My Thoughts on Evo 2012

Evo Championship Series
42

For one I’d like to take a moment to say that this Evo was very hype, I couldn’t make Evo for years because of my schooling but I finally got a chance to come out and meet some cool people and play some ggs.

Here’s my thoughts on some things:

- Some people are still not hitting up the showers. In some areas in the ballroom and main hall it smelled like hot ass, I understand that it’s impossible to prevent these kinds of things but it was really that bad in some areas.

*- If you are scheduled for pools, be sure to show up at least 5 mins early and do NOT leave until you’re officially out. DO NOT LEAVE! *I had to help an Evo judge locate some people because they kept leaving after a match, and the KOF pool I was in started 30 mins overtime! (to be fair, Xian didn’t get finished with SF pools until 15 mins after KOF pool time so he had a good execuse)

  • C*aesars **hotels rooms were noted to have power plugs that didn’t work. *This wouldn’t be an issue if it was just one area, but my room had 4 power plugs that didn’t work all over the room! It was hell trying to hook up my PS3 and HD Monitor, and other people were saying their rooms were like this too! Not fun.

  • *One day the escalator stopped working upward. *Not fun having to climb two stories of steps, my legs felt like bricks when I reached the main hall.

  • Caesars internet is pretty sad. You have to pay $15 for 24hr bellow average connections, one day I waited like 10 mins just get a page to load. Just charging us in the first place is bullshit lol–I hate these fancy hotels nickel and diming the common man.

43

Isn’t the streams running of the hotel’s internet anyway? Couldn’t they have a bundle for all EVO participating rooms and the event if the internet is THAT shitty? I’m sure people have had to run mobile hotspots from their applicable phones.

44

No, EVO had their own wireless supplier or whatever it’s called.

45

I see haha. I guess I could give up internet for a weekend when I make it out there.

46

Yeah I arrived at my hotel on the 5th, one day before Evo and the first two days from there were ass.

I think Marvel had the most hyped Top 8. Then KOF.

47

So then they clearly weren’t the top 32 players at this point in time. The notion and idea of the best is one that, in any competition, is fluid and changes week to week, you are only as good as your last match or last competition. If you lose when the chips are down, at the highest stakes fighting game tournament on earth, then at this time, you simply weren’t as good as the competition. Its not a knock on anyone, its simply how it is. The “best” beats whoever is in front of them. You cannot take away from said accomplishment simply because of something out of their control. If those players you mentioned were in fact among the top 32, they would still be there. Thats why competitions are won on the playing field, not on paper.

I was a high school and college basketball player, in high school I bumped heads with the so called top point guard in my area. My ass he was. By games end everyone knew who the best player was when our game ended. He can say whatever he wants, I out played him, my team beat his, and my team has a trophy in our trophy case. Everything else is nonsense. Thats the essence of competition. What ifs don’t matter. Its who sacks up and does what needs to be done to win, advantages or not. A good player still has to capitalize on whatever tools they have at their disposal.

Therefore they are not among the top this year. Being the top player at a tournament that draws 20 top players, does not merit the same notoriety as being a top player in a tournament with 200 top players in the world. We would have liked to see them play sure, hardly grounds to change a tournament. This year they simply didn’t have enough. Thats why we have, next year.

No you wouldn’t. The better players would still win, there would still be inherent matchup issues that you are citing because they can’t pick every single character in the game, all this would do is cover up inherent flaws in their own games, resulting in a game designed around 1 vs 1 no longer giving you the best player, but the best, pair. SFIV is about the best individual fighter. Same with EVO relatively speaking to this game. If you want results for the best pair of players sure your suggestion would work fine. However that is not the inherent design of of what SFIV is about at EVO. That would require its own pool and own set up.

It is still getting outplayed. The Chicago Bulls last year lost to the Miami Heat in 5 games in the ECF. It was a dogshit matchup for Chicago but they were still outplayed because the other team came in with a better game plan and EXECUTED it better. Dhalsim may have the advantage, but if the Zangief player, has a sound plan and executes it better, he inherently is out playing said Dhalsim player and vice versa. Ultimately match ups on paper don’t mean jack. Its the person in control, games aren’t won on paper.

48

I really enjoy every year the Evo staff booting fat people out of the aisles. Its like, move your fat scrub ass with your spectator badge out of the isle before it kills someone. Some of the excuses were amazing too, one guy said “This is my culture!” and another told Keits “But my friends are nearby and I like them a lot.” Keits and the other staff of course said STFU and move. Which is funny as hell.

Seriously, show up earlier. And I thought it was really nice that they set up speakers and a projector in the back for the late arrivals. And people were still crawling over each other like newborn kittens to get close to the stage for no reason, does it really matter how close you are? I show up early to get a close seat yes, but I would never lay on the floor like a god damn child and get stepped on and have people’s asses in my face.

Please, also folks. Do not get up a hundred times during the day. Sit down and watch. I had to get up for one dude about 30 times alone. I finally asked why he was coming and going the entire day, and he said something like “My friends are outside, they dont have badges, I need to look out for them.” What? Are these friends of his children or dogs? I do not get it.

