Portland Ranbats!

Regional Matchmaking Northwest
41

Okay I have read everything here, and this now where im at if im gonna run this:

Tournament Style: This will be a DOUBLE ELIMINATION STYLE TOURNAMENT. Thats it. Nothing More nothing less.

REASON BEING We need to get stronger in tournaments! Not stronger in round robins, not stronger in single elimination, not stronger in playing in small groups. NONE OF THAT. all that Matters in tournaments that all of us enter and care about are Double Elimination style tournaments.

POINT SYSTEM I havent nailed this down yet on which one i like most but there have been great ideas and i appreciate those that have come up with stuff. But to be real as i said down at VERSUS. this should not be a huge issue regardless of what we come up with This is mainly for keeping track of progress and seeing where you are at as players. People need not to take the point system to seriously even if they cant make it too a outing. Lets be real here. Lets say Matt “BBH” misses a tournament and for some reason i win and take over the number 1 spot in the ranbat. Does anybody seriously believe i am really #1? The answer is NO, anybody with 12 brain cells should figure that out, and it should be the same for any other thing that could come up like that. Points should only really matter in a ranbat if at the end, a Prize is givin, SEEING THAT THERE ISNT A PRIZE AT THE END nobody should take this point shit that serious.

Tournament Times This will be a Every 2 weeks Event. I hear everyone’s argument and here is where im at. If we cant focus ourselves 2-3 hours a tournament or 4-6 hours every month. How in the blue hell do we expect to get better? Seriously, this should not be that hard for ANYONE that is trying to get better. TO say your cant do that much for yourself or your community, then your really not ready to become a better player. Its that easy. Its not a bad thing to those who aren’t willing, but it is what is.

My Mission To make the people that want to get better, a opportunity to get better. If your not down to get better, then best of luck to you and I will welcome you with Open arms whenever you wanna step up your game.

To Chanchi/Nick Everything that i said above is my mission and what i want to due and what Portland NEEDS to due to get better. If this gets in the way of what you are trying to due, then by all means, let me know, and there will be no hard feelings at all and i can run it at my place and all i can do is HOPE people will follow through on the dedication. As much as i like and respect you Nick, there is some things i can’t follow you on. Like people being peer pressured into the ranbat. Peer pressure is something most these players have left back in High school. I personally will not be pressured into doing something i dont wanna do. Thats why i feel its open, If your in, your In, If not, catch you next time around. its no big deal. Any pressure that could be there for the people not participating would really be self inflicted in my eyes and not something that any of us can control without getting in the way of what the people that are trying to get better are trying to due.

Thanks for yalls time and get at me with more thoughts.

42

the only problem with this is if you took over the #1 spot that means you had to be in approximately the top 5 before “bbh” missed said tournament, so i WOULD consider you top 5 and i would consider “bbh” top 5 as well, i wouldn’t really consider anyone #1 until the end of the season, even if it was obvious.
my point is i dont think people would consider a player “Portland’s rank 1” or w/e just because they came in first in one of the ranbats(though some players have already established how good they are) i know it can be easy to take the numbers too seriously but part of the fun of ranbats is seeing how well you can do against the best our state/city has to offer, and like you(OMNE) said “This is mainly for keeping track of progress and seeing where you are at as players.”.
so i wouldn’t water the point system down TOO much(not saying you are, just voicing my opinion that points are important to an extent).

43

I think implementing the Konrad system solves that. Let’s say we do these as biweeklies with 3 months for a season. With the Konrad system you would only be taking your top 4 or 5 performances out of a possible 6 (again, ignoring 5th Thursdays). Meaning, someone could overtake BBH in your example temporarily but by the fifth week (or the sixth at the latest) everyone would have their required number of results even if they missed a tourney and the results would be less anomalous.

Regarding single-elim versus double-elim: We can do double if we get a second setup but I wouldn’t want to stick with that format with just the one tv. Single elimination may not be the standard here but it is a feasible format and would save us time while giving mostly reliable results; yes, there will be some anomalous results but these will go away in time as players get better and seedings gain consistency. But in regards to double elimination, it’s not so much the time factor (although that does weigh in to a degree since this is supposed to be a social night and we spent at least half watching other people play on Thursday) but it’s also the tedium. There’s a ton of downtime doing one setup, especially for double elim; one more setup would alleviate this and allow for better efficiency. I’m more than willing to bring my copy of SF4 and a MU with characters unlocked if it meant making things run that much smoother.

