monster perspective, I want a lot more bracket visibility next time, especially at top 32. It was kind of pathetic that we had to resort to devoted internet fans making guesses to try to determine who was still in and who would play who.
One main complaint: There is absolutely no reason to have exhibitions take up time away from finals on the last day. Either show it on Friday/Saturday during pools or have it only on the secondary stream as long as you’re not gonna stop everything else for the sake of it.
I think online brackets is good. but at the venue itself, paper brackets are superior as far as running tournaments goes. they are very modular, and with properly trained ref’s are more efficient than people looking for labtops/flash drives.
Just a thought to throw out. I had attended a starcraft 2 final, and thought of how sound-proof booths for the players allowed for the audience to hear the commentators. Is this possible to be implemented for EVO?
I will not come to EVO if it turns into a god damn cosplay convention. I was disgusting by how many cosplayers were there. This is a god damn video game tournament. Quit trying to be an attention whore because your daddy didn’t love you enough. ****
then don’t go to evo, there is nothing you can’t do about. US law protect those people, they have the right to wear whatever they want. Unless they implement a dress code rule, which is hard to do. Unless they want to require a tie and at a t-shirt. lol
things that can improve.
double setup for stream like evo 2010.
I remember at the beginning, evo said Evo points only factor for seeding in the final evo bracket, but it looks like it’s the “only” factor. I heard story of 3 hawaii players that know each others play in the same pool.
Only American players can get points anyway. Some jp players go some point that’s because they travel to US. Players from other countries are not going to your tournaments to just get couple points.
Either eliminate the evo point system next year. or
NA shouldn’t have more than 4 tournaments that give out evo points.(EC-2, WC-2)
EU should have 2 evo point tounaments.
JP should have 2 evo point tounaments.
Korea 1
AU 1.
…
If that’s not possible. We shouldn’t use the point system. You call this event “world championship”, but your point system give American players the advantage.
i feel like the fee is kind of high, but i can’t say the fee is not reasonable because I don’t know if you guys are really making money or not. If you guys only make little or no money, then i think fee is fine.
if the payout is really only for top 3, that’s kind of suck. I don’t really care because i can’t make top 8 anyway. the payout can be top 8 or top16 for AE and mvc3.
i feel like the tournaments were running very late into the night(Friday and Saturday). Like almost 1am. i wish it can finish early like 10PM, so people can do other stuffs. This might be hard consider there were 1000+ enter mvc3 and AE. You can limit number of spots for each tournament. depends on the game. what will you guys do if there are over 5000 people enter AE next year?
Too many people in some area. you can’t even get out. again, hard to fix that.
How about this…just get back to basics.
Get back to what SRK/EVO/Tournaments were originally about…hype rivalry and games. The thing is that since the influx of new folk that it’s nearly impossible to please everyone. There will always be people complaining. So how about just going back to square one??
Games
Proper seeding
Hype/Rivalry
That’s it. Barebones tournament where evo/B tournaments came from. I understand you guys need sponsors and whatnot, but it seems like people around here are forgetting the origins. How about instead of Bang The Machine, play the intro/interview portion of the B5 dvd with the footage of the night before B5 where there was a fat shady K coming in on an RV bus going 90 mph. lol
Just to clarify, Evo seeds by tournament season points first, then by zipcode.
We have been doing this for about 10 years now, if you dont want to be in the same pool as your friends, you guys should all put down the same zip code when registering.
Pools should be seeded by region. I was judging a pool where there were like 5 people that travelled together in it. I think it should be seeded by region first then points.
The 16 man bracket was really fun to judge actually. things went really smooth except for when ski told me to send people up and then i ended up waiting almost a hour with my pool held up because of so many people on the stream. when i went up to the stream station to pull them back they were 3rd in line with a shitload of people behind them so i didn’t wanna make their wait not worth it. I do think that the event should be expanded to 4 days tho so that us volunteers have a chance to attend some of the other things going on like panels and stuff.
There was only 1 hiccup I had as a player. I was playing my first match and did a button check. After my buttons were set my wife was cheering me on. While my head was turned my opponent had swapped our controller ports around so that our sides matched. I didnt notice till after the match had started and my buttons were off. The rules state that you can forfeit the round and use the remainder of the round for a button check, however because we both were requesting it it just made more sense to restart the match. when we asked our pool’s (41) judge to let us restart the match he didn’t know what to do. Before i could ask him to just let us both forfeit a round (since it had just started) he took off for Tony (or Tom). He comes back and says that we either finish the match or we both forfeit the match. Sorry but that’s not only a bad call but that’s a dumb call. At worst, we both should have forfeited 1 round and been able to use them to correct our buttons. I don’t think he was aware of the rules, and I don’t think he correctly explained to Tony (or Tom) the situation. I understand the nice gesture about volunteering to be a judge but if they don’t know the rules, then it ends up doing more harm than good. As a judge, I didnt want to call another judge out in front of his pool that he was running, but as much common sense as this is I think that whoever selects judges needs to ensure that the judges actually know the rules they are enforcing. If the training on the day before is the first time they seen them then something is wrong. I’m not saying that the guy shouldn’t judge again because people make mistakes, and people learn from mistakes. But this was one that could have been prevented by just simply taking 10 minutes to read the rules.
Other than that I thought everything went really well. I could send people off to smoke or use the bathroom or whatever because i could give them an accurate time to be back. The only time people were waiting was when people were at the stream station. I still have a voice. We even had time to run casuals and money matches in between pools. Oh, and one more thing. I like how pools did a really good job to avoid double jeapordy early on. It was inevitable when you got to top 4 but i only had 4 people play each other twice and both “pairs” were in seperate pools that fought at the start and at the end of the pools.
soooo… after long wall o text i’ll just summarize
-top 10% get paid
-regional seeding
-dont change 16 man brackets
-dual set-ups on stage
-judges need to know rules… not just know of rules.
