Final Round 12 focus group discussion

Regional Matchmaking Atlantic South
21

It’s 10 more dollars.

If 10 more dollars is going to make or break your whole trip, you should have stayed home in the first place.

And, in reality, the numbers do need to shrink in some games. That would cut down on the ridiculously long tournaments, and leave time for more, smaller, more fierce tournaments.

This could be a good thing. Nobody really gets anything out of it when somebody just joins a tournament on a whim. The player who joined is still gonna get worked. The players that matter just have their time wasted on a meaningless match. The tournament in general is now more cluttered, and made longer… for what?

If we cut the 3S bracket in half, we wouldn’t have more randoms playing 3S, but maybe in the time we save, we could highlight other games that are currently sideshows.

Keits, if you had the choice of entering 3S, or using the time freed up by 3S being shorter, to run WHP on the big screen, what would you choose?

I don’t see why people are advocates for pot-fillers. They don’t serve a purpose, IMO. I’m not speaking of players that are bad, but are trying to get better. I believe they’ll pay an additional fee. Players that don’t care, and just join on a whim probably will not still enter… and I don’t think that’s a loss.

Especially as a tournament organizer… there’s no need to make the tournament unnecessarily long. The goal is to find the proper balance so that every match in the tournament is worthwhile. Wasted time isn’t good for anybody.

Everyone talks about numbers all the time. I don’t get it.

The only number that matters, as far as sponsors go (and as far as directors are concerned), is the total number of people through the door. That won’t change if the tournament entry fee goes up. Getting every tournament to get bigger isn’t the answer. Getting the overall number to get bigger is the answer, and that isn’t necessarily done by making every tournament larger. There’s a reason why Evo had to cut games this year, and pot-fillers taking up time in a bunch of games is one reason.

22

Id choose both. I enjoy playing 16 different games when i show up, and 10 more PER game would destroy my trip.
No reason i cant enter 3s and whatever else i want, until you price me out. shrinking the number of entries is ONLY good for time. its bad for breeding competition and helping new players get thier feet wet, etc.

i am by no means poor but im not wealthy either. its not even abot what i can afford. its about what is reasonable.

the only way id support higher game prices is if money was paid to top 8 instead of top 3.

23

all this would be doing is dilluting the skill level of any given tournament. if the intention is to get better, then I don’t think it would be a problem to raise the fees if the community asks for it.

24

You’re missing the point.

You can’t have both. If 3S has 4565460493588 entrants, how is there going to be time to run WHP on the big screen? It can’t happen.

If 3S has 40 entrants, well, now there’s time.

Better yet, nobody that really wants to play 3S will be unable to. Tournaments get announced weeks/months in advance. Anyone that cares, will care enough to plan to have $10 more available. Anybody that doesn’t really care, won’t.

The players that care will still be able to play 3S. The players that don’t care about 3S will have time to play whatever games they like on a grander scale.

It really sounds like win/win to me.

25

Which would lead to a situation where WHP has more entrants then 3s. Yeah, I hate 3S, but something is wrong with that picture. Some people will be unhappy, and that’s not a good thing.

The point of a major tourney isn’t to get better, it’s to have fun. Your locals are where you get better.

I don’t view pot-fillers as a bad thing. I mean, it’s not UNC and Tyler Hacksborough that draws people into the NCAA, it’s the Davidsons. The fact is, the appeal of the tourney is that even Joe Scrub gets the chance Justin Wong does, and there’s always the day he’ll lose to a scrub. You just hope it’s that day and you’re the scrub.

Another possible side effect- people save money to play the game they like, and dump the side games. Evo is about being exclusive, FRXI is about being inclusive. FRXI shouldn’t ape Evo in this regard- would be stupid.

26

sounds interesting…

27

i agree with this post. i start saving money for big tourneys like this months in advance nickels dimes quarters dollars they all add up. i save it up with the intention of paying out the ass for entry, room, food, fun, mm’s, etc. i do still budget but if im going to a national tourney im willing to shell the dough if

a. im having fun at it, which final round has been doing the past two times i been so of course i support it.

b. i want to enter games to test my skill.

its cool that you want to enter other tourneys and shit like that but if youre doing it just to pass time youre wasting your money (which you dont have a problem doin) and your wasting time. its already hard enough when they have to call multiple times for one player and that player probably doesnt even care for that game.

anyways as far as moving it downtown i just thought of something that could probably ruin it just a little. GA TRAFFIC!!! yeah you gonna have traffic everywhere but if someone is out trying to get some food real quick in between matches and they end up stuck in traffic they’re now screwed.

28

News flash. That day is never coming.

