GGA soonk
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After this weekend's event in Philly, it has become glaringly obvious that some changes need to be made at our community run events. Unfortunately, nobody in the community wants to speak up and be "that guy," but I don't mind, so here goes.
The first issue lies in having participating players creating pools and brackets. There is a clear conflict of interest here, and even if nothing fishy is actually going on, there's no point in leaving room for speculation. We have heard of suspected player rigging at more than one tournament, and NEC was just one more on the list. If a player notices something not right(such as BlueNine being seeded higher than w1nter warz) and points it out, he now becomes "that guy" and nothing done from this point on is going to be the correct choice. If players are moved, the player that brought it up becomes accused of rigging pools/brackets himself or just flat out being a diva/whiner/excuse maker/etc, and if no players are moved, someone else is accused of bracket rigging. People end up mad at each other or feeling slighted, and it just creates an unnecessary situation that could be easily avoided by having non-participating members of the community create pools and brackets.
My next concern lies in adding players to the tournament after registration has been closed. We saw something like this at Evo when noobe was moved to a later pool for missing his scheduled time, and twice at NEC this past weekend with Pimpuigi being added sometime midday and Riu48 being added late at night after most of the tournament was already completed. Since when is this acceptable? Riu took out a lot of players in a tournament he rightfully should have not been participating in. Consider w1nter warz possibly being seeded improperly then losing to a player that was just added to the last pool because rules apparently mean nothing. I'm sure he's at home scratching his head right now, much like I am.
The third concern is schedule. It really can't be that hard to stick to a set schedule. Keits does it. MLG does it. Why can't anybody else? Registration was kept open an extra hour for no real reason(which makes no sense, since registering/pre-registering apparently doesn't mean a thing at our tournaments), the concerns over bracket rigging took extra time(which again, could have easily been avoided) and setups were managed poorly during the event. It's not a big deal that there were 8 pools, but it's clear that there's a point about halfway through each pool where you end up waiting on matches to finish to start other matches, which means stations will be open. It would make sense to start the next pools on those open stations, but instead we waited for each set of pools to finish before starting new ones. As a result, players that thought they would be playing that evening ended up standing around all day waiting for their pools, only to be told at midnight to come back at 10am the next day. That is really an unacceptable way to treat the players that make your event what it is.
Stream station lag. I'm tired of it. Nobody else but PL will say anything about stream station lag, but I never have an issue speaking up when it's unplayable. When you have players like CD jr missing their anti-airs, you have to wonder if something is up. When I watched GGA HAN actively try to AA k-frog's jumps and fail over and over, I told Phil that it was unplayable and he needed to do something about it. I was informed that we were the only two complaining about it, so I proceeded to pull top player after top player(jr, death, curbo, brady) to confirm what I was saying, and he did what he could to take care of it, but the problem is I promise you this kind of thing will cost people matches. Part of the problem is nobody wants to ever say anything. If a lesser known player complains, they have no standing so nobody really cares, and if a top player complains, they get labeled as a diva. Another issue is I'm not so sure the streamers are bothering to look for setups that create less lag. Splitting the signal 4 or 5 ways so you can have extra monitors and projectors and whatnot are not helping. I believe I have a lagless stream setup that I will be testing this Thursday at GGA, and if it works as well as I think it will, I will forward the information to the TO's in hopes that they upgrade their setups to provide a better experience for the players. The third variable in this is the system we choose to play on. As much as the community doesn't want to switch to Xbox, I have not seen that system slow down the way the PS3 tends to. During my match with Curbo, we spent most of the time looking at each other wondering why we were even bothering. The slowdown made the game unplayable, and it was rife with grounded gasblasts, dropped combos, and missed inputs. Certain characters make it worse, like Kabal and Cyrax, putting way more stuff on the screen than the system can handle. Dealing with the input delay from the ps3 is one thing; we can prepare for that. Random slowdowns, however, can't be prepared for, and it's unfortunate when you spend the time and money to fly out to an offline tournament only to deal with lag issues. If we wanted lag we could just play online for free.
I understand that the people running these events put a lot into it, but I also feel that certain decisions end up making running the event more difficult. I think that players have always had these complains but never really seem to bring them up, or offer solutions, and instead just sweep things under the rug and write it off as standard tournament practice. I don't agree with this, and hopefully neither does the rest of the community.
