I’m a former local tournament organizer and player, and I’ve been to a few majors. Everything I say here is for larger tournaments. Anything under 32 players is a little different.
I advocate 100% random. I have zero problems with people playing their best friends in the first round, or top players eliminating each other in the prelims.
Shit happens.
The game doesn’t know how good the players are, and neither should the tournament. It should all be 100% standardized rules, and the tournament organizer’s opinions should play as little of a role as possible.
The random possibility that you might have a very difficult road to the finals is just one aspect of the game that every player should have to deal with the possibility of, especially if they play in many tournaments. To give the same players over and over “easier” paths to the final is favoritism and skews the results of their tournament career. If a player is so well known that he is always seeded, then there is less chance that he will someday just land in a really shitty bracket and get knocked out early on. That is something that should happen occasionally if tournaments were truly unbiased.
It would also give lesser known players a chance to get in the finals. Does this mean that the winner of the tournament is less skilled, and really shouldn’t have won? No way. The guy who got first place is the best player that day.
Again, shit happens. Randomness is a part of SF, and especially a part of the competitive experience. Some days things just don’t go your way. The purpose of a tournament is to determine a champion who has the greatest level of skill in the game. The ability to cope with a random tournament, and random opponents is part of that skillset. The same goes for having to possibly play your greatest rival in the tournament first round. To take away that possibility is to aid the player, and I don’t think that’s right.
As far as the idea goes that the finals need to be “hype” and contain known players goes: GTFO of here with that shit. SF is not sports entertainment, and any tournament organizer that intentionally spreads out a bracket in order to make sure that the right players end up in the right spots at the right time, maybe even going so far as to know who plays what character etc, is absolute bullshit.
Finally made it back, okay let me say that the three topics of randomness in the brackets, Playing to win vs playing to learn in a tournament and online vs at a tournament SRK are all interconnected.
There are 3 factors that come into play in real fighting game tournament that were being addressed in those arguments
[LIST=1]
[]The Past
[]The fact that this is a small community
[*]The fact that these are real people
[/LIST]
The past and small community parts comes into play when the argument focuses on the premise that these people being top players is somehow arbitrary or in dispute, This is mostly an concept of online Shoryuken. People who have watched match vids and participated in discussion from the safety of their own homes. When a group of people play together face to face with no lag and someone destroys you repeatedly there is nothing to hide behind, no “i would have done this in that situation”. In real life SRK people know who they go back and forth with and who is better than them. the idea of putting a player who would beat anyone anyway through better challengers is just opening room for someone with less skill to advance in the gap left void by good players.
Separating good players also serves as a way of making sure anyone has who gets to the end is of proven skill or has to beat someone who has proven their skill, which random doesn’t.
Also separating the best players turns the losers bracket into a much better experience for people who aren’t as skilled When top players play each other early one of them has to go to the losers bracket and you end up with someone far better than the rest of the people at the beginning of the losers bracket. Keeping the people who will most likely win apart makes the losers bracket a good test of skill for people who aren’t likely to win. When you have 3 or 4 rounds before the top players meet you can have some some of the most unpredictable matches of the tournament in the early losers bracket, because even if the two people probably won’t win the tournament its not usually nearly as clear who will win before the match starts as the winners bracket. BTW in real tournaments where people play each other often you can usually call matches with 80-90% accuracy before they begin, Because there is a history and its a small community. The reason those end matches are so good is because they could go either way, i mean in theory any match could go either way but in reality it doesn’t work like that.
Here is a real life situation that a bunch of people on SRK can back me up on. At large tournaments where multiple major games are run simultaneously you often end up with a bottleneck at the end of the day because the same people are in the final 8 of 2 or 3 or 5 different tournaments. Better players aren’t a myth they do exist, and by separating them you are make the tournament more enjoyable for everyone, you’re making the people on top complain less, lower skilled players get a better loser bracket experience, and everyone gets more exciting matches at the end, and it double elimination so the skill will sort itself out near the end. Every place isn’t Cali and every tournament isn’t EVO in places where the fighting game scene is small or places where its dwindling you need to be concerned about making sure the people who do support your scene and come out don’t regret it at the end of the day regardless of what their current skill level is.
As for the reply about bending the rules for a select group here is a real situation that has happened more than once: You have a tournaments posted that starts at 5:00pm. The posting also states that you need at least 16 people for the tournament. 5:00 rolls around and you only have 10 people. at 5:05 you get a call from a group of guy who are on their way, something happened, (real people) and the got held up. They’re an hour away in a 2 hour drive, if they get here you have enough people to hold the tournament.
