SC2SEA.com - Starcraft 2 SEA eSports Community Site

My AVCon Experience
 

This last weekend AVCon was on, which is a