I know what happened.
A player said he was told by a judge that he had to play in a setup that didn’t have Shuma. The judge said he absolutely didn’t say that.
It’s a miscommunication problem. The issue is that the player went ahead and played the set without Shuma,lost and then complained about it to Angelic after the set was done and the bracket had moved forward.
I asked Valle and Chris Li about it, and they both agreed that the player signed the papers when he went ahead and played the set.
That was the main problem. The best course of action in that situation for the player was to not play the game and contact the staff, but it didn’t happen.
I really think that if you are a player who knows the rules, and you are told (allegedly) a BS rule, that should be a red flag right there, but this player just took it. I really wish it would have gone a different way.
People shouldn’t be downplaying the importance of viewers and streams of the tournment. Evo makes money both directly and indirectly from viewers watching. They can’t profit from stream viewers, then be defended when viewers say the matches they wanted to see weren’t shown (well, this thread showing that actually, they can be defended notwithstanding).
Justin wong, Chris G and Filipino Champ are the 3 biggest players of the game. They did not factor this into their streaming decisions and hence the backlash. Add in a stream starting nearly 2 hours late, the shambles of frutsy/kbr match, and KBR not getting the mic, and here we are.
Actually, this is all Justin Wong’s, Chris G’s and Filipino Champ’s fault for not winning. I can’t even be mad at the organization of the tournament for this.
So, all the same issues that have been around since at least my first time going, scaled up for larger attendance. I honestly think Evo needs to add at least a 4th day, and probably a 5th if we really want to get every match that should be on stream on stream, without creating cluster fucks and down time.
We can, easily. This community was getting along pretty well before things just blew up. The stream as a means to reach out to members of the community who can’t go? Great. The streams as a free show to people who will never really give two fucks about any of us? There’s only so much we can do for them.
This needs to be explained one more time: there are always great matches going on and some of them are going to be missed. Trying to get them all on stream means that pools would have to run late. While I don’t agree with all of the decisions involved with Evo, timeliness and running a proper tournament are one thing they excel at. This tourney being sloppy seems to have happened because they were too busy arranging free entertainment for a shitload of people.
The floodgates are open and all that’s fine. Could do they do a better job? Yeah. Provide better insight on how they messed up and how they could improve it. Ranting because they didn’t show some of the marquee match ups is just what happens. Have you ever watched Evo DVDs? Guess how many things aren’t there?
I hate to be that guy, but having two smash games at EVO I feel really fucked things up. Their communities are both huge and do not have nearly as much overlap as one might think, which made the venue just horribly clogged. As Viscant was saying, when Smash was going on in the exhibitor hall it was basically impossible to maneuver around in that area.
I can’t see how the EVO staff didn’t have the foresight to see that including two additional games which draw the same amount of players as SF would be a logistical nightmare in that venue, especially since I’m sure they plan what venue they pick at least a year ahead.
I fully understand the staff not handing over the mic. It’s a potential PR nightmare if the winner says something dumb live. You don’t want to tick off sponsors or have something said that will always link back to EVO and tarnish the game/tournament. Kane may have only wanted to say good things, but it’s still risky. Maybe next year we can get some sort of immediate interview or report after the grand finals for each game.
The only other issue that seemed to pop up was the “extended button checks”. Even though it sucked, I understand the fire hazard one. However, their seemed to be quite a few games that were proceeding for a bit only for one individual to claim it was a button check and to restart the game. The staff and the FGC needs to come down hard on this if it starts to become a serious trend. It’s effectively giving yourself a free mulligan and reset if your opponent starts gaining momentum.
Edit: “Everything needs to be streamed/recorded” just isn’t going to happen with the current EVO schedule. EVO would have to turn in to a week long tournament to even begin to think about recording every game that is played. It’s up to the community to take the initiative and try and record every game they can. Lets be thankful that camera phones are now so much more prevalent. They may not be ideal, but it’s better than nothing.
DING DING DING! We have a winner!