Keep in mind the past and the small community now these are guys who have traveled up to your tournaments before you know them, and you’ve hung out with them and they are an hour into they’re drive already.
Do you
A) tell them to turn around now because there are no late entries
B) Wait for them to get there to let them know its too late.
C) hold up the tournament an hour for them with complaining people who showed up on time
D) cancel the tournament as you don’t have enough people to run it without them.
E) …
Remember this isn’t a question on a forum its an actual phone call from people you know 5 minutes after your tournament was supposed to start.
When I was faced with this situation I chose option C. And I hated it. I hated it because I was extremely clear in my previously posted rules that the tournaments would start at particular times, and end at other times.
By allowing players to come late I had to deal with some guys later on leaving the tournament because they could only stay so long, and they didn’t participate in the tournament that they showed up for on time because they had to go to work the next day and had a long drive. In fact it was longer than the guys who wear coming late. So I had to choose between 2 guys who wear on time but had to leave in a couple of hours, and 4 guys who were late but could stay for the late tournament.
These days I would choose option A and D. Option B is just a plain dick move and should never
be done.
There’s always the option of polling the players and seeing if they want to wait, but that creates the issue that the tournament is going to run late, and probably run into the time alotted for some other event. And that will cause issues to snowball.
I believe this community is far too forgiving of lateness and it takes away some of the legitimacy of our tournaments, and also insults the players who can show up on time. I understand that real-life issues may arise, but I think the player should put time in his schedule to allow for these type of things and not count on the tournaments to start late.
It’s to the point these days that pretty much every player knows that no tournament ever starts or ends on time, and they abuse the leniency that comes along with this.
The person that got #1 MAY be the best player “for that day” (or whatever), but what about 2nd and 3rd place? They’re also given part of the pot. Are you really going to argue that a randomized ladder will consistently have the 2nd and 3rd best people place 2nd and 3rd? If the three best players are in one half of the bracket, the third best player gets screwed because Winner’s Final (where a bad player comes from the bottom half of the bracket) determines who gets 3rd. The 3rd best player, however, can do nothing about it. Randomness tends to favor bad players.
ALTERNATIVELY, if the brackets are seeded, then anyone that beats what’s seeded as “a better player” gets the same advantages that the “better player” is said to receive once they advance past them.
For me, this is an easy decision. It is unfortunate that someone has to end up unhappy, but let it be the people who are not following the rules (out of towners). before you jump to conclusions, I go out of town for tournaments semi-regularly I would never expect to hold up ten people because of a mistake on my part. I know shit happens, but how does that fall on the organizer?!
this also applies to people that complain about playing a friend in the bracket. if you clearly state that the brackets will be random, and somebody doesnt like the the result, how do they justify going after the TO? “DAMN YOU FOR HAVING SUPERHUMAN CONTROL OVER STATISTICS!”
When people come at me with these insane levels of douchery, I feel its my responsibility to shut them down. Many of you want to make it the standard. I guess thats the primary difference in thinking.
No one likes C, but its probably the most common. No one likes any of those options and as an organizer as soon as it comes up you’re in a lose/lose situation. Tournaments don’t run in the hypothetical they run in real life and in real life once you hold up a tournament for someone people start showing up late because they either think you will hold the tournament up for them or they think it just won’t start on time but i’m drifting off topic again.
For he argument that random allows the best player to come out on top while seeding doesn’t because top players may get easier matches early on help me with this
Pool A
(Top player)
(Random #1)
(Random #2)
(Random #3)
(Unknown God tier player)
(Random #4)
(Random #5)
(Random #6)
Regardless of how bad randoms #1, 2 and 3 are there is no way for the top player in this pool to advance without playing the unknown god tier player, unless one of them loses to some random, they serve as a check to each other, each legitimizing whichever one makes it out of the pool. The argument that random allows the best player to come out on top doesn’t in anyway disprove that seeding somehow makes it so that the best player doesn’t still come out on top.
In the argument for random you can’t say the best player will come out on top no matter how hard their bracket is and then for a seeded tournament say that the best player doesn’t still come out on top because better players don’t have to play each other until a few rounds in, its still an unavoidable fact that they will have to play each other at some point.