The first issue lies in having participating players creating pools and brackets. There is a clear conflict of interest here, and even if nothing fishy is actually going on, there's no point in leaving room for speculation. We have heard of suspected player rigging at more than one tournament, and NEC was just one more on the list. If a player notices something not right(such as BlueNine being seeded higher than w1nter warz) and points it out, he now becomes "that guy" and nothing done from this point on is going to be the correct choice. If players are moved, the player that brought it up becomes accused of rigging pools/brackets himself or just flat out being a diva/whiner/excuse maker/etc, and if no players are moved, someone else is accused of bracket rigging. People end up mad at each other or feeling slighted, and it just creates an unnecessary situation that could be easily avoided by having non-participating members of the community create pools and brackets.
My next concern lies in adding players to the tournament after registration has been closed. We saw something like this at Evo when noobe was moved to a later pool for missing his scheduled time, and twice at NEC this past weekend with Pimpuigi being added sometime midday and Riu48 being added late at night after most of the tournament was already completed. Since when is this acceptable? Riu took out a lot of players in a tournament he rightfully should have not been participating in. Consider w1nter warz possibly being seeded improperly then losing to a player that was just added to the last pool because rules apparently mean nothing. I'm sure he's at home scratching his head right now, much like I am.
The third concern is schedule. It really can't be that hard to stick to a set schedule. Keits does it. MLG does it. Why can't anybody else? Registration was kept open an extra hour for no real reason(which makes no sense, since registering/pre-registering apparently doesn't mean a thing at our tournaments), the concerns over bracket rigging took extra time(which again, could have easily been avoided) and setups were managed poorly during the event. It's not a big deal that there were 8 pools, but it's clear that there's a point about halfway through each pool where you end up waiting on matches to finish to start other matches, which means stations will be open. It would make sense to start the next pools on those open stations, but instead we waited for each set of pools to finish before starting new ones. As a result, players that thought they would be playing that evening ended up standing around all day waiting for their pools, only to be told at midnight to come back at 10am the next day. That is really an unacceptable way to treat the players that make your event what it is.
Stream station lag. I'm tired of it. Nobody else but PL will say anything about stream station lag, but I never have an issue speaking up when it's unplayable. When you have players like CD jr missing their anti-airs, you have to wonder if something is up. When I watched GGA HAN actively try to AA k-frog's jumps and fail over and over, I told Phil that it was unplayable and he needed to do something about it. I was informed that we were the only two complaining about it, so I proceeded to pull top player after top player(jr, death, curbo, brady) to confirm what I was saying, and he did what he could to take care of it, but the problem is I promise you this kind of thing will cost people matches. Part of the problem is nobody wants to ever say anything. If a lesser known player complains, they have no standing so nobody really cares, and if a top player complains, they get labeled as a diva. Another issue is I'm not so sure the streamers are bothering to look for setups that create less lag. Splitting the signal 4 or 5 ways so you can have extra monitors and projectors and whatnot are not helping. I believe I have a lagless stream setup that I will be testing this Thursday at GGA, and if it works as well as I think it will, I will forward the information to the TO's in hopes that they upgrade their setups to provide a better experience for the players. The third variable in this is the system we choose to play on. As much as the community doesn't want to switch to Xbox, I have not seen that system slow down the way the PS3 tends to. During my match with Curbo, we spent most of the time looking at each other wondering why we were even bothering. The slowdown made the game unplayable, and it was rife with grounded gasblasts, dropped combos, and missed inputs. Certain characters make it worse, like Kabal and Cyrax, putting way more stuff on the screen than the system can handle. Dealing with the input delay from the ps3 is one thing; we can prepare for that. Random slowdowns, however, can't be prepared for, and it's unfortunate when you spend the time and money to fly out to an offline tournament only to deal with lag issues. If we wanted lag we could just play online for free.
I understand that the people running these events put a lot into it, but I also feel that certain decisions end up making running the event more difficult. I think that players have always had these complains but never really seem to bring them up, or offer solutions, and instead just sweep things under the rug and write it off as standard tournament practice. I don't agree with this, and hopefully neither does the rest of the community.
(the mk community's feelings on why ps3 is better for tournaments.)