Using your own analogy, Davidson aren’t scrubs. They are heavily trained, highly motivated, serious players. If they had to pay $20 to get into the NCAA tournament, they’d do it.

Players that care, and want to try, will still play, and they will always have a chance to win, because they are always trying to get better.

Random guys that don’t care will never acquire the skills necessary to beat anybody that matters. They may not still play, and it’s really nobody’s loss.

These kinds of comments bother me. People say all sorts of stuff without understanding what goes into running a tournament. I doubt Larry will admit to this (he’s too nice), but I KNOW he’d prefer if the numbers were a little more under control so that there isn’t huge pressure to vacate the premises, and pressure to pay additional fees on the venue (that none of the players are going to help him with). Everyone wants more people to be at the venue. Everyone wants that.

Everyone doesn’t necessarily want every individual tournament to be unnecessarily long. It really serves no purpose; it helps no one, and it just goes for shits and giggles for the player involved. Meanwhile, everything runs late, people are late for work the next day, people have to leave before their real game starts, directors have to pay extra money for running over their time… all because Johnny P. Donuts thought “hey, 10 bucks? I can swing that!”.

As for the notion of WHP getting more entrants than Third… that’ll never happen. If it DOES, it’s because it’s supposed to. If 3S is relying on random Donuts to push the pot up, maybe those guys shouldn’t be playing. It’d be doing everyone a huge favor. Maybe GG would still be at Evo if 3S had 200 entrants instead of 400.

So 200 more people get to scrub out at a game they barely like, while an entire community now has to watch from the sideline? This is good for the community? How?

29

No, what REALLY matters is how many hotel rooms are sold.

Like or not, you NEED Johnny Donuts to fill up rooms and fatten up pots.

It just seems like you want to make some kind of FR into some kind of elitest event.
Which is totally counter-productive to promoting FR as a growing business.
Yeah, you can double the tournament entry fee and make half the players will drop and the tournament pot won’t be any worse.
But how are you gonna fill up those hotel rooms with only half the entrants?

30

Well I’m looking at all of my options right now! There are good points on both sides. I do not want to price people out of coming to future FR’s. It’s the players that make FR special. Not how big the pot can be. If I did raise the tournament fee to $20 for the top games like SF4, 3S, Tekken, Smash I would prolly have top 5 have pay out’s. Maybe even top 8 pay outs for the games that are $20. Does that sound better?

Also I want people to play in as many tournaments they can afford. Yes FR only comes around once a year and you should beable to save $10 extra over atleast 6 months in advance notice I usually give when I make the FR threads. But I also know that people have lives and bills and can’t or won’t spend mad money on a videogame tournament when bills have to be paid. I’m still not 100% out of the old hotel yet. I just wanted to throw some idea’s out there and get the peoples views.

For right now smash is the only game that will be $20 for sure. I might keep it at the same hotel and add a day to make FRXII a 3 day event. If I do that I will have to up the entry to $25 to pay for the extra day. So with the entry being $25 at the same place and maybe 3 possible 4 games at the most being $20 wouldn’t be as bad as $30-$35 and $20 per every game. That’s 50-$55 just to get a 2 day pass and enter one game VS paying 40-45 for 3 day entry and one game. Also if I stay I can run the smaller tournaments on friday and then everyone will get time on the big screen!

The tournaments on arcade cabinets don’t take up space/resources because we don’t have to use any tv’s/consoles, so those tournaments will run with the major console games. Now the only problem with going to 3 days in people getting vacation for FR to be intown on thursday and ready to play on friday. What do ya’ll think about my #2 suggestion about staying at the same hotel,but making it a 3 day event? Also we will have 2 projectors to play the finals next year. So we can start 2 finals if we need too, just to keep things rolling. I want to beable to run team tournaments also and 3day event will ensure that we have teams tournaments be an official part of frxii. Keep the feedback coming people!

I am sick of pimping the hotel rooms for that hotel, but it’s still the cheeapset ballroom price I can afford on my wage without sponsership. I don’t want to overprice myself when getting a venue and I don’t want to overprice people out of coming to any future FR’s! If less people show up because they don’t want to pay $20 per game, then I don’t make my money back! that’s a very bad thing! FR must pay for itself. It’s not about making every pot huge to draw more international players or top players attending FR imo. FR has and always be about the people having a venue to play and compete against others with equal or greater skill than them in all of the games they love to play. People say it will weed out the scrubs from playing and that’s good if you want to turn FR into an elitist tournament. FR is for everyone. The highly skilled and the noob. Nothing is set in stone yet.