Its not like the NCAA where its (1,8) (2,7) (3,6) (4,5), you’re not assigning values to every player, its just get the people who shouldn’t be playing each other early (location/skill) away from each other and let the rest sort itself out. The fact that the top 8 ends up similar isn’t due to top players getting a free ride its due to the fact that no one in their pools is better.
Thanks for the really interesting posts guys, especially Black Shinobi, and the other tourney organizers for sharing their thoughts.
I’d like to kindly re-iterate that I’ve never run a tourney, I don’t feel I know what is the “right” way, and the whole point of this thread was to discuss these things so that guys like me can learn more about the scene and how to keep it alive.
I think the real impetus here is that we are turning our local gamenights into ranbats and this got me thinking about how it would be to actually be the guy responsible for organizing/bracketing/rules, etc…
Thanks blackshinobi for posting, I’ll get around to a reply but, just been having a hectic kinda day (girlfriend got in a car accident early morning and mechanics acting full of nonsense).
I’ve run tournaments, been in tournaments, and have helped run them.
I’m for 100% random.
You enter tournaments to win plain and simple. If you’re there to compete you are there to win and I don’t care who it is I’m playing, I’m going to do my damndest to win.
I can understand seeding by location, but that’s it. I’ve played friends several times first or second round at majors, and I treated the matches just as if I had been playing someone I had never played before. I played to fucking win.
What’s this bullshit about ‘equal footing’?
That’s not the tournament organizers job, that’s YOUR JOB.
You don’t want to lose to your friend first round?
Don’t lose to your friend.
You don’t want to lose to Daigo first round?
Don’t lose to Daigo first round.
Modifying the brackets by any means is flat out rigging the brackets.
This why I don’t run tournaments anymore, this shit is an absolute headache and it’s like some bullshit unspoken rule to give a top player a handjob in the brackets the moment they walk into your tournament.
Admitting lack of research, I have honestly never heard of a BYOC kind of competitive game community where tournament organizing was a reasonable kind of investment for your time and money. Is tournament organization actually reasonably profitable in the fighting game community?
I didn’t read this thread, but as a tourney runner, it’s actually really ironic.
The times I seeded the top players, nobody has any complaints. When I do 100% random, people are like “man wtf, why am i playing this guy, you rigged this shit, whine whine whine”
I have to rig it in order for people to not complain that it’s rigged.
…
Anyways, nowadays (or when I’m in the states, rather), whenever I run tournies, I just seed by location.
Drawing up brackets by location has generally been my way of dividing or assigning people to certain pools.
If all tournament participants or the majority agree that the bracket should be seeded, (and can be seeded and a reasonable and logical way) I will do that. Otherwise, you go random. No one gets hurt. In the end, I do what the majority of the players ask for.
Note: I only run small local tournaments, and have never ran one larger than 128 people, so this might not apply to large scale majors.
Let’s say you drive 5-10 hours to come to a tourney. You come with two guys better than you. You go 0-2, but the only games you played were with the two guys you came with. It’s like, WTF is the point in even coming in the first place? You don’t win, you don’t learn anything, you don’t get experience with other playstyles. It’s probably the most frustrating tourney experience anybody can have.
Yeah, because 100% random is fair and makes sense.
If only organizations like the NCAA would listen to the wise posters of FGD. Got 4 #1 seeds in the same pool? Fuck it, play to win.
Who cares if we end up with Duke vs. West Bumfuck State as the finals.
Often, the guys throwing tourneys end up taking a loss out of thier own pocket.
Example: Season’s Beatings 4. It was basically the second hypest tourney of 2009, outside Evo. You had a Daigo v Jwong revenge FT10 exhibition that WASN’T streamed, so you had to be there to see it. This was way after EVO, so people were better by SB4 (at SF4 anyway). You had guys repping both coasts AND Japan. They traveled all the way to fucking Columbus OH for this tourney. Attendance was huge, the venue was awesome, the room was absolutely FULL of hype. In the back of Momo’s, you had station after station where people were playing different games (marvel, melty, I think I even saw one arcana setup) doing money matches and shit.
It was HYPE AS HELL.
And I’m here to tell you that due to no particular fault of their own, the organizers of SB4 ended up FOUR DIGITS out of pocket. I don’t feel the need to state the actual number, but it was a four digit number…for basically the hypest tourney of the year that wasn’t Evo.
They ended up taking a collection and guys like myself donated all we could to help them break even.
So yeah…its fair to say that running tourneys is a tricky thing and even if you are running a hype tourney and doing it well…shit can go wrong and you can end up losing a lot out of pocket…even if the tourney was great.