PS… Rio hotel sucked IMO. Also, shoutouts to the big dude helping the tournament runnin around askin us if we needed anything so much that it was almost annoying. That dude was cool.
Payouts wouldn’t be spread out more if the pot is smaller. Besides the way it is right now paying out only the top eight players works and in a sense a stretch when compared to many other events with larger payouts. If we were to pay out the top 10%, the winner of the actual tournament would get paid a lot less.
One way to “fix” that is to get more sponsorships and a significant increase on the entrance fee. This year’s entrance fee is still a deal considering you’re paying for all three days of the event.
Would it be possible to seed by the first X digits of the zip code or by city, rather than the whole five-digit zip code? It’s extremely common for people in the same city (even 5 minutes apart) to have different zip codes, and having to coordinate with your friends to all enter the same fake zip code just so you don’t have to play each other seems like an unnecessary burden on registrants.
That said, my comments:
Panels were good, though like an earlier poster I missed multiple panels that I was really interested in due to my pools schedule.
Could have used a lot more chairs both in the main ballroom as well as the panel room. Will be doubly important if Evo 2012 is even bigger.
THANK YOU for the water stations. That was amazing, and they were almost never empty, even at the end of the day.
I’m also going to agree with the people who said that Evo should be careful about staying a tournament first and not becoming a “con.” The developer panels were mostly enjoyable, but other full-blown anime-con-type events (like, say, the suggested cosplay contests) would feel extremely out of place at an event like Evo. On that same note, non-tournament content should be kept to optional side areas when possible, without forcing the entire audience to watch and holding up tournament play. Having not one, not two, but *three *separate gameplay exhibitions on Sunday (SC5, TTT2, 3SO) sort of dulled the hype a little bit between finals for a lot of people, I think. The combo videos and Balrog movie at least were short and sweet, and were relevant to most of the audience.
First off, thank you for yet another awesome Evo. This is my fourth year and it was probably my favorite. I know some people didn’t care for the booths or the random cosplayers, but I loved it! It was like having a small convention along with the tournament so there was always something to do if you didin’t want to watch certain matches. Also this year had the fastest pools I’ve ever seen. Having a designated time for the pools was a great idea.
My only real suggestion involves the distribution of the matches. I know there are no plans to produce another DVD, but it would be nice if Evo’s Youtube page could break the videos into playlists to make it easier to view the matches in the order that they were played in.
A little heads up next year before the tournament about which joystick companies will be selling sticks and which will not be would be appreciated. I flew out without a stick fully intent on buying a HRAP V3 when I got there. Surprised when I saw a Mad Catz booth but no Hori booth. Then I spotted Hori sticks over at Focus Fire and asked the dude if I could buy one. He then explained they could only raffle them/give them as prizes for mini tournaments because Mad Catz paid for exclusivity to be the only ones able to sell sticks at EVO. Felt like a Pepsi person who goes somewhere and finds out they only sell Coca-Cola.
Great evo guys, had a great time even though this was the first time I didn’t compete in a main event.
Need more screens in more areas of the conventions room. All the action was at the far end, which is why everyone was crowding in the aisles in front. Put (smaller) screens on the side walls so that people can see the top 8 or big screen matches from anywhere. This will solve a lot of the crowding/seating problems. Think of it like a sports bar. Is there just one big screen? No there are many many screens everywhere showing the same thing. Evo needs this.
Online brackets. People have a very hard time following the tournament structure. Anytime a match is shown on stream or on the big screen it should be super clear who the players are and where in the backet they are. Announcers need to do a better job with this as well.
Mobile app for evo. Please give me a mobile app for evo. I log in, it shows me where in the tournament I am, what time my games are, I can browse the schedule, watch the stream, etc. Iphone/droid/windows 7 (okay I put the last one in because thats what I have haha)
Update the top 8 bracket software. As a tournament veteran I had no problem understanding the top 8 structure. But I heard many confused questions around me. You could make the top 8 bracket stuff much clearer. “Who is Jwong fighting next???” should be obvious to the newbies. Don’t assume everyone understands that the top 8 has 4 people in winners, 4 in losers. This is NOT CLEAR to most people. Make a software bracket that makes it clear to your little sister who has never heard of evo who is playing. Think of the way basketball or poker brackets are clearly made in mass media, where they show a large bracket in software and then zoom in … even showing a “red path” to the grand finals. Need something like this.
Water stations were great. This was a very nice feature, thank you.
overall i would say this is the best pax i have ever been too! great jobs guys! but heres a few things
[LIST=1]
[]lets run the brackets the same way we did this year, next year. more vendors would be cool.
[]more chairs once the vendors like capcom packed up.
[]better schedule, list of movies being played, what times etc.
[]maybe even add a 24/7 video room, that just plays community videos, documentaries etc
[*]badges sent out before EVO similar to what other conventions do
[/LIST]
i am not interested in higher fees
i completely agree, but so did the tekken tag portion
i know this has nothing to do with evo per say but i completely agree, some dude was just raping everyone at SFxT and then i went over to KoF and it was the same thing.
this is an awesome idea. PAX -penny arcade expo- in seattle has one of these for iphone and android. and it makes your experience very smooth and organized.
See if you can employ some of the hotel security to be ushers and keep the aisles clear!
It was my fist Evo, I loved every minute of it! I didn’t have much in the terms of complaints other than my own performance. More chairs?
I agree that the entrance fee should be higher. It’s a steal at 10 and I feel we should reward a higher portion of the players. If making top 8 is considered important enough to be on its own day, they should be paid out for their efforts and successes.