The only issue I encountered was being uninformed that if I had an issue midgame with my opponent to stop the game immediately and ask for an admin. It does seem very logical and obvious in hindsight but when you are in the situation and focusing on the game, it didn't occur to me. Maybe just reinforcing this fact in the speech before games started would've helped for me to think about it in the moment. I'm not sure if it was said during the speech before we started or not - if it was, then i apologise.
I can see why you'd be upset by a pause, the early pool is designed to catch them of guard and get damage done.. However pausing gives you time to compose yourself, think about the best response and make it happen asap. Rather than perhaps making a rash decision in the heat of the moment. Moral of the story, play with out music. You can hear the game you're playing at a competitive level much clearer. quite frankly, I don't see why people play music while playing SC2. Also with Internet bandwidth being shared by other competitors, I think its very selfish and should be banned by ACL to stream music.
That said, Petrify, its not very likely that pausing the game made any difference to the outcome of the match. Cheer up.
My god your so salty you need to chill out mate. He literally just paused the game zzzzzzz
I'm not trying to create drama, i'm providing feedback... which is the point of this thread... you are the one who needs to chill out. It wasn't just a pause. Pretty much everyone watching the games reaction was "wtf????".
Quote:
I can see why you'd be upset by a pause, the early pool is designed to catch them of guard and get damage done.. However pausing gives you time to compose yourself, think about the best response and make it happen asap.
This is why I was mad at the time. The pause was clearly at a time where he needed to think.
Quote:
That said, Petrify, its not very likely that pausing the game made any difference to the outcome of the match. Cheer up.
It just tilted me, I'm completely fine now, I'm just trying to provide feedback to prevent this situation from happening again.
Good:
- Admin were friendly and accommodating
- Nice setup
- Spare Headsets/Gear
- Tournament Seedings
Bad:
- Tournament Time Scheduling
- Lack of structured rounds
- New tournament style (completed all of bracket B first before moving to bracket A).
- Too much basic information at the beginning of the day (could be posted on a web page instead to save time).
From my understanding, there were 2 brackets (A & B). A decision was made at some point to complete all of a single bracket first before progressing onto another bracket. I am not sure if this has been done before, but it seemed like a somewhat unorganised or lack of thought decision as people had to hang around for a long time in case it was their turn to play after a few hours.
If thought had gone into it, then it would be logical to begin this type of tournament structure with bracket A. In addition, this meant many players did not know what times their games would complete, and meant that some players were not available at the correct time which contributed to time waste and in some cases walkovers. This also made it more difficult for admins to manage.
Suggestion is to prepare a more thorough planned time schedule for each round so that players are aware when they should be expected to be available. If time does go over the planned schedule, then at least you still have people turning up on time for their matches. If implemented, Admins may not have to micromanage and multi-task finding and matching players.
Overall the event worked out due to the hard work of the starcraft admin/volunteer team and it looked good overall from a spectator point of view.
one suggestion moving forward, the more of you who pay before the tournament, the easier it is for us to have the brackets ready for you as soon as you walk in.
Each time a player paid and registered, we had to add them to the list in points order to make it as fair as possible for seeding. as you noticed, we had to redo the two brackets a few times due to late signups etc.
if you prepay its also one less thing you have to worry about organizing on the day
Open bracket seeding was ******* shambolic. I don't think you can simply brush it aside and say it's the player's fault for not having enough ACL points. Seems to me like you're passing the blame onto a system, when that system (to me, at least) looks to be pretty poor. There's not enough chance to gain ACL points except for qualifiers for ACL events themselves; some people don't or can't play these online rounds for a myriad of reasons. To have one bracket completely stacked and the other one basically free seed for anyone half competent is absurd and needs to be addressed for future events so something like this doesn't happen again.
*
But there was 6 online rounds and a LAN this year to get points in...
Sure, but the kinds of players who are competing at ACL for a shot at getting into the group stages don't play tournaments for "points". I'm pretty surprised to see this system being defended when two really strong players were knocked out in the open bracket, when they could potentially have topped a couple of the groups in pool stages.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ETL.abbadonz
I'm not speaking for or against the system at this point, just pointing out how we could streamline the current process.
If you had control of how seeding was done, how would you go about doing it?
Constructive criticism is great, but suggestions and ideas are better!
I'm no expert on tournament seeding, but when there's a huge bracket **** up like we had this ACL, you should re-generate the brackets. Pretty stupid when you have players like Blysk coming in from Singapore to play and then having to deal with some of the worst bracket luck. Some people (Baldie included) would probably argue that this is subjective, but it's honestly common sense. Why would any tournament throw its big name dedicated players under the bus for a couple of (no offense) no-names who got there simply because the brackets were seeded in a stupid way?
Sorry but it's not making sense to me, maybe I'm just dumb and it's fair that some of the biggest names in SEA had to fight through one open bracket and some of them fell while a couple of mid-master players got through on the other bracket.
Seeding is a difficult issue: it's not like there's a quickfix and I understand why the current system is in place - at first glance it makes sense to seed ACL events based on ACL points and it's clearly unbiased. That said (and as my previous post made clear), it's not fair. there are a couple of problems with the "just play in the online rounds" argument:
* Many players do not play the online qualifiers, whether it's because they don't plan to attend the LAN that far in advance or simply that the time doesn't work for them.
* A good player having 0 ACL points doesn't just hurt them, it hurts other good players who hit them in the brackets.