I had an idea for an Abridged Double Elimination format, or a 1.5 knockout format. In the case of 16 players, the first round is single elim and the rest of the players go into an 8 person double elim bracket. While this would be a compromise between the two knockout formats, it might be difficult to make this work with the points and seeding systems; if you do it with complete random seeding you get inconsistent results because of the first round knockouts, but if you seed then the point gap will get exponentially larger as the top players play the lower half first round every week.

For the 16 man example again, if we did ADE you could possibly seed the top 8 so they don’t have to play each other and then random the lower 8 into the rest of the slots.

My biggest concern right now is looking towards what we’re going to do when we start getting more than 16+ people each week. We had 15 this week with at least 3 players missing off the top of my head in Sam, Ross and Kurt. We need to have a setup that can grow with the scene. ADE could possibly do this, with x number of the top seeds bypassing the first round and the rest playing the single elim to fill in an 8 or 16 man bracket.

44

I’m coming pretty close to just flat out saying “no double elimination tournament every two weeks.”

  • It’s not the only way to make Portland better.

  • It is too time-consuming, tedious, and exhausting.

  • As proposed, it is going to run too late.

  • It is going to dominate the participants’ time at the Fight Night, and with downtime.

  • It doesn’t look like you’re going to be starting these things early, which already cuts some people out who have work the next day (ex. Joe is a good guy who wants to get better, but he’s gotta work super early on Friday mornings).

  • That other stations ends up becoming a partial barren wasteland, almost obligated to being SFIV as well.

  • If we want to expand the # of stations, I’ll need more willingness from others to bring systems themselves in this case.

  • But I can never guarantee more stations either because I have other customers who might want to play at those stations.

  • One of the problems with both Single and Double Elimination formats is you have to wait for a lot of people to get them started. The first round can and often does get stuck on this. You also should just cut people out for being late, no matter who they are.

45

A single elimination tournament shouldn’t take more than 2 hours, until our scene grows to far bigger than it is now, so starting at eight every night might be best (in any case, we really need a start time for this thing). A double elim every five weeks sounds far less strenuous and time consuming than any more than that, and we can have single elim for in between these times. The konrad system of dropping your worst two performances will help those who miss a week or get a “poor” seeding, and maintain balance. Basically, I think Chanchai’s proposal is best.

OMNE, I think you should go with whatever the community wants, if you really want to run this. If you want to run your own double elim more often, I think that’d be neat, but we need something less time consuming that we can all agree on for Versis.

46

I think you guys should trust Jetay, he is really passionate about trying to get you guys better, and for now just see how his ideas go and work out. Along the way you can see if you can change some stuff or tweak some things. I don’t know how many people you guys have that are playing at Versis, or are willing to enter tournaments. But a 16 man double elimination shouldn’t take that long.

If time constraints are an issue, you can always do 1 game matches until top 8.

47

Hey Frank,

I appreciate you weighing in on the discussion.

That said, part of the complications arise from a combination of:

  • venue (Versis, the store I run)
  • schedules (everyone has theirs)
  • guaranteed timeframe (Versis actually closes at 10pm, I just try to be accomodating to everyone when I can but I am a busy as hell guy like many others and sessions that go late definitely take a toll on me but I like seeing the community enjoy their time).

Just like I do have work priorities and wife priorities, Jetay has his priorities, and many others have theirs–and these do create some issues.

If Jetay is to run it, his priorities prevent him from coming to the store at an earlier time than say 8 or 8:30pm and he generally only comes to Versis when he’s sure that it’s gonna go super late.

While Jetay says he’s gotta come in at those times, there are others that gotta leave at 9:00pm so they can sleep before work at 5:00am, etc…

I have to remind everyone that being open super late is never promised but basically me working for free or trusting Mackinzie (volunteering when he can despite having his own priorities and work that should come first) to be there so we can keep the place open, run our electricity bill, etc…

And I’m not saying it only has to be at Versis, but right now that’s the place where people are consistently meeting (which I am glad for and I want Versis to keep being one of the places people can meet, but also why I have to worry about the format of the ranbats).

But while it’s happening during the Fight Nights, I do have conflicts of interest if the Ranbats become a drain to the Fight Nights themselves and what they were meant to be.

It is a different environment with different constraints from Preppy’s house or even other arcades and places like Arcade Infinity. And people go in and out at different times, and all for valid and different reasons.

