SweetJohnnyCage: Yeah I was in Pool K, you were doing a great job, it was too bad you had to leave, because it got really tough to hear and quite a few guys got DQ’d. I agree with all of your suggestions as well.
Good call, Saikyo.
Having brackets posted online would be such a huge benefit instead of having 100+ people at each pool swarming a posterboard and trying to make sense of the illegible tiny writing. Registration deadline was 3 days before EVO, which is plenty of time to enter brackets into an online system like tonamento or something. If you need more time, bump up reg deadline to a week before EVO.
Then once people know where they stand in the bracket, pool handlers can divide the pool in half and organize the matches like “top half of bracket (1A) plays first, we’ll go deep into the winners and losers brackets for the top half, then everybody else in 1B come back in 3 hours” or something like that. That way not everybody has to wait around for hours and hours.
I dunno, it seems like a lot of these problems can be easily solved with a little advance planning but I’ve never organized a tourney so maybe there’s more to it than I think.
I certainly agree!!
Screen commentators well before the event. Don’t let anyone up on stage that hasn’t been screened. There’s no way that Bronson “He’s a scrub, he sucks, everyone sucks except for me and Rip and Mr. Naps, they are the stupidest people alive” Tran should’ve been allowed within 100 feet of a microphone CABLE, let alone a microphone during Tekken 6 pools. I would’ve applauded anyone who EWGF’d that nigga in real life. Seb was awesome though.
But this was a problem last year too during SC4 pools. Don’t let people on the stream that are just going to be douchebags when they get a mic like Bronson was. Better to hear Sherry stammer than what Bronson had to say. It’s time you start screening these people before they even get in the booth. Give them special badges, anyone without that badge doesn’t get near the booth. Simple as that.
Bronson could’ve just turned off the a ton of potential players off of Tekken based on his douchebaggery, because the commentators for games basically end up representing the games they are commentating on.
Unless I missed them, there were no post-event interviews with the winners this year. I liked that last year. It was interesting to hear from the winners of each event. Like when Ski interviewed Latif last year about how he could get so good playing in Saudi Arabia. Come on, that’s solid.
Maybe a little more space between matches. They just seemed to come at a rapid fire speed this year. I can understand with Pools. But beyond that, it could’ve slowed down. Especially Top 8. I could barely even recover from one match before the next match happened, and considering how hype the Top 8 was, that was almost sensory overload.
I think you guys should also take a look at the Tuhon tournament in Korea for examples on a solid set. For the World Championships, it looked…third rate. Get a little flash and glare. I could understand not doing dual monitor setups like Tuhon, since you have to switch between SD and HD setups, that would take more setup time. But at least put some flash on stage. Not anything that’s too distracting for the players (Pulsating lights and strobes are a no-no), but just something that makes it look less like you’re playing on an abandoned Hollywood set and more like this is the important event that it is.
Seriously guys, as far as issues with pools go… No need to have an automatic text sent to peoples phones, brackets posted online (this wouldn’t even solve much as it’d only show initial matchups, unless they were updated after every match, which would be a pain), or any of the other suggestions that would require tedious attention… All we need is dry erase boards on a stick that are large enough to legibly write the next ~2-8 names of people who will need to play in the next 5-10. All anyone will need to do is glance over at their pool area every 5-10 minutes to see their names, and the judges won’t have to put in much more effort physically, as holding a stick above your head really isn’t more strenuous than having to run around screaming peoples names over and over. Cheap, easy, effective.
A drunk tourney maybe? Over 21 yrs of age of course. Make it like a 3 shot minimum to enter. You lose a round, you gotta take another shot.
Brackets need to be updated electronically. Give all judges a walkie talkie to update results, and then those results can be updated online and on a projector screen so people can easily check their next matches and what station they are on without having to ask a bewildered judge.
Yeah I agree with the two guys here about the tekken commentators. I tuned in only for the finals and god damn those guys really blew. Totally biased and trying to prove themselves or some shit but fell short making them look like dicks. I don’t have much desire to play tekken but as one guy said here, those guys completely turned me away from the scene. This isn’t some local 20 man tournament, its fucking EVO. You can’t be pulling for your friend and taking sides, that shit doesn’t fly and is very unprofessional.
Huge +1!
You may be right about the momentary quality issues, but as far as the final match dropping out, they completely owned that one (from here):
-ud
There was a post interview that was done with Daigo, off stream for G4 after Super, but I think that was for the special on the 20th. But I do agree, that would have been cool to see. It would of had to spill into the other games though, the finals were really compacted and we got out of there pretty late without delays.
