iPads and a shared file make this a non-issue. That way everyone has up-to-date info immediately and it can even be shared with people online instead of having hundreds of guys asking “yo where am I in this shit, son?” which gets grating.
So when your running an 300 man AE tournament will everyone that’s running pools for you have a iPad or will you just run that one big bracket of your iPad.
Paper my friend paper.
I could’ve delt with the delays but I got DQ’d while I was sitting next to the speakers listening to every single match being called. This was losers bracket RIGHT after losing to Masta CJ round 1 of winners. My thoughts were"it’s okay, CJ’s a beast, I’ll make it up in losers bracket" So I sat there listening for 3 hours assuming that my match hadn’t been called since the tournament was running so slowly. None of my friends heard my name get called. When I finally went up to the bracket they said I’d been DQ’d against Gunblade. Now, I know Gunblade, why wouldn’t he come get me? So when I asked him about it he said that he didn’t even know that he beat anyone via DQ. This doesn’t make any sense. If you’re gonna DQ some one then his opponent needs to show up and wait for the match. If he wasn’t waiting to play me how could I have been late to the match? It makes me feel like the match wasn’t even called. DMBrandon tried to make up for it by giving me extra Pizza(Which I asked for) and Alex Strife promised me a refund. While I do respect this it doesn’t make up for the fact that I spent about $150 for the weekend(including gas money and hotel) for absolutely nothing. I did enter smash, but I really only came for Marvel. I know that this will never happen again since they’ve learned from their mistakes, but I just can’t see how this could even happen especially when I was being super diligent in listening for my matches.
/salt
Type it up on a PC in a spreadsheet or whatever that program is for brackets. You can drag & drop names from there. Unless someone hasn’t updated it for iPads which it should be. Drag & drop beats pen and paper.
For future reference a few points I would like to mention…
-match reporting was very poor for traditional fighting games.
-organization in general for trad games was very poor. Giving them benefit of the doubt I don’t think they were prepared for that many people.
-with the brackets the way they were, I felt it should of been important for the announcer to announce people who had byes. We had so many players sitting around not knowing when they had to play next, myself included but we will get to that
-THERE SHOULD HAVE BEEN AN ANNOUNCEMENT reading off every player in the trad games bracket. I was a victim of sitting in front of the stream station, waiting for my name to be called for 6 hours. Then a half assed announcement just to be set on a wild goose chase to find out i was never put in the bracket. This was the most unacceptable part for me. This situation for about 6 people could easily of been solved if someone just announced all of the players who are in the bracket. That we the situation could of been resolved early rather than making people hopeful they would be entered just to realize they never were in the bracket. Not to mention, I pre registered!. Unacceptable.
-I have all of the respect to Brandon and the entire host crew but the staff for trad fighting games was atrocious. They were all having the stress get to them in some situations and no one was asking for help when it was clearly obvious that they did. I’m calling out the staff for this event on the trad fighting game side. The staff for trad fighting games, with the acceptation to Mortal Kombat, was absolutely terrible. Everyone had their thumbs up their asses. Sure it got done but it could of gotten done much more effectively if they accepted that they needed more assistance given the situation.
For the staff reading this don’t try to defend yourself or make excuses I just hope it gets fixed and never happen again.
Unfortunately this was by far the worst run tournament that I have ever attended and every top player will agree with me.
I’m not mad.
I just want that shit to get fixed next year, because god fucking game, it was horrible.
Sent from my iPad2 using Tapatalk
Okay, I know this thread has gone waaaaaaaay off topic and should probably die, but here’s the thing:
I have an iPad. I have an app on my iPad, NoteTaker HD, that is designed for taking class notes. I’ve imported pdfs of bracket templates from playpool.com into this program. Using a stylus, I then can make a bracket for any tournament from scratch and then run that bracket to completion, just as I would using pencil and paper. I have done this many times at several tournaments and it works quite well. It even allows me to upload the bracket to the internet, allowing everybody to see the full results of the tournament.
However, I still prefer to use pencil and paper.
Why?
- All the reasons inkblot described above.
- Running more than one bracket on the iPad is too difficult to be worth doing. I have done it once, and it was extremely hard to keep track of everything, especially because you can only look at one bracket at a time, and people are bringing you results from three different tournaments.
- Can’t run large brackets with pools for the same reason as (2)
- I don’t know about you, but I personally don’t feel super-comfortable handing off my expensive iPad to somebody else to run the tournament if I need to go do something else, like sort out the money.
- Even if there was somebody I trust helping me run things, there is no entry barrier to using pen and paper.
- It’s technology. Sometimes things go wrong. I have had the app crash on me once before without saving the bracket, meaning I had to stop a tournament for 10 minutes while I re-entered the results from memory. Fortunately, this happened just after the first round, but if it had been later, I would have struggled to remember all the results.
Yes, using the iPad is cool and neat and handy and it can run a damn fine tournament. It’s also a great conversation piece, and using it to run a tournament makes me feel like I’m halfway to Minority Report technology. But when it comes to incredibly important events, where there’s a lot of money at stake and reputations are on the line, paper is the way to go. Always.
Thank you. ^^^^
Hey, I was one of the guys working the fighting game side of things at this event.
There isn’t really much I can add that hasn’t already been said in regards to what went wrong. We could have run this event better and we extend a sincere apology to the FGC. I hope you guys at least enjoyed Sunday, and I assure you that we learned a TON from the mistakes that were made at this event and how to handle the issues that can occur.