So yeah… it’s complicated because it’s mid-week, there are capacity issues, conflicts of interests, my intention of being community building (which is different from competition building, but it’s not necessarily mutually exclusive), etc…

updated stuff…
So at least while the Ranbats are being done at Versis Fight Nights, I need certain amounts of flexibility for various reasons.

Right now we’re working under assumptions that Ranbats will happen during the Fight Nights because we do have people coming to Fight Night and people have found ways to work their schedules with it. It’s been a long time coming and it wasn’t easy for most people, but that’s why we have a nice situation now with Fight Night.

But I will also put it out there that there are various other options for the Ranbats. They can technically be held anywhere, but the Fight Nights seem to be able to reach the most active offline players in Portland right now.

If say another venue was found, I’d be happy to pitch it to everyone at the Fight Night and fighting game players in my store, at least if there wasn’t something malicious like having the Ranbats on Thursday Nights but somewhere else. But yeah, I’d be happy to advertise and push it.

Another option is to work out a deal for another time the Ranbats can happen at Versis, outside of the Fight Nights. I’m down with that too, but there are issues with weekends (unless it’s like 7pm or later on Sundays) because we need to serve other customers better for parties and groups on the weekends.

But I would be willing to work out some special discounted price or deal for a Ranbat Night.

Anyhow, it’s all up in the air, but again–it is a little complicated.

-Chanchai

48

Nice work by the organizers. I enjoyed the mini tourney we had.

I’ll just say that I personally can’t really concentrate on other games when playing in the ranbat. A special ranbat night would be good so it doesn’t take away from fight nights.

49

There are all the match vids except one between myself and Kwyjibo because the video was a complete blur, literally.

So anyways, I would like to give my view on both of the arguments at hand as far as tournaments and everything of the like.

Like I said, I’m in favor of both a double elimination and round robin style of thing.

Ya’ll know I’m a total scrub, and I admit that, I mean playing against CPU’s have taught me CPU mentality of never needing to block.

And I agree with OMNE, this isn’t about whos best in Portland, at the moment, we can pretty much agree on who portlands top players are, and probably the top player in Portland.

Anyways, a double elimination tournament pretty much means that two games will be played, and more if you win, but after two you are done.

If we went through round robin, if that meant 4 person/pool or 6 person/pool it would give more chances to play different people (even though we’ve all played one another sometime)

I’ll be having my gear on me to photograph events as well as record, and I’m sure Pasqual will have his camera and stuff on him too.

I think also everyone being able to collectively share knowledge after matches and everything would help too. I know I can use it.

I uploaded brackets from thursdays event to the VFC and I’ll also try to upload the Grand Grand Finals match between BBH and Alix. That was a sick 5th match!

50

Question how many ppl do you guys have for tournaments?

51

Our last tournament we had 15 people (13 at start, then 2 more showed up)

Top 16

http://virtuafightclub.ning.com/photo/photo/show?id=3714115%3APhoto%3A2145

Top 8

http://virtuafightclub.ning.com/photo/photo/show?id=3714115%3APhoto%3A2147

Grand Finals

http://virtuafightclub.ning.com/photo/photo/show?id=3714115%3APhoto%3A2149

We started around 9:30/10:00 and finished up around 1:00 am

52

Is 1am a typical ending time for Ranbat tournaments? I live about 2 hours away so I’m trying to figure out if this is going to work for me. I want to play against some real competition so bad, and I really suck so I’d really benefit from the community.

53

This was the first one, so no. Our window will be closer to 8:00 - 10:00 I believe. And you’ll never be required to enter the ranbat (or you can choose to bow out early if it ran late for some reason) so at the least you can come down and get matches in with us all.

So where are we guys? If nothing gets specified I’m just going to bring my laptop and run a single elimination tourney starting around 8 this week for a test run; if we come to a group decision before that, then we’ll go with the flow. But everybody cool with contingency single elim this Thursday in case we don’t?

54

Also, which system will be be playing on. I mainly want to know since I won’t be bringing my dual mod till I get the boards I need in.

55

I have no interest in single elimination.

56

It’ll probably be on what we ran last week, which was PS3 if my memory serves? I guess it’ll just depend on whichever is less active though.