Still a very good idea though.
There was a post interview that was done with Daigo, off stream for G4 after Super, but I think that was for the special on the 20th. But I do agree, that would have been cool to see. It would of had to spill into the other games though, the finals were really compacted and we got out of there pretty late without delays.
Still a very good idea though.
How about having a computer run all the pools instead of a whiteboard that is prone to human error. Plus if you used a computer you could post the pool matchups to a monitor that everyone can see.
Yeah and that fat brown dude with the beard would always add some trivial facts about his life. Every sentence is about me, myself and I. “This guy called me fat.” “I shook this guys hand” “This guy is good, almost as good as me.”
I guess the SF fans can’t rally criticize though. Their Tekken finals still had better commentary than the SSF4 finals. Thanks for that, Sessler.
If I understand correctly, the bracket in EVO 2010 are generated by a computer program, and then each pool is printed for the judges.
It is the judge’s responsibility to call the players to play and update the bracket manually.
For EVO 2011, maybe we can have a web server backend that runs the bracket.
Then each judge can carry an ipad, with an optional dedicated iPad application or just the web browser to connect to the web backend to update the bracket.
Since the computer runs the bracket, it can easily lists all the coming matches in order with estimate time so player at least have an idea that his match won’t start in an hour so he can go take a leak or buy some snacks.
They can even check the bracket while they’re eating with an iphone or something.
Each player can also register their cell phone number and the web backend can text them 20 mins before their match are up.
Also, a real time bracket update can be a big draw for spectators.
Lastly, we can still have the program to print out a paper bracket in case wifi is down or other malfunction, so we can still do this the old fashion way.
I know this is all vaporware and might not be easy, but it seems like it might work.
I remember the night before NCR2 ponder posted a computer generated bracket online, so maybe some of these functionalities are already there.
Maybe damdai can donate some of this code from Tonamento to make this happen.
I believe that inkblot and ponder are programmers, so they might have a better idea of how feasible this is.
Just a thought.
Sorry but please no on the iPads, I don’t want to see that much money go to waste on a non-multitasking piece of steve jobs’ ego.
Better organized pool stations, waited forever for a battle and no where to sit.
I absolutely loved everything EXCEPT for the pools. Props to the bracket wranglers for the hard work but several pools experienced major fuck ups that cost everyone lots of time. Also worth mentioning that many judges were far too lenient on DQing players. Several people didn’t show up for hours after their scheduled match and still got to play. I find it unfair for me to wait 1:30 - 2 hours to play my match because some dude doesn’t want to show up to play me.
“Better organized pools” seems to be the biggest request so far. A few years ago EVO outgrew the single-bracket system that many tournaments and started to use the pool system. In 2010 we finally outgrew the current format and will need to switch to something different.
IMO, there was one great failure and one great success of the system used at EVO 2010. The success was that the semi-final pool was so small that all of the matches could be streamed. All of those matches were awesome. To many, they were the highlight of the entire weekend. We definitely want to keep this going in the future.
The failure, as many of you have alluded to, is that playing in your pool was not a great experience. Many of you had to wait hours in the same area, afraid to leave lest you be disqualified. Lots of you couldn’t hear your judges, or judges were too busy and trying to get through their pool that they were unresponsive or sometimes a bit rude. The root cause of all these problems is that the pools are just too big. Having only 16 pools let us create a small semi-final bracket, but put too much stress on the judges and players for those pools.
The solution we’re looking into now is to have at most 16 players per pool. This will force us to go to a 4 stage format. So instead of having:
16 Pools of ~128 players each (top 2 qualify)
1 Semi-Finals bracket (top 8 qualify)
1 Finals bracket.
We’ll have something like:
~128 Pools of 16 players each (top 2 qualify)
~16 Second Stage Pools of 16 players each (top 2 qualify)
1 Semi-Finals bracket (top 8 qualify)
1 Finals bracket.
The advantages of this system are pretty profound. Players will get to play all their matches in bunches. It doesn’t take long to run a 16-man pool, so you won’t have to sit around waiting for 100 other people to play to run your second match. Judges can be much more responsive to a 16 man tournament than a 128 man tournament, and disqualifications will happen immediately rather 2 or 3 hours into the tournament.
Thanks for all the helpful feedback. Keep it coming.
Wow Ponder, that idea sounds fantastic. A 16-man pool would make it so much easier and efficient.