Hey guys,
Pardon me for my late respond. I felt so bad for what happened during the WGC that I needed some time to figure everything out. So where can I begin? Maybe the first thing is to try to explain why there is no MK love in France and as a result, why the tournament organization was so fucked up.
MK9 competitive life in France was really short. I mean something like one month or one month and a half. The game was released in April and we had a major tournament two weeks after. A lot of SFIV top players attended the tournament and gave a lot of support to the game. But because of netcode issues, patches and a lot of problems the game had at the beginning, they stopped playing it. After that, the game was definitively dead and disappeared from tournaments. A lot of players then said the game is crap and it became the general statement in France. To give you an example, Cimerian bodied free a Scorpion player during WGC, this guy is a SFIV top player and was a former support of the game . He entered the tournament for having fun and couldn't believe the game was still played seriously.
Here comes the big problem related to WGC organization. MK isn't considered at all in France. People makes distinction saying MK is not a fighting game in the way they see it. You know, the classic "it's not like Street Fighter" or any Japanese 2D fighting game, so it's necessarily bad. I know it's complete nonsense but, this is how it is. MK is not the only game in this kind of situation, we even have people saying that UMvC3 isn't a serious game because you have more than two characters at the same time on the screen. But as we have a little local scene on Marvel and top players supporting the game, things are totally different.
Concerning the organization itself, as MK9 disappeared from tournament they weren't aware the game was patched several times since its released and they didn't even know you have to finish the story mode to unlock Quan Chi. No one amongst the organizers knew a single thing about MK except one person who was already busy with all the mvc3/Blazblue/sfxt stuff. This is why I decided to help them in the organization of the tournament and that's a reason why I couldn't do that much for you guys . I was initially supposed to do things on the second stream, but finally spent most of my time trying to fix all the problems. In this situation, I had no power to do something by my own.
Shit happens in tournament, it's a part of the organization process, but the main problem here was you as members of the FGC not being welcomed during that event. Even if there were more people for MK (mostly from abroad) than for BlazBlue and Third Strike included, MK was still the little game from the poll that nobody care about. I tried my best to obtain you everything you needed (patched consoles, more freeplay setups...) but nobody gave a shit about what was going on. For that part, I definitely believe things would have been different if the Komplete Edition had been released before. To give you an idea, someone bought Skarlet just at the beginning of the tournament especially for one player because the DLCs codes given by Warner weren't working.
The worst part in that is, initially, the organizers wanted to have MK on their tournament. They tried their best and, unfortunately, also made a lot of mistakes. I still don't understand why they suddenly changed the tournament schedule whereas it was mentioned several times by mails that top 4 was on Sunday. Apparently, French players asked to change the tournament schedule because it was written somewhere on the official website that MK was only on Saturday. I was busy somewhere else when they made that decision and even if I tried to reverse the situation as the majority of the foreign players understood correctly that top 4 was on Sunday, nothing was possible.
Different problems happened at the same time (not only for MK), people were really stressed out and all the people in charge of the event had a different version. It was a complete mess. When it was finally decided top 4 was on Saturday, I tried to negotiate a two hours exhibition on the stream 2 where the top 4 was supposed to be broadcast. But here again, things fucked up I don't know why, and friends of mine had literally to hijack the stream station to put you on for only a small amount of time.
I don't blame all the organization staff for what happened. I don't think they despised MK players or anything, they had just no clue of what is going on in the European scene. The vast majority of the French players are online warriors and as a matter of fact, they are unknown outside the MK sphere which means they had no one who could be in charge of the tournament. On the other games, players involved in their scene helped running their tournaments. For MK, it was famous Soul Calibur players from GnouzCorp who ran it and they didn't even entered the SCV single tournament happening at the same time. So, even if they didn't really care about the game, they did what they could.
Finally, the organizers asked me to thank you for being so nice and relaxed with all those troubles around the weekend. The tournament in itself was really cool and the organizers quite enjoyed doing it. Few of them told me they were really impressed by the MK European scene in general and felt they were more solidarity in it than in the French Soul Calibur community (often shown as an example in France). I'm personally sad this tournament wasn't really a good start for people entering their first tournament abroad. A lot of work has still to be done in France for MK players being considered as part of the FGC. But anyway, I hope we'll see you again in the future, it could be on MK (why not) or on another game, and that time, everything will be fine.
Good luck for anyone entering Evo this year and long live MK.
Oh, I almost forgot. Direct footage of the top 4 are now available.
