IMO The issue is way to many tournaments in a small amount of time. It's unreasonable to expect people to travel to every single one. I had to choose between Canada and this one and i chose canada, one because I wanted to hang out with my friends from there and two because i had already planned it pre ufgt.
I can say that Toryuken was the best community major i have been to yet. It was ran on time, we registered at the door, there was plenty of space and we had a huge projector set up with like 100 seats. And they let us do an 8 v 8 on stream with everyone watching on that big setup. It didn't start until 3 pm and top 8 didn't start until 4 the next day. Also it was on a ps3 not xbox. Was GODLIKE!
This is more of a thing for
Ponder and
MrWizard than
Keits, but IMO this "problem" is something that really ought to be talked about more. Last year in 2011, there were 10-11 (a list I found has 10, but it's omitting ECT) EVO Qualifying Tournaments, which essentially made 10-11 big tournaments for people to travel to (One of those was in Australia, so it's really 9-10 tournaments).
This year, there were 16 such events! That's a ridiculous # of tournaments, and players have to budget their time and money accordingly. This results in one of two effects:
1. Every tournament gets mid-sized fields for MK (and other games get not huge fields) of around 30-50 players, because players end up not traveling and going only to the tourneys closest to them and maybe one other tourney.
or
2. Most tournaments have tiny fields for MK and then a few get the entire community to come out, resulting in large fields.
We've seen, in MK at least, a mixture of 1 and 2. Final Round had a huge MK field (120 is pretty damn good), but then no later EVO tourney has seemed to have more than 50 players (MLG had over 90, admittedly). The end result is that MK tourney fields seem small, as the community is heavily diluted.
For MK, that kind of sucks. And It is nice I guess to support as many big tourneys as possible by giving them EVO recognition, but it does make certain games look worse and may not be building scenes as players don't get together. Normally this wouldn't be that big of a problem, except EVO now has a limit on the playerbase due to it being so damn big, meaning even that tourney may not have the whole community coming together as it should.