Of course it was the “fault” of having two Smash games at Evo this year, and OF COURSE the Evo organizers should have used this huge influx of money to hold the event in a venue appropriate for such a bigger influx of players and spectators.
[quote=“Ramrod, post:67, topic:175905”]
Not as easy as it sounds. Most ballrooms in Vegas are booked through 2020.
Serious question - Who gets to decide who doesn’t give a fuck and who does?
Don’t know why, that quoted comment really rubbed me the wrong way. Not entirely sure what you’re implying about some of us Stream Monsters.
Something that can’t be denied in this - Viscant has come in and dropped an informative post about his experience and the only part anyone has mentioned was the Shuma thing? (Which is a he said/she said situation at this point).
This is exactly what other people are saying but Jay gets to say it without people talking down to him because he’s known?
I’m not saying that’s 100% how it is but just how it appears to be while reading through this.
Because he is wrong. Here, since you think we care about OGs:
Lol no. Whenever possible they should but not at the cost of having the tournament run like shit. It some bullshit that people who spent thousands of dollars should play second fiddle to people who didn’t attend. Its a tournament, you don’t go there to get screen time, you go there to win.
even then, they can handle Melee no problem.
Smash 4 was the problem. Takes forever to run, boring to watch game with one guy so much better than anyone else the only thing he murdered harder than his bracket was hype. Smash 4 is what fucked over Marvel on Saturday. I could have sworn when I checked the Evo schedule, Marvel was supposed to be running almost all day on two streams Saturday … then when I actually tuned in and could find nothing but Smash, I noticed the schedule only had a few hours of Marvel scheduled for that night all on side streams.
Then running so many ChrisG and Champ matches off stream … like, come on guys. It’s a little more understandable when it happens in a SF tournament because there are way more killers playing it … and even then shit like Evo final runbacks involving guys like Daigo should NEVER be offstream - fuck a bracket disruption, stuff like that NEEDS to be streamed. Matches with an extremely high chance of generating an Evo Moment need to happen on a good recording setup and be seen live. This is just common sense, I though.
You gotta build the word of mouth while the tournament is still going on so it spreads to the stream monsters and gets them pumped for finals day. Just a tweet here and there with no video ain’t going to cut it for that.
Total Marvel audience this year was 177k between Twitch & Topanga because Japan started tuning into Marvel in big numbers … that’s a good show, but even tho entrant numbers dropped this year, viewers should have easily climbed up to the 200k mark. If a game as shitty as MKX can hit 190k, Marvel can do better
There’s no reason Marvel top 32 couldn’t have been run exactly the same as SF4 top 32. We devoted the same amount of resources (2 streams) to both games. SF4 despite running as a slightly slower game on average got more top 32 matches on stream than Marvel did and a significantly higher percentage of RELEVANT matches on stream than Marvel did. SF4 ran later into the night time wise and tournament wise than the Marvel streams did (Marvel streams shut down while top 8 spots were still being decided, both srkevo2 and srkevo3 signed off for the night not knowing who qualified for the last spots in losers).
Nobody’s blaming anyone for this. As I said in my original post there were a lot of logistic headaches that Marvel had that SF didn’t that absolutely contributed to the problem.
But if we’re going to have a losers bracket stream at all, we have to prioritize Justin Wong vs. Chris G or Champ vs. Clockw0rk as high up on the list as possible even if it’s going to cost us 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there in absolute time. We can’t sign off of two separate streams before Chris G vs. RF for top 8 is decided. That’s simply not acceptable for a major tournament stream for a (theoretically) featured game, but especially not for Evo. They didn’t do this for SF4, there was no reason to do this for Marvel.
We saw the aftereffects of these decisions in the general attitude towards Marvel on Sunday. People didn’t know who was in top 8, half the people tweeting out top 8 at 11pm thought Full Schedule qualified. RF’s biggest moment in Marvel wasn’t on stream. Nobody saw F Champ losing despite being one of the most important people in the game. We lost a lot of fanbases and created a lot of apathy towards top 8 due to stream decisions and tournament running decisions. Maybe running it right would have cost us an extra 30 minutes overall but we HAD that time.