I don’t want to take the, so called noob out of tournaments. They are what drive tournaments. I don’t know about you guy’s but I never heard of the 2 brothers that got 2nd and 4th in 3S this past year. I’m not calling them noob’s by any means. I’m just saying they came out of NOWHERE to get top 4 at a major! It’s that element of the tournament that I don’t want to get rid of. ALso I wonder how many people would enter older tournament games like A3, A2, ST, Kof98 ifthey all were $20 each? You wouldn’t have anyone enter A2 of KOF98 and prolly 8-10 would enter ST and A3. I don’t want that to happen.

Also I was watching the new games like MeltyBlood and AH at frxi and I was like wow! These games have a chance to be main stream just like GG is now. That’s why I give small communities a chance to showcase their games at FR. Games like Guilty Gear are main stream NOW, but I remember when Jeff ask me if he could run GGXX at FR8. He was telling me how it was a good game worthy of a national scene, but no one has open the door for them to showcase GG on a major level. I said sure man you can run GG here and the rest is history. I showed support for them and they have supported FR every year. So much that FR is the Granddaddy GG tournament in the nation for now and forever!

Making the price higher for every game would discourage people to enter a game and try the game on a tournament level if they aren’t really good at playing the game. Why throw money away is what most people will think about. The purpose of a tournament is to compete, but to also open peoples eyes to others games.

I know i’m going to try and learn how to play AH and GG now after watching some of those matches. The bigger the number of people enter the tournament = the hyper the crowd will be! The hype in the crowd watching all of the finals was too sick this past year. That was the best part of FRXI imo. Seeing and hearing the crowd reaction to the players playing.

Keep the suggestions coming people. I’ll read them all even though I maybe slow to respond. :lol: I don’t live online, but I do take small vacations on here! :lol:

31

The players will still come.

Everyone here plays something seriously enough to pay $20, once a year, to play.

They may not play everything seriously enough to warrant paying a higher fee, and that’s the point.

So the players do come out, but they don’t clog everything up, and make everything run late for no good reason.

32

Yes smaller turnouts would be easier to handle and less stress on me and my staff, but it wouldn’t be as fun imo. I enjoy trying to do 114 man bracket tournament in 8 hours! Because usually sign up’s take until 1pm-2:30pm to finish. During that time we are making brackets while people are coming up to us asking
"WHEN DOES THE TOURNAMENT START?"

When I finish this brackets that’s when sir!!! Then we get the

OH SORRY DUDE!!! :lol:

I enjoy every minute of it people. It’s a hassle, but it’s apart of the job. As long as people are happy then i’m happy. I’m amazed at how we got 16 tournaments done in two day 8 hours time slots!!! Has to be some kind of a record. :wink:

Well I have a question for you sir. If raising the price will keep people from coming to FRXII or atleast entering alot of games, how will that help FR grow? If i’m going to pitch FR to a company. Let’s say snk/playmore. How would raising the prices of every game help me to get sponsership form SNK/playmore if I price everyone out of playing.

The snk scene is already small and half of the entries are off caSUAL players of the game that are willing to throw down $5-$10 to play it in a major tournament setting. Raising the price would only hurt the turnout in the non mainstream games. So I would not even think about calling snk for sponsership because the #'s would be too low. I think snk has room to grow in the community, but I can’t push them into the $20 range Not calling anyone out just using snk/playmore as an example of a future sponser of FR.

I don’t know if people thought about how tournaments like FR are viewed by companies. Most companies would view FR as a very small comvention. 300-400 people at one tournament is huge for the tournament scene, but that ain’t shit to move a big company to pull out the check book and support FR. They can get better advertisment at a high school gym than FR when you really look at it from that angle.

The more people I can reach/have at FR will get companies attention IMO. #'s of entries/future consumers is all the companies care about imo. How many new customers can they make by sponsering FR. They don’t give a flying fuck about how big the pots are and what type of skilled players it will attract! They want to know how many people will see, eat, use, or buy their products if they sponser this tournament/convention! That’s the bottom line when it comes to getting sponsership for those that didn’t know! So make the amount of people attending FR less is not an option if FR is to grow in the future.

2nd question:

Who will help me recover the money I spend on FR if I price people out of coming? It’s not just saving for the games. It’s about getting a hotel room. Eatting and maybe going out on the town while your in the “A” if you don’t want to hang around a bunch of smelly nicca’s for 3 days. I do feel like I do give people PLENTY of time to save up for FR. The past 2 years I have given atleats 6 month notice for FR. But we all know the fighting game community is full of slackers and lazy people that do things at the last second.

Case and point with me pimping the hotel rooms. They didn’t get sold out until 1 1/2 weeks before FRXI. Usually people just wait until the last month to try and get shit together/plan to travel to any big tournament. You do have some good points havoc and don’t think i’m not listening to what you are posting. I’m also not picking on you either, but you do make the strongest arguments for raising the prices.

