Did WCG ever pay Arturo for getting 2nd at that cyber club thing? I remember before Evo he was still trying to get that money.
I recall that MLG used to have issues with paying players back when they were doing Tekken & Soul Calibur tournaments. Wouldn’t throw them on the list right now, but just FYI.
…
Alright then, enough with the maybes, here is a certainty: I would definitely add DancingFighterG to this list. In case you don’t know, he’s a tournament director in Colorado who, I shit you not, begins every single one of his posts with “Yo, this is DancingFighterG.” He’s involved with something called the National Video Game Association and its annual anime/gaming convention, NVGA Supercon.
He has botched a number of tournaments in the past, to the point where much of the Colorado scene refuses to attend his events, but what really cements his place in this thread is his handling of SC4 Nationals.
At first, this was supposed to be a more collaborative community effort, but somewhere along the line it was placed under the control of DancingFighterG and NVGA, who wanted to make the tournament a centerpiece of Supercon. Supercon seemed like a convenient location with a convenient date, and DFG was a long-time Soul Calibur player with roots in the community, so it all sounded like a good idea at first. He promised a guaranteed prize pool of at least $4k, and even said that with sponsors it would likely be more.
At the actual event, however, all kinds of major problems arose. For the sake of brevity, I’ll only mention the two that outright qualify as “shady”:
- Going against the community’s wishes, DFG allowed anyone to enter Nationals for $20. To understand why this would be shady, you have to realize that Nationals was an SBO-style event with regional qualifiers used to determine the final bracket. Some players flew out to qualifiers, or drove to three different ones before finally making it in, so this was basically a giant “fuck you” to those people.
Since some very strong non-qualified players (e.g. French, Koreans) traveled to this event, the community had voted to run a last chance qualifier where the top 4 would move on to the actual Nationals bracket. But DFG just ignored all that and let anyone in. This was probably done to make the turnout look a little more impressive and to fatten the pot. The latter is an especially important point because…
- …remember that $4k+ prize pool I mentioned? Yeah, try like half of that. The actual payouts ended up being $1k for 1st, $600 for 2nd, $300 for 3rd, and $100 for 4th.
If you’re interested in reading more about these and other ways DFG & co. fucked up (Loud techno music & flashing bright lights during tournament matches! Waiting hours in between matches!), take a look at THIS THREAD. The first couple posts and the last two on that first page are a nice start, and it only gets better from there…
EDIT: Oh yeah, since most of SRK doesn’t care about Soul Calibur, I’ll give you another example from an HD Remix tournament at Supercon. In the words of another Colorado player:
"Please know that DFG does not represent the Colorado fighting game scene. There was a small HDR tournament for example, at Supercon, and a player from CO won that. He didn’t get the $250 pot that was listed on most of the Supercon promo stuff. I guess there was fine print somewhere in that horribly-designed website that explained the intricacies of the payout, but that’s just horrible crap in and of itself. This important information shouldn’t be hidden away like that.
Since our local winner of the HDR tournament was not only local but knew enough to be able to confront DFG, he was able pull teeth and get some winnings, but still not $250."