Okay. If that’s your decision then I guess it’ll be Slash and myself running this for the foreseeable future with help from whoever feels like it. I know you said you’re able to host at your place but I don’t know what your limit for size is so if you end up wanting to run something there or anywhere else hit me on AIM or whatever, I’d like to see multiple venues (be they people’s houses, centers like Versis, or arcades for applicable games) doing things to help with the progression of the community.

Slash, thank you once again for handling the footage, and thanks to both you and Jetay for handling the brackets and the tourney in general this past week. For the coming week we’ll aim for an earlier start time and testing out the single elimination format. Shooting for sometime around 8 for signups/headcount/whatever so if you think you’ll be there a little later and would still like to be involved get in touch with me and we’ll get it set up. If this goes well we’ll look for the first or second Thursday in October as the beginning of the season although this first one may be short/augmented because of winter holidays and possible schedule conflicts but that’s all a bit in the future.

57

Okay, Im going to attempt to say something before this completely explodes.

I totally understand Jetay’s passion of getting Portland better, and I do like the double elim tournaments, but if we do DE tournaments all the time, then we’ll get good at tournament play.

Our best way to go forwards with this right now is wait till we get a dead set core group that want to be in the DE tournaments, because it would suck to have 17 people one week, then 13 the next, once we get the core what…14 people, we’ll be good.

Being up there till 1AM isn’t going to play nice with my school schedule, as well as anyone else who is in school, I’m sure, which is why I proposed the round robin with month end de tournaments for the top 16 people in point count for the RR portion. Jetay’s right, it doesn’t really matter on who the number one player is, because we already know who the top players are and aren’t, as well as whos up and coming.

I mean if you look at 16 person bracket in SE, thats 15 matches, call 2 minutes a match, 2 out of 3, assume all go to three matches thats 9 minutes, multiply that by 15 and you have 135 and add 6 for finals and that gives us 141 minutes which is just under 2 and a half hours.

The ONLY way we’re going to get better is to play against each other more, and the first thing we need to do is figure out how to accomplish that. The order of ways I’d rank that is…

Round Robin (3 matches per full set, all 3 matches will be played, so it doesn’t matter if you win the first two, play the last and one point per victory. Top 16 play in a DE tournament at the end of the month)

Swiss (BIZARRE tournament format that somehow works, unless you have an odd number of people, then its fucked)

Double Elimination (minimum of two matches are played throughout the whole tournament, so a min of 6 rounds)

Single Elimination (minimum of one match played so minimum of 3 rounds).

Another thing, that has nothing to do with ranbats, is I remember when I first came to Versis I got raped in VF5 after playing everyone once. If we did that in SF4 or any other fighter, it would definitely help players out who only get to play each other once or twice a week, or when you have instances of Scottys Rog and the 21 win streak or Alix’s 15 win streak (before picking Abel, or it would have been longer)

58

Personally, another reason I like quicker formats is you can possibly go straight to workshopping. Some topics that could have been workshopped out of Questions during the tournament:

  • Jetay’s “Stupid Shit You Should Not Be Doing With Ryu” Workshop.

  • BBH’S “Boxer vs. Sagat (Sagat slight edge)” Workshop

  • Panda’s “Make My Viper Even More Competitive” Workshop (but boy is it already getting more competitive).

I’m being a bit tongue in cheek here… But during competition good questions pop up, some players are much more ready to hear what others have to say on such topics, and if we had time for it–I think it’s a good opportunity to workshop.

Anyhow… we can discuss more of this in the Fight Night thread. But the prospects of workshops has always excited me.

The replay review session in VF5 a couple months back was great and spurred some great VF discussion when we were all trying to help Jetay out.

-Chanchai

P.S. My personal ideal format is still a RR spread over a number of weeeks, but the Single Elimination season was just a quick idea of an elimination format with a playoff schedule.

59

On which console to play on:

More of the players in the area have 360 arcade sticks now.

However, I consider Alix one of the top players and I would like to see him get in on these things and at the moment, he is only competitive on the PS3 pad. That said, PS3 seems to be what EVO is sticking with.

It’s honestly a hard call, but you know I’ll bring my PS3 TE Stick. TsunamiKen and Slash are likely to bring theirs as well. And Ross too :slight_smile:

But it should be discussed in full with everyone to see how they really feel about it. The only person I know that must play on a 360 pad is Derrick, and I don’t know if he will participate in the Ranbats, I doubt it at this point.

60

could we get a work shop for, “Get mackinzie to like this game dot com slash workshop”