-Major, major seconding for the white board idea. Have the next, say, four fights on the board; that’s the notice to get ‘on deck’, and go through them in order. It would reduce shouting from the judges, give players at least their two minutes given in the rules to respond, and there wouldn’t be any doubt if your name was called while you were distracted by the big screen. If the white boards were sizable enough to hold more than four matches, all the better; more time for people to see and respond. When a station is open, send the next pair of players to the station, wipe, and write up the next one at the end of the queue. Whoever isn’t there when the station is open DQ’ed, wipe and go to the next pair. This’d work best with two judges to a pool; one to consult the bracket and record, one in charge of whiteboard and player direction.
Use the area where the judges are standing behind the setups as a dedicated ‘on deck’. If your name’s on the whiteboard, come on back, otherwise, GTFO, no you can’t see the bracket.
Focus on the loser’s brackets! Every loser’s bracket game is one more person who is done and can get out of the way to go eat and wont be crowding the judge or the immediate play area. ‘Thinning the herd’ is the only strategy that makes sense for ease of controlling the flow and finishing early. I understand that doing all winners matches followed by all losers matches, back and forth, is too optimistic, but once the chaos hits, focusing on the left half of the bracket when you need to queue up a match is the way to go. This may just be a judge by judge thing, but it should be stressed IMHO.
-Do not allow ANY third matches until every first is determined, either by play or DQ. In my Super pool, I was put in loser’s bracket at about 5:15pm. As of 9:45pm, the match to determine whom I would be playing had not been settled yet. Again, maybe a judge by judge thing.
Can we get a couple of volunteer bouncers/enforcers/Evo thugs? We had a jackass on Friday who was dead set on getting into a fight. MrWiz finally got him thrown out, after over an hour of getting in people’s faces. Can judges kick someone out or call hotel security to have someone thrown out?
16 man pools would be quick, but harder to schedule. 32 is perfectly reasonable and easier to schedule.
for those who want to hear commentary for live matches, why not output the commentary audio to one of those shortrange fm broadcasters? that way, you can tell people who want to hear it to tune into a certain band with something that has fm.
Such a great idea. The pools were the only complaint I had about Evo. What also might help is some sort of screen where the judges are that lists what players need to be ‘on deck’ or will be up soon like the others are suggesting. Even just a large dry erase board would probably work. Also creating some dividers between the crowd and pool play area might help too. There wasn’t much room and the judges were also losing their voice from screaming “please step back!”
This. Find a way to let audience members that want to hear the commentary hear it. Watching games I know almost nothing about without commentary isn’t very exciting.
As a judge, I run down the bracket for that round, letting everyone know who they need to be play and pointing out the other player to them. You should as a player realize you’re queued. If you’re not there and show up late, it has to be on you to figure out who you’re playing. If you only run one round at a time and then DQ everyone who’s not there, the brackets run really smooth. Bending the brackets a tiny bit for someone that has checked in and has given you their number works, bending the brackets for someone that hasn’t checked in is where things get out of hand.
Cross-posting my own feedback from another thread:
If Evo insists on working with volunteers going forward, please see Preppy to understand how your judges should be working. He did things as perfectly as possible, from my point of view.
Other than that, I agree with the idea of working with smaller pools and also believe that this event has grown to the point of needing a 4th day. This can also open up the possibility of perhaps adding another official game or two. Seems to me that many people got here several days prior to Evo this year, may as well take advantage of it.
not sure if anyone said this. but i think the evo staff should go do some interviews of some of the OG legends that have left the scene. they can show it on the big screen. i saw on youtube of some evo and mike watson was interviewing tomo and i thought that was very interesting and they should go find more ppl to interview. it really displays the history of the fighting game community and shows respect to the OGs and what they have done
Great idea by Ponder; I agree with others that the pool experience was by far the low point of an otherwise amazing weekend. I actually think though that it might be best to go with the 32 player pools (as someone suggested), for the reasons mentioned. This should be very easy to manage -each set of 16 or 32 pools can be scheduled for 45 or 90 minute increment. The schedule could look something like this (with 32 player pools):
Pools 1-8: 10 AM to 11:30 AM
Pools 9-16: 11:30 AM to 1 PM
Pools 17-24: 1 PM to 2:30 PM
Pools 25-32: 2:30 PM to 4 PM
Pools 33-40: 4 PM to 5:30 PM
Pools 41-48: 5:30 PM to 7 PM
Pools 49-56: 7 PM to 8:30 PM
Pools 57-64: 8:30 PM to 10 PM
Etc, so you would know what time you needed to be ready to play.
I originally was thinking of something like a whiteboard too, but with just 16 or 32 person pools, they probably will not be necessary.
However, I would really like to support the idea of creating more space between the pool matches being played and the crowd. I was thinking perhaps that velvet ropes could be used to separate the pool match area from the pool waiting area. It would be easy to implement, and it would establish a nice psychological barrier that says “you don’t enter this area until it is time to play”. This would give those who are playing their matches some breathing room, but the crowd would still be right there behind the players.
I think more numerous smaller pools is a great idea, but my main concern is kind of based on my experiences with Evo2k4. CvS2 had a lot of smaller pools (5 people per pool I believe) where you played round robin and the top 2 people advanced. Instead of having an AM and PM group, you instead had groups stacked back to back all day long.
My pool was scheduled to play at 8:00 PM, so I got prepped and ready to play, showed up on time, and was told they were delayed. My match didn’t get to play until after midnight, thats a 4 hour delay. Needless to say I was pretty drained by then.
Basically, the scary part about stacking up smaller pools back to back is that if one pool lags, it pushes back every pool for the rest of the day in kind of a ripple effect. You have to make sure to only book judges who can handle their brackets on time and get the matches done and who know their stuff. I know it’s really hard because it’s volunteer based, but really it should be stressed that only experienced people should be the ones running these smaller tighter brackets. If you get 1/2 the volunteers who know what they’re doing and give them twice as many stations to work with, you’ll get much better results I think, and for other people who want to volunteer but who aren’t quite as experienced should be sidekicking alongside somebody more experienced to help out (finding players, calling names, rules disputes, watching the brackets for a minute so the judge can take a bathroom break/get a drink) so they can learn and be prepared for the next year, making things progressively easier.
Also, I think it needs to be said that with smaller pools, there should be no excuses for not being around for your match time, and judges need to be able to DQ and get their brackets going. The stream setup is really awesome, but it also leads to problems with the top players forced to wait a long time in line which can bring the brackets to a crawl in some cases; not really that bad because I think the benefit of the stream outweights the downsides of the wait.
This is really genius. You can actually have the same set of consistent judges run most of the pools too, because you will breeze through most of the pools anyways, so you can keep the same judge for a long period of time. Herding 16 people is a lot easier than herding 128.
One thing: we need some of those separators that let us separate the crowd from the players, and also to keep people from going to the back of the area. It was getting really obnoxious to deal with a huge amount of the crowd pressing up against competitors and not be able to yell at them to get back because your voice was already dead from a couple of hours of trying to micromanage 128 people like you were playing Terran while your mouse is broken.
I most certainly agree with having the players be head to head as oppose to sitting next to each other. I think it would seem a little less awkward. But if there’s one thing that’s bothered me at Evo, it has to be the announcers at the pools. I think there should be a limit to how many times you can be called before you’re disqualified. I heard the same name called 6 or 8 times before the announcer even began to consider disqualifying him. Staying by your pool is just common sense.