Alright, I'm back. For those of you who don't know, I'm the assistant TO of UFGT. I handle all of the brackets making, seeding, and bracket running responsibilities. I thought I handled that job pretty well for both MK and Injustice this year. I'm also responsible, together with Keits, for making the schedule. [dodges beer bottles]
Anyway, I'm here to respond to people's concerns. I'm not going to answer questions on everything, but I'll do my best to answer most of them.
Stream Time: Injustice was on stream for 4 blocks, more than any game apart from SF4 and MvC3. The 4 blocks were 2 pools, Top 16 (Semifinals), and Top 8 (Finals). We also had the Injustice auction on Friday night, which I think was much more exciting than the Marvel auction this year due to the community actively bidding up certain characters. Top 32 to Top 16 was not streamed, which I know a lot of people were disappointed about.
(EDIT: Keits (who is reading this thread by the way) wants me to mention that Injustice had 9 total hours of stream time, 8 not counting the auction. SSF4 had 12 hours. Marvel had 14. No other game had more than 6, I think. Divekick only had finals streamed, which was around 3 hours, admittedly in prime-time on Sunday, but I'll discuss that further down. I think a big part of thinking that the game got little stream time was that at the time, Injustice matches were running really, really, really fast (if I recall correctly) and pools were finishing much quicker than expected.)
The thing is that we have a different philosophy about running tournaments than, say, NEC, particularly when it comes to streaming. At NEC, you have 5 or 6 (or more) streams, one for each community, streaming all pools and semifinals all day, usually using 4G, then Sunday Top 8 gets shown on Team Spooky (sometimes). While this keeps the community happy, since everything is streamed, it also often results in a lower-quality stream as all these community streamers fight for bandwidth at the hotel. In addition, having lots of community streamers makes it nearly impossible for the TO of the event to be in charge the output. By that, I mean making sure all the streams have the same overlays, the same sponsor cards, the same commercials, etc. Also, and just as importantly, it's much more difficult to ensure that nothing inappropriate gets said on a stream, and while the stream may be a community-run thing, it's also representing the tournament itself. Example: At NEC, on the Anime game stream, the stream proprietor St1ckbug repeatedly used the word "rape" in his commentary. Somebody called him out on it, and he responded by going on a big rant about how "rape" was fine to use. Fortunately, Kotaku didn't get word of this so any bad press was fortunately avoided. However, should a media outlet found that footage, who gets blamed? St1ckbug for saying it? The anime community for streaming it? Or Big E and NEC for running the tournament being streamed? The answer is all of them, especially Big E since he's in charge of the event, even though he had nothing to do with it and likely wasn't (and may even still not be) aware that it happened.
At UFGT, our philosophy is that since it's our tournament, ultimately, it's our responsibility regarding what the public sees and hears. This is why for the past two years, we've only had two streamers each time. The streamers coordinated their overlays to be the same, they had the same slides, same graphics, same everything. They even had a feature where during a lull in the action, one of the streams could "peek in" at what was happening on the other stream at the same time (just like real sports!). In addition, with only two streams, the hotel internet was able to handle it and the streams looked better as a result. Of course, the downside of this is that there's very limited time for games to have their time on stream, and nowadays there's more games than ever. We felt we did the fairest thing possible while still trying to maximize viewers with our stream schedule allotments. We also allowed community people to record certain matches that took place offstream. Medina did this for MK9 at UFGT8 (2012). The Tekken community took advantage of this as well by recording their Top 16 matches. Admittedly, we could publicize this fact better.
I will say that next year, having 3 streams is looking very likely. However, stream time is still going to be limited for a lot of games. We won't know for sure until we make the schedule.
Setups Lagging: I can't verify this myself, but this is what I heard from Focus Fire, who handled all of our equipment at UFGT7, 8, and 9: The stations were on the correct settings on Friday, but by Saturday, they were upscaled to 1080p. We don't know how or why this happened or who did this, and frankly, we're really mad about it. I will say that our policy is that whenever there's a problem with the equipment, you should bring it to the attention of the bracket runner, equipment manager, or TO immediately, and we'll respond by working to fix the problem. Apparently with the Soul Calibur V tournament this year, none of the setups had the unlockable characters unlocked. They played through the whole tournament without telling us this, and as a result, we didn't fix it, because we didn't know. And we could have easily solved this problem simply if one of them had talked to us. (I'm REALLY pissed about that too.) Anyway, we're definitely going to do our best to make sure something like that doesn't happen again, and if somehow it does, we need to know about it so we can fix it.
Setups Flickering: This problem is more complicated. It was also a problem that we didn't foresee at all and one that didn't have a good solution. For those who don't know, UFGT9 was our first time holding an event at this particular hotel. We previously were at a different Crowne Plaza to the northeast. When we first started hearing about setups flickering on and off when people plugged in controllers, we immediately told the hotel to call the electrician. The electrician came and told us that the hotel had what he called "dirty power". I don't completely understand it, but basically, the power that the hotel received was unregulated, and whenever somebody plugged in a new controller (especially a fightstick), there would be a large surge of electricity that would cause monitors on the same table (since it was all connected) to flicker off and on. I heard that Wound Cowboy got fucked over by this happening, and for that I sincerely apologize (not that apologizing makes it better).