Also, one more thing while I am here. Do not sleep on the floor, sleep in your chair, if you are that tired, go back to your hotel room or whatever cardboard box you crawled out of. Do not talk about dumb shit during the matches either, I heard some ugly geekonerds talking about how corrupt Hollywood is. Did they not realize that grand finals of UMVC3 was going on?I was honestly shocked by the sheer number of people who had spectator badges, I thought you came to compete? Now Evo is turning into a in person “stream monster/I am so scrubby I am afraid to even play this game off the internet” event. Esports?

Overall, most people are really, really cool and have good manners. But for those scrubs who do not, it brings the experience for the rest of us down a notch. Round of applause for the staff of Evo again, they also have to put up with us to get the tournie running well. And yes, I know, tl;dr.

49

I moved this out of the IV boards and got curious how this went, but here’s 2 cents after skimming it:

Outside of exhibition, EVO has always been THE singles tournament to win. Always. Ever since we held this thing in hole in the wall arcades in the Bay Area and it was called the B-series. You want to claim to be the best in the world, you don’t rely on team members. You don’t rely on someone else covering bad match ups for you. You don’t rely on some weird format to protect you from having to perform. You don’t rely on seeding to pull you through.

You run through the landmine like everyone else and you out perform at every level. It’s straight Street Fighter: outplay the match up or you outplay the player. You don’t do that, you can’t do that, you need help doing that, you need someone else to take a hold of the stick to do that: fuck it, you didn’t earn being called the best in the world this year. Good luck next year. You need a team member to help you pull through the brackets, buy a plane ticket to SBO (an event I have a ton of respect for btw…so don’t take that wrong).

With the complaint floating around about match ups not being exciting enough, EVO is a competitive event first, entertainment resource a close…but still…second. If EVO starts bending and shaping things so you get to watch exciting matches over matches that should happen naturally through the bracket, it isn’t a competition at that point: It’s a high profile random stream session. If you wanted to see your favorite players in the top 8 and they didn’t make it, that’s how shit crumbles. For whatever reason, they weren’t prepared to survive the meat grinder.

This competition has worked well for about 15-ish years, with games with thousand head entries and every legit player on earth putting it on the line to take the top spot. I’m not sure how much more you realistically need from EVO to be able to crown someone best in the world for the moment (or before SBO). You can take it as a grain of salt utilizing whatever weird logic you want, but EVO is as live and world wide as it gets for competition.

50

I prefer 1on1 but AE should have been FT3 for top 8 and FT5 grand final

51

oh God no…

52

You realise a double elimination tournament only reliably ranks the top 2 players, right? Consider that most of the Asian killers weren’t seeded and it’s a pretty reasonable claim that top 32 did not really reflect the best 32 players in the tournament.

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What does being seeded have to do with being the best? If you’re the BEST 32 players at the tournament having a seed should mean absolutely nothing. The point of a tournament is to see who plays the best against who is put infront of them at that given day. That’s what it is. Now if you’re implying players got a free ride to top 32 then I’m just going to laugh over here.

54

Except for you apparently. There’s no reason to diss people who want to spectate. You’re going to talk shit because a competitor shows up with 4 of his family and friends? There were parents, brothers, sisters~ friends of friends. Wives and husbands who know shit about the game and yet are here to support people. In ANY tournament, the majority of the people there ARE going to be spectators. Any large tournament anyway. Evo is becoming a large Esport. Yes. Get over it. Eventually the venue will have to be even bigger, and more people are going to show up who quite frankly are not going to toss in money into a pot just to lose 0-2 when they play the game for fun, but still LOVE it enough to spend the money and time to travel. I spectated, lost out on two days of pay for it. I got to see friends from the UK I never get to see otherwise. Evo is more than just a tournament for some. It’s a place where people who LOVE the game, and love the genre can come together in a way they never can anymore. To live out the feeling of local arcade-style play, which for a HUGE majority of people, have never experienced before. For some it’s for the sweet merch and the feeling of being a part of something. Excuse you for not understanding the intentions of thousands upon thousands of living, breathing people.

55

You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. In any double elimination bracket the 3rd best player can end up having to face the best and 2nd best player long before top 3, and going out in a place that doesn’t reflect their skill. If that player happens not to be seeded while the best player is, the likelihood of this happening increases.

56

Disagree. The best players in a given time will move on, regardless of who matches up versus who and when. . Arguments can be made in any kind of competition that any system creates so called “flaws” in accurately ranking players and classifying them.

Regardless of when you play them the old adage is to get to the top you have to go through them, eventually. You can poke holes in a 7 game series, single elimination, triple elimination, any setup has inherent flaws built into it.

I can easily counter, had they handled their business in earlier rounds they never would BE in the losers bracket to begin with. Which goes back to my initial point. The best 32 players at this time, handled what they had to when they where faced by it. Who they played and when is out of their control, however it does not diminish what they have done. Otherwise every championship playoff we have on this planet may as well be scrapped. No system is perfect nor will it ever be.

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Rather than respond just read Noodie 5’s post above, said it way better than I could

58

jesus christ