Although we are deeply involved with the Smash community, we have an equal love for the FGC(endured a 130 hour round trip via bus to attend EVO2k11), and it’s heartbreaking that the event ended up being messy. Shoutouts to everyone that came through and supported the event and tuned into the stream.
Two things: One, please don’t act like the tourney you ran this weekend was anything near what I ran this weekend. I’ve read your posts, and they’re condescending. We had over 5x the amount of people come to our tournament, and we had serious sponsors and other things to deal with. It’s rude. You’re comparing apples to really big super mutant apples, to which there should never be comparison.
We hit snags. But you were not there, and therefore, don’t really have a grasp of what went on.
Two, MLG runs electronically; they’re the biggest.
Joe, I’m pretty sure most of the people running SF4/Marvel didn’t expect to even think about brackets when they walked in the door to Apex. I know Phire (who had his face in the brackets almost the entire time) and Jon weren’t. Hell even I was only there to take photos but wound up helping out where I could. You have all right to be pissed, but let’s not shit on these guys too hard … they wanted it to go well just as much as anyone, and stepped in to try and make that happen.
Anyway, let’s take a detour from the drama (at least for one post
)…
Day 1 Photos (mostly Melee)
Day 2 Photos (mostly SF/Marvel)
Day 3 Photos (all the finals)
TL;DR - “Best Of Apex” Photos (a little bit of everything)
http://robertpaul.smugmug.com/Events/APEX-2012/Day-2/i-btHsv9H/1/L/IMG8432-L.jpg
http://robertpaul.smugmug.com/Events/APEX-2012/Day-2/i-DrJK2xw/0/L/IMG8302-L.jpg
http://robertpaul.smugmug.com/Events/APEX-2012/Day-2/i-mWXTCcZ/1/L/IMG8101-L.jpg
http://robertpaul.smugmug.com/Events/APEX-2012/Day-2/i-vfCKVqF/0/L/IMG8186-L.jpg
Man I love the pics. Dont let that account ever die
That post I just wrote was not in response to anything about Apex. It was in response to the guy who insisted that the iPad was the way to go for running brackets. My point at the beginning of that post was that this thread is no longer about Apex but about the question of pen and paper vs. iPad and/or computer. I didn’t think that there was a connection between that discussion and what happened at your event. I assure you that my long post about the negatives of using an iPad was written without any malice towards Apex whatsoever.
If you’re referring to my post on the last page, I should explain that I meant it in more of a lighthearted fashion. I know that your event was bigger, had more sponsors, had more people, and overall was on a bigger stage. It was never my intention to seriously compare Apex to my event. And you’re right, I wasn’t there and I don’t really know what went on, and anything I’ve read is just hearsay. I have tried to avoid saying anything (at least seriously) about your event because of this. I don’t want to start any feud, so I’ll leave the thread after this post.
I will say that even MLG doesn’t run its brackets very well, but that’s just my personal opinion, and explaining it is another post entirely.
I wish you the best of luck with your future events.
Sad please let this die.
It’s fine. Sorry I blew up a bit. Dealing with the people who I’ve let down at the event is one thing, but people who didn’t go are likely to take you seriously. No problems at all. In fact, I can’t wait to eventually get out there as a competitor and help the EC blow up MW marvel :3
Also, MLG doesn’t run brackets well? That’s the first I’ve ever heard that!
@ Del yeah; I had a lot of burned out rage but I really had to get that off my chest. After going to break and hearing more about eveyrthing that happened leading up the actual start time It was designed to just be a great tournament; great experience.
Regarding the original topic, the Apex team showed a lot of ambition, and clearly by this thread they know what went wrong and aren’t afraid to be honest with the players. An ambitious, smart team will improve and achieve greatness.
Now, one more point on the paper vs. software comparison for bracket running. Sorry to come back to this again, but IMO it’s an important point. Quick note: MLG tournaments are capped at 256, so in terms of bracket size, no, they aren’t the biggest.
As a TO, there are 100 things you need to worry about, then 100 more things that pop up on site to add to the list. So it’s important to simplify and bulletproof as many aspects of the tournament as you can. With a paper bracket, you have to worry about two things:
[LIST=1]
[]Someone loses the paper
[]Transcribing the results online
[/LIST]
If necessary #2 can be done after the event, so really there’s just one thing to worry about. Compare that to the potential issues brought up earlier in the thread:
[LIST=1]
[]Software bugs, OS crashes, etc.
[]iPad/laptop runs out of power
[]Getting enough equipment when running many brackets simultaneously
[]Equipment theft
[/LIST]
As a software developer by trade I have a strong pro-software bias, but IMO this is a no-brainer. A software solution is more flexible than paper and is awesome if you’re running a small bracket (or if you have the staff, time, and budget to scale things up). But for large tournaments, paper gets you 90% of the flexibility with 1% of the investment and hassle. For Evo we use software to generate the brackets, then PRINT them, hand them out on site, and transcribe results online after the fact. We went to this system after trying a software-based approach and running into the problems listed above.
We did that for Smash. We used tio, and printed pools for refs. 400 people ina small room was tough, but we got thought it. (Keep in mind, Smash runs round robin pools.)
There’s a lot of blame going around, with who should have been doing what, and stuff, but that’s not my style. My name is listed, so if you have a complaint, I’m trying to make it better.
Official numbers:
128 marvel, 9 DQs in winners, 4 in losers.
96 AE: 4 DQs in winners, 1 in losers
33 MK8, one DQ in winners, none in losers.
Some one said that we went DQ Happy. In fact, 7 of the 9 people in winners didn’t show up after pre-regging online.
Just thought I’d clear that up
Thank you again sir. Computer than paper.