Anyway, for UFGT10, this unregulated power situation has been a main topic of discussion in Keits' talks with the hotel venue. Basically, one of two things will happen: Either the hotel will get their power fixed, or we (or the hotel) will obtain several Monster regulators, regardless of cost. Either way, the monitor flickering will not happen again.
9:30am: There's two parts to this story. (1) I feel now that 9am was too early to start on Sunday, regardless of what games were played at that time. The start time on Sunday should have been 10am, which would've put Injustice at 10:30. Now, I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with having a game's finals that early on a Sunday. And here's the second part. (2) What WAS a mistake was holding Injustice Top 8 first on Sunday morning when MK Top 8 was last on Saturday night. That was a huuuuuuuuuuuge oversight regarding the schedule, and for that I take full responsibility as a schedule makers. I also take responsibility for King of Fighters and Tekken Tag 2 running long on Saturday evening, which pushed MK back even later. This was a very legitimate complaint. Again, having Injustice Top 8 so early when MK Top 8 was so late the night before was a gigantic mistake and for that, I am deeply sorry. All I can say now is that I will do everything I can to make sure something similar doesn't happen again when I am making the schedule for next year.
As for Divekick having a primetime spot on Sunday instead of Injustice, this is, in fact, a case of sponsors. Unlike UFGT8, where we had several sponsors, the number of sponsors for UFGT9 actually went down. The biggest sponsor for UFGT9 was in fact Iron Galaxy. Therefore, their game got precedence on the main stage, even ahead of Super Street Fighter 4. And yes, since Keits works at Iron Galaxy and Divekick is his game, self-interest did rule the day. But running a big tournament like this is a very selfless thing. We don't do this for money (I ended up in the red and Keits broke even, I think), we do this for the fighting game community. I feel that putting his game in primetime is a small benefit to the big energy and money loss of running a major tournament. (And if WB or Team Ninja or Lab Zero paid to sponsor UFGT, their games would get the god treatment as well, guaranteed.)
Sum up: We don't hate NRS games at UFGT. We don't hate the community either. I consider myself good friends with Delriach, Medina, Dizzy, Steve, Webster, Tommy, and the rest of the GGA guys. And if you go back to UFGT8, that MK tournament was very successful, I felt, and everybody seemed to have a good time. Obviously things at UFGT9 were not so great for many of you. Some of that is because things didn't go as planned, and more of that is because things did go as planned. Once again, scheduling MK at midnight on Saturday and Injustice at 9:30am on Sunday was a huge mistake. If you don't want to attend UFGT10, I completely understand. All I can do is say that we will try our hardest to do better next year.
EDIT Forgot one thing
Stage Selection: The game was new, and there was a lot of discussion over which was the best way to handle stage selection rules at UFGT9. I heard a lot of different opinions on the issue (and I mean a lot). We ultimately decided that the rule would be loser would have the option to 50/50 a new stage, but with all the confusion from all the different possibilities to handle it, I think we only announced it as just "you can 50/50" not "you can 50/50 if you lose". So because of the confusion, it ended up with people just 50/50ing at the beginning of every match. Anyway, this won't be an issue for UFGT10 since there's a defined ruleset now.
EDIT Also forgot about this until I saw Keits' tweets
Number of setups: I'm actually going to side with the bad guys on this one. We only obtain the number of setups we need to run the tournament, which in this case was just 4 for Injustice. There was a BYOC station in the back with free monitors to hook up consoles to, which few people took advantage of. (Admittedly, that's something we need to promote more in the future, since I'm not sure many people were aware of it.) With just 4 monitors, we were able to run Injustice perfectly on time.
However, I will admit that in comparison to Marvel and Street Fighter, Injustice had fewer setups. Marvel, SF, and Injustice all had 16 tournament pools, the difference was that the Capcom pools were run 4 at a time in 4 total time blocks while Injustice pools ran only 2 at a time in 8 total time blocks. So not only did Injustice have 4 fewer setups than Marvel & SF, but there was also much less time for casual matches than those other games, with tournament pools happening throughout both Friday and Saturday. And with Injustice having significantly more entrants than other games with only 4 setups (although significantly fewer entrants than Marvel or SF), I can certainly understand the frustrations you have. I think we were all caught off-guard by how popular Injustice turned out to be. I also think we didn't realize how much people use our tournament setups for casuals. Injustice did pull the short straw in this particular case, but given that there were other options for getting more casuals in, the small number of setups is not one of the things that I'm going to apologize for.
. But he wasn't the only crazy guy. I remember some fool put $50 bucks down on Doomsday...
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