And again, I’m not pointing fingers or calling out blame and in fact if anyone should get blame for Marvel running like this, it should be me who was standing around on backup duty doing nothing seeing what was going on with my thumb up my butt instead of jumping in and helping out.
But we can all agree that Marvel ran poorly and we as a community will have to do better next year.
–Jay Snyder
Viscant@aol.com
SF4, Xrd and MvC3 all ran like shit though. Xrd guys got dicked over in regular viewing space. Even then we are compounding issues by making pools bend themselves for stream time. If the notable names are a handful, then maybe MvC3 should be an exhibition tournament. I mean, if you’re going to say something like:
Then something just isn’t quite right. You’re worried largely about a lot of people who don’t play the game in the first place. As I mentioned before, running a smooth tournament should be the main concern. Maybe if MvC3 had gone smoothly the players could’ve excused things being missing from the stream. If the tournament runs like ass and there is no benefit to it in the stream, then it just seems like a lot of effort for nothing. that didn’t happen and then the stream ended up jacking up things even more.
If you want a fanbase that watches, then making MvC3 a special PPV type thing would be best. If you want to run a tournament, then running the tournament smoothly should be the focus. It sounds like you got neither.
Who in the fuck is going to PAY to watch Marvel?
Apparently whichever fanbase was it that got it let down. A fanbase which also cares so much about the game that some of them didn’t like watching KBR do something amazing in that game.
I guess this is also the same fanbase that stopped showing up to play the games at majors.
So skimming through this, pretty much people’s thoughts on ChrisG vs RF not getting streamed is essentially “can you imagine if Snake Eyez vs Daigo happened off-stream?”.
As for the KBR mic situation…couldn’t they have just well, ASKED him what he wanted to say and decided from that? Now, I’m not saying anything silly like “The Top 8 can write out ‘in case I win’ statements beforehand if they want to say anything”, but still. I mean, I may not know KBR, but he doesn’t come across as the type to grab the house mic and start yelling “fuck you, bitches! I won, y’all are fucking garbage, you’re shit!” or whatever.
Can’t tell if willfully obtuse or moron.
Not really about that, the precedent was that no one gets the mic, they didn’t want to start a new precedent. Check Viscant’s post, he didn’t get it either when he won.
I don’t even know what you’re arguing at this point. We don’t need a special PPV stream, we had enough resources. Look, let’s just do the numbers here. Let’s say for the sake of arguments that top 32 Marvel can only run from 8pm to 11pm, that 11pm is a hard deadline. Even though it’s not and we could stretch out to like 11:30 or even midnight if we wanted.
There aren’t that many matches in top 32 to top 8. 12 winners bracket matches and 24 losers bracket matches. 18 matches per stream in 3 hours, an average of 10 minutes per match. That’s not just doable, that’s plenty of wiggle room built in. It gets even easier if you run a few of the top 32 losers matches offstream preventing the bottleneck, say 4 in the 1st round of losers 32 off stream (loser gets 25th), 4 in the 2nd round of losers 32 off stream (loser gets 17th) and everything else on stream. That’s cuts huge chunks off the overall running time and you lose almost nothing.
That’s why people are upset. People are OK with good quarters matches being offstream. Going from 128 (or whatever the number was this year) to 32 is a whole lot more matches, you can’t get every good match on. Everyone understands. Good pools matches being offstream is whatever, nobody’s going to make a big deal of that. But if we have 2 streams and even some WINNERS BRACKET top 32 matches are offstream? Just not acceptable. We don’t need to hold up the tournament past an acceptable level or run a Justin and friends PPV stream to get the marquee losers bracket matches, we just needed to organize better.
For those who weren’t there, here’s the problem right here. Maybe a picture would help.
