Thank god that the matches were as good as they were. It’s the only part of the Marvel tournament that was good. Seriously, everyone’s thinking it after what happened on Friday.
Justin, Nemo, ChrisG, and FChamp’s matches are all ran offstream. Justin vs. ChrisG was literally last year’s Grand Finals, RF vs. ChrisG was essentially two of their respective country’s strongest players dueling in a mirror match, Clockwork took out FChamp, Flux 3-0’d Ryan, but NONE of that gets on stream?
That KBR-Frutsy “button check” round. This may as well be a lack of communication there, but Frutsy had a clear lead up until the on-stage staff decided to cut the match just to prove a point? Completely killed Frutsy’s momentum. Who honestly cares if there’s people at the foot of the stage? The entire main hall was a giant fire hazard to begin with, the stagehand priority was utter nonsense.
No moment for Kane with the mic? Seriously? The arguments behind this aren’t exactly solid either. “Setting a bad precedent” isn’t particularly new since real eSports leagues for DotA 2, Starcraft, and the like do this anyway with the winners. If they were worried about maintaining their schedule, they should have given more of a shit about Guilty Gear running late or Smash matches taking something like eight minutes per round. There were similar issues like interrupting KOF 13 finals for a meet & greet for Ultrachen or Mike Ross/Gootecks or whatever.
And in case you were wondering what he said, someone up front got to record what he said:
The most viewed game for something like two/three years in a row gets a corner of the secondary hall but we get Killer Instinct/MKX for the big screen? I understand EVO is more about the “Holla Holla Get Dollah” lifestyle but some courtesy for a community that strove to do whatever it could to bring their game’s prestige to a similar level.
There’s more to say than this but I’m very disappointed in how Marvel was handled this year and hope that Wizard and company will stop pretending like they give a shit about our game.
Hype matches have always happened offstream. You only get ‘n’ stream options and you need to run a lot of matches quickly. Thankfully people recorded at least several of those.
I plan on being back next year: perhaps we need to set up an Evo Film Crew to ensure goodness doesn’t get lost.
Stating that the hall should have been shut down and everybody kicked out doesn’t help your argument. Agree it sucked ass, but … follow the simple goddamned rules, people.
Scale, baby, scale. I like the idea - maybe do a post-match interview with people win or lose on stream pretty please? Maybe not live because god knows wtf people are going to say, but – yeah I like the idea of letting people’s personality shine through a little more. But generally the Evo schedule is a train wreck that they’re just trying to salvage as best they can each year. The priority on stage is just running matches as fast as possible. They still love you: that’s why they’re still doing this.
It was awful. A flat-out embarrassment for those watching at home and for those at the tournament. This seems to happen more often then not at Evo but this year was particularly bad.
There is NO EXCUSE for the lacking of streaming. Marvel pools cut TWO HOURS short. Marvel quarter finals start AN HOUR late and then one of the two streams takes a break in the middle for a whole HOUR!
3 of the matches to determine who makes top 8 were off stream!
This is the fault of the TO’s running marvel (Who were they? We deserve names), Mr. Wizard, and the Cannon Bros.
Correct me if I’m wrong but weren’t there something like five separate streams specifically for this reason? There should not have been a moment where Skisonic is asking if there were any Top 8-worthy matches they could show. Obviously paraphrasing but still.
The issue wasn’t that people shouldn’t have crowded the halls. The issue was, as I stated before, that there was a complete lack of communication. Some people may have different levels of hearing than I do but what sort of obliviousness does it take for the onstage staff to realize that two players in top 8 were playing before they gave the go ahead? If neither player were gaining any sort of momentum, I’d have been cool with it. But they forced a reset after one of Kane’s characters had died. I don’t know who to address with this but fuck you to whoever is responsible for it. Kane worked his ass off to get where he was but I can’t help but think how different it might have been if the staff didn’t pull the plug.