I do agree with your point that everyone should beable to save up enough to compete in everything in an annual tournament! If I give them atleast 6 months to prepare and save up the loot it shouldn’t be a problem IMO. With that said I will “NEVER” tell people how they should spend their hard earned money! I don’t pay their bills and they don’t have to show up and support FR anymore. A tournament is only a major because of the people attending make it a major. Other tournaments have tried the my way of the highway approach and have seen a dip in attendance and hype died down over the years! I don’t ever want the hype to die down for FR.

Everyone that attends FR makes FR a great event. Not just justin w. showing his great skills to everyone, but even the noob that just started playing in the tournament scene. Maybe next year it will drive him to train harder so he can try to do better. I just don’t want that same guy to not compete because he want to compete in multiple games and is being forced to choose what games he will enter due to pricing of games vs his skill level in those games. I’m enjoying the feedback because it shows people are already thinking about FRXII and have views they want to express to try and help FR grow in the future.

33

Larry, Final Round only comes around once a year. I’ll gladly pay the extra entry fee so you and your crew can get FR on the map even moreso as a major gaming event to play at. Any pictures of this area you wanted to rent out? I’m curious as to how much bigger it’ll be.

The new location proposal already has me excited for next year’s event. Goodluck and I’m with you on the idea 100%. I hope you get the sponsorship you need.

34

:wonder: Same goes here… dood!

35

Goood shit larry. you are quickly becoming one of my favorite people. inclusive is the way, and showcasing less popular games is amazing. our comunity is small enough as is. lets not let it shrink anymore.

hopefully you wont do any brackets by hand anymore, though. lets talk and get fr12 computerized!

36

For the record, this is not at all what I’m saying.

It’s one thing to weed out the players that don’t care. It’s another thing to weed out the players that care, but aren’t that great/well known yet. The players that don’t care, won’t play. The players that DO care, but aren’t that great, will definitely still play.

I can’t speak for those two guys, but I’m fairly certain that $20 wouldn’t price them out. YOU may not have heard of them, but they came into the tournament with the confidence and the knowledge that they would do well. It’s impossible to place that high without that. Those guys are not scrubs. They are not players that didn’t give a damn. They were highly motivated players with confidence and purpose, and I guarantee that raising tournament entry fees would not price them out. You would not lose that element of the tournament at all. All you would lose is the first 2-3 rounds that never produce any surprises from the type of player that would be priced out.

Obviously, you don’t want to raise the price on every game. The same way at WSOP, the smaller tournaments have lower buy-ins. Same deal. A2 won’t get entries above $5. 3S will.

Now this is my point.

If you have a 140 man 3S bracket, FR now runs much longer, and you are making it harder for players to stay for the entire event. You are making it less likely that every game gets to be on the big screen. It is harder for smaller games to get exposure. Whereas if 3S has 60 people, now FR is more compact. People don’t have to leave early. They get to see everything, and they get to see it all on the big screen. This would serve smaller games much better.

I don’t believe that’s necessarily true. People respond to great play. A greater number of players in the event doesn’t produce greater play. The best play is still going to come from the players that would spend $20, $30, $40 to enter. I don’t play 3S, GG, Tekken, or Marvel, but I know great play when I see it. Just because I don’t enter the Marvel tournament doesn’t mean I’m not gonna get hype when I see great play.

As long as the overall number of players at the venue is large, the entire crowd will react to exciting play.

37

Davidson lost to NC State this year. NC State lost to East Carolina. East Carolina would lose to a bunch of nuns. Upsets happen.

That said, after reading your refinements of the idea, and we both agree that “minor” games shouldn’t have high prices. Major games we both agreed should. I’d go for an incremental increase.

One idea- why not run this as an experiment. Take Marvel or 3S and run that at $30/entry. It can be one with one game, and see what the results are. That I wouldn’t mind doing to see if it changes peoples minds.

I thought you meant it to apply to every tourney. I’m still unconvinced. One solution would be to start major tournies earlier. For big money- I suggested the decathlon idea as well.

38

your clarification was very good havok.

i half agree.

but keep in mind zero of this money goes to FR… and drawing brackets next year will take 2 seconds if i have my way.

39

The Decathlon wouldn’t solve anything, because it would just be an extra event. That’s the last thing that we need for the purposes of getting things done more efficiently, so that more stuff can happen.

Also, there are very few players that can play so many games that they’d want to put up $150 to play.

40

How much does EVO charge for tournament entry fees?
$20, I think, right?
$20 is reasonable for something like Tekken and 3S that would get over 100 entrants. $30 is a bit much.