The picture is of Smash but this looked pretty much exactly the same as Marvel. The setup that PPMD and Hugs are playing on is srkevo2. srkevo6 is somewhere behind them that I can’t even see through the people (right around where the flashing light is I’m guessing?) which is why Marvel 4-6pm pools were cut. It just wasn’t feasible to run important tournament matches in that sea of people. srkevo3 is further behind that, to the left (our left) of that most clearly visible brown door I’m guessing?
The problem is that the offstream area where the bracket guys were running Evo (without a megaphone or easy access to the house mic) is not visible, far to the left of where the picture cuts off. In order to get from the stream organizer (down and right of the photographer and Hugs/PPMD here) to the stream organizer of srkevo3 all the way back to the bracket involves pushing all these people (who can barely move themselves) out of the way and running that loop continuously.
We could have put Justin/Chris or Clock/Champ on stream if we just organized the situation better. Here are the questions we have to be asking ourselves going forward.
Why did srkevo2 choose that location in a corner where the human spillover was going to be greatest? Marvel and Melee (two hugely popular games) were scheduled for this area. Did they really think that only 100-200 people would want to watch these top 32s?
Why did srkevo2 have a tiny projector forcing people to crowd close and pack in if they wanted to see the matches? (BTW this setup had no sound.) srkevo3 didn’t have a projector at all and was running Marvel/Melee as well! What was the thought process here?
Why was srkevo6 that close in the first place? We had to abandon streaming 4pm Marvel pools because there were too many Smash people. But couldn’t we anticipate that Smash would have that many people? Was melee being that popular a surprise to anyone? Because it wasn’t to me.
Why was Marvel’s bracket for top 32 that far away? Why didn’t we move the offstream Marvel area closer to the stream location where melee was set up previously? One of the biggest problems is that the bracket runner and organizer lost track of people waiting for streams, didn’t know srkevo3 was down for 45 minutes, didn’t know when srkevo3 came back, didn’t realize that srkevo2 had no matches for half the night (people thought Kane celebrating was holding up the stream–it wasn’t, we had no matches! Persia/Sp00ky for stream MVPs for finding something to talk about while no matches were scheduled). These are all logistics problems.
And to address your other point, yeah Justin and Champ and Chris all have a lot of fans, some of which are game players and some aren’t. Justin has 70k twitter followers, probably a decent percentage of them aren’t active players and are just his own personal fans. We DID alienate them by having his biggest matches happen offstream and we didn’t have to. We had the resources, we just failed on organization and logistics, we just dropped the ball. Putting them on stream wouldn’t have held up anything since (as mentioned repeatedly) srkevo3 was down on break for at least 45 minutes when we had marquee matches going on offstream. But even if it would have, it would have been worth the minor inconvenience just to keep these people interested, these people are important to us.
Here’s something I want people to think about.
Why do we even have a stream in the first place? It’s so people who couldn’t make it or don’t travel regularly to events can keep abreast of the event and can follow the major storylines. Clearly we failed streamwise. I mean, it’s a damn good thing that Kane won the tournament because that was the only major story we really told with the stream from pools, to quarters, to semis, to top 8. All the other major storylines we came up way short on. I agree that we should cater to the players over spectators if a choice has to be made but no choice had to be made at all. We didn’t make it better for the players by running matches offstream or forcing Chris/RF to play offstream.
And again, just to avoid any possible misunderstandings, this isn’t anyone’s fault to bear on their own. There were a lot of problems in this hall and Marvel just got the worst of them. The only reason this is even worth talking about and posting about anymore is just to make sure it doesn’t happen again next year.
–Jay Snyder
Viscant@aol.com
Ok id like to a dress this statement now if you look at both games you just named even though they weren’t the most popular games they have showed easily the most support from their community funds wise. KI community raised so much money for the past 3 tournaments including evo pot bonus wise you wouldn’t believe how fast it was too. MKX also raise a huge amount of funds too so I feel they earned their position to be on the main stage. Not only that but KI was having Finals the day of marvel pools so finals should naturally get main stage priority over pools.