As I said before, if they cared about running things on time then they would take into account Smash matches taking an inordinate amount of time compared to best-of-3 games like Ultra or Killer Instinct. Or just outright interrupting tournaments- a grand finals no less to announce meet and greets when this could have just as easily been done through other means that don’t interfere with tournament scheduling. For all that they claim to do for the community, there seems to be a disturbing lack of empathy for it once they’re done cashing their checks. Not to mention that as far as defenses go, “Their schedules are garbage but not THAT garbage,” is also rather weak.
I’m not going to deny that Evo is a gigantic event that’s essentially the Super Bowl of the FGC (And while I guess I’m at it Mario Kart for that one year.) but pretending that they handled Marvel with any amount of consideration or grace is insulting.
No idea this year as I was at my brother’s birthday/family stuff and missed it. They have to jam the matches in as fast as possible on whatever consoles are available. Aligning that to the stream has historically been awesome but not always possible.
So: sure, things could be better. But also: this has always been a problem and is the reason I started filming in the first place. People should know to expect this and handle it themselves if possible.
I bet they stopped it as soon as they noticed. They typically have the area clearly marked with tape: blame the people ignoring that, but also be aware that you’re fighting the hype tide there. Totally utterly sucked all around, but if people could stop trying to have Evo shut down that’d be tight. =P
Sure, but that still doesn’t equate to “it’d be a good idea to give everyone a live mic on stage”. MrWizard typically listens: suggest that to him if you want. But it doesn’t make sense to me and I can’t imagine you can make it make it sense to him. Removing the fanboy/interest here, it just logically seems a bad plan. That’s why I like the idea of doing it on-stream or in a recorded-right-then interview where you can do it long-form instead of “you have 10 seconds to thank everyone before the music plays”.
I see all your current concerns and raise you Evo 2002. They’ve learned a lot of lessons since then. I/we might disagree with a lot of the details, but – there’s typically reasons for everything they do. If you don’t think they’re doing it super-awesomely, work with them to make it better. That’s what I typically do.
Spectators have been on top of this and have mentioned whether or not they could film matches. But the fact that it’s left to the spectators to maintain coverage of what could be considered the most important matches of our game’s tournament, rather than the tournament organizers, is something of a mystery, regardless of where they were located on the bracket and how many stream set-ups there might have been.
I was there in the main hall to witness it and can tell you that beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Kane paused the match when one of the officials onstage was telling him something to his ear. People were confused, wondering what was going on, and people were already telling Frutsy to take the match. Turns out that it was to set an example. Again, feel free to pass this along to whoever: FUCK YOU. They certainly did stop, right as Kane lost his first character and Frutsy started building momentum for that round. After that it was a 3-0 sweep. I’d have been fine if they expressly told the two of them to not even enter gameplay until the hype zone was cleared out, but no.
It’s not a case where everyone is getting the mic. Solely the winning player/team captain/whatever. And if there’s concern about setting a precedent, you’re Evo. EVO. You can get away with that sort of thing because you’re the largest single FGC tournament on an annual level. Big E Leagues and CEO can probably follow suit- ESPECIALLY the latter considering the atmosphere it sets. That’s assuming that this idea isn’t being set up to fail by wantonly granting Winner’s Mic privileges to anyone with a grand prize trophy; lord knows we don’t want some people anywhere close to the mic given past decisions.
I’d argue the difference between then and now is that back in 2002, it was entirely the players’ fault for what happened. They planned it out beforehand when the staff was trusting enough for there to not be any foul play. In this case? For why there weren’t setups for some of the most anticipated matches in our game’s history, or why staff decided to approach the crowd dilemma like absolute pricks during Top 8 of THIS GAME specifically? There’s no way that blame can be landed on us. Hell, 2002 never even received proper repercussions until two years back when the Collusion Agreement went underway, so forget that there might be an issue of never making the same mistake twice. More to make it three or four more times just to be sure.
I’m not mad anymore. Just disappointed. And given that Evo has just come to a close, I doubt Wizard would give someone like me the time of day.
I still think marvel would still have a spot next year and will be handled better imo. Each year evo improves but the number of people do grow so its a lot of stress on the TO’s. I do think if someone is in the middle of the match then let them continue and then bring them on stage. As for smash it would probably because they didnt want two smash games in the finals on sunday.
Saturday finals are that big of a deal? I mean, yeah, everyone wants their game on Sunday for the extra viewers, but I’m failing to see the crime of being on Saturday.
Not a big Marvel fan by any means but it was ran poorly. I could understand if all the other streams were taken at the time but I think at least one of them wasn’t running anything. In all honesty the TOs probably thought the same guys who were always at the top would coast till Sunday but were wrong.
I seriously lost a ton of respect for the Evo staff when they didn’t give Nico (KaneBlueRiver) the mic.
You can watch any sport, top Tennis players, team captains, quarterbacks, they get post match interviews. This was a grand final on fighting games biggest stage. He should have had a chance to speak. Instead, he gets his elation from winning cut short with a slap in the face.
Running late? It wouldn’t have gone longer than a minute and the OP covered other very valid points. The only legitimate reason I see why they’d keep it off him was because they were worried about a Kotaku-bait style popoff which, honestly, is pathetic. Not only does he not have a track record of that kind of show-boating, if you want the FGC to mature and grow, treat the players like mature adults, don’t nanny them.
I’m not even a big Marvel player/fan. I’m a Street Fighter / Tekken guy. I just found the lack of respect and disconcerting precedent shown to KBR after finals to be disgusting.
How the flying FUCK would Wiz know what the fuck he was going to say? I wouldn’t have given him the mic either. Hindsight is a gift he didn’t have at the time so shut it.
Kane and Frutsy started the match while the EVO staff was trying to take care of a fire hazard. If you can’t understand why they had to stop the match I don’t know what to tell you.
Tony Cannon even said on the mic that they were going to stop the tournament until the fire hazard had been cleared before they started playing, and they started anyway.
Most of the matches played offstream happened that way because the matches were holding of the bracket for quite a while. When you are running out of time and the bracket is not moving forward, you need to start making decisions. And plz don’t say it had to be planned ahead, because you’re not taking into consideration how players sometimes can’t even follow a simple rule of reporting back to their judge once the stream match was over. If you take into account all the time lost because of the players who couldn’t do that simple thing, it becomes around an hour and a half behind schedule. There’s also the players who were playing different games.
I’m not sure why the stream was offline, but the guys running the brackets really have nothing to do with that.
EVO does care a lot about Marvel, but it also deals with issues that no other tournament in the world has to deal with.
Maybe the OP is just unhappy with how everything worked out.
So if people follow a sport like Football but the top ranked teams from the year before are defeated but there’s no match footage, wouldn’t they be confused why they can’t see why these amazing teams lost.
I see this as no different.
When I heard the stream saying Champ was out I couldn’t help but wonder why a former Evo Champion wasn’t even put on stream once. Same thing with ChrisG. It was highly considered that this year was either Chris’ or Clocks. In fact, if I’d seen Clock vs Champ I think I would’ve been set for him to win.
As a Stream Monster this year was painful to watch if for no other reason than I didn’t know what the hell was going on or who was actually in top 8 until after the stream had finished because of the lack of information.
To be honest you take what you get, the stream is a free service put out for the viewers. It’s not like you can’t catch a lot of the missed matches through recordings, I can’t see how it’s an embarrassment and shameful on their part, they’re just trying to get a metric fuckton of people through brackets as quickly as possible and make sure everything runs on time, which it wasn’t IIRC. I’m not very passionate about Marvel any more since it pretty much got the death sentence by Capcom though, so I guess I wouldn’t care as much about missed matches.
They’ve learned a lot of lessons since then. I/we might disagree with a lot of the details, but – there’s typically reasons for everything they do. If you don’t think they’re doing it super-awesomely, work with them to make it better. That’s what I typically do.