I've seen OSC points recommended as a solution but I'm not sure that entirely works either - there are many good players who don't play online tournaments. Even just drawing the line at NA GM would have been a lot better than what we had, but once again not everyone ladders on that server. I can't actually think of an objective metric that would produce totally fair seeds, but I feel like this tournament was a shining example of why something more than just ACL points is probably appropriate.
Thanks to Brad, Dale, Todd and anyone else I'm forgetting for keeping everything together - you did a great job overall, and this is obviously the kind of procedural issue that needs to be fixed between events, not during them.
I know this isn't very constructive but i gotta say it, I've been playing starcraft since 1998, and this was my first offline event I have ever been to, and I am kicking myself that I didn't go to one earlier. I didn't know what to expect but i had the best damn time watching all these games and meeting so many awesome people in this community. This community really does make this scene so great, and i'm definitely making the effort to go to more events in the future.
I'm no expert on tournament seeding, but when there's a huge bracket **** up like we had this ACL, you should re-generate the brackets
So you are saying they should rig the brackets so all the good players make it? That actually sounds dumb to me, as Maynarde said they had 6 online rounds to play in to qualify, if they couldn't make it for various reasons that is no fault to ACL at all.
Its just like saying oh Barcelona are one of the best teams in Spain so they don't have to play any games at all during the year to earn the points needed to win the La Liga, they only have to play the real important games and that's it.
Yes it sucks for the good players but it is what it is RNG good unit nothing you can do about that
But if there's a player who is essentially a blank slate in terms of whatever seeding system you're using but still very good you can't just mega micro manage everything or else bias will start creeping into the brackets.
I agree with your idea from earlier that maybe just have a list of NA GMs+ with no points and seed them above the others who don't have any ACL points.
___________________________________
The Transformer Zerg, Jadron Burgerman @Soundwave
But if there's a player who is essentially a blank slate in terms of whatever seeding system you're using but still very good you can't just mega micro manage everything or else bias will start creeping into the brackets.
Yeah, this is why some thought needs to go in to a fairer seeding system - I'm not specifically advocating an ad-hoc approach (though it has worked pretty well for local LANs in the past).
I had lots of fun, thanks to ACl for the amazing event.
I feel like the problem with the open bracket partly emerged because of this whole notion of "yearly points". It seems ridiculous that online rounds played back before Brisbane should be given equal weight to qualifying for Sydney as the Sydney online rounds themselves. In fact, the weighting for yearly points was so skewed towards season 1, that even if Tajea himself had come and played in online rounds three and four he still would have barely scraped into groups with a measly 600 points.
So my feedback is this: online rounds should only give points for a single ACL. (If this had been implemented for Sydney, MK, Frustration and Iaguz would have all gotten groups, and players like me and Runamok wouldn't have had better seeding than players like Blysk and Pidgeon.
My other piece of feedback is to really try to maximize interactions between the different games at ACL. I thought it was awesome the way the FIFA finals really drew a crowd, because it was right at the centre of the event. But with the Starcraft, LoL and Smash all being off in separate rooms I felt there was a bit of a disconnect. I for one would have loved to watch some LoL and Smash if it was made really clear to everybody at the event that a big game was happening.
FluX, i see what you mean with both Fighto and Blysk getting knocked out early but;
4 players from open bracket placed top 2 in pro pools.
Pigeon, Frustration, RivaL and iaguz.
Two of these players came from Bracket A and two from Bracket B.
Pigeon and Frustration, from arguably the 'easier' bracket placed 3rd and 5/6th respectively. Obviously they were capable of taking the pro bracket placings they won considering they beat a bunch of 'pros'
So my feedback is this: online rounds should only give points for a single ACL. (If this had been implemented for Sydney, MK, Frustration and Iaguz would have all gotten groups, and players like me and Runamok wouldn't have had better seeding than players like Blysk and Pidgeon.
My other piece of feedback is to really try to maximize interactions between the different games at ACL. I thought it was awesome the way the FIFA finals really drew a crowd, because it was right at the centre of the event. But with the Starcraft, LoL and Smash all being off in separate rooms I felt there was a bit of a disconnect. I for one would have loved to watch some LoL and Smash if it was made really clear to everybody at the event that a big game was happening.
Agreed on both points, would have been cool to watch some smash but I completely forgot it was going on.
Quote:
Originally Posted by TtSYF.tRoy
FluX, i see what you mean with both Fighto and Blysk getting knocked out early but;
4 players from open bracket placed top 2 in pro pools.
Pigeon, Frustration, RivaL and iaguz.
Two of these players came from Bracket A and two from Bracket B.
Pigeon and Frustration, from arguably the 'easier' bracket placed 3rd and 5/6th respectively. Obviously they were capable of taking the pro bracket placings they won considering they beat a bunch of 'pros'
Look at the next two players from each bracket. MK and I managed ~50% winrates in groups, and only barely eliminated Blysk and Fighto - they were both knocked out 1-2 1-2 by some combination of david, iaguz and I. Runamok and South qualified dropping only two maps between them and went 0-5 in groups. Not trying to be mean here, just trying to establish that I really don't think you can seriously refute that the brackets were stacked - the argument should be about whether or not ACL points are a fair way to seed.
Even the smallest donations help keep sc2sea running! All donations go towards helping our site run including our monthly server hosting fees and sc2sea sponsored community tournaments we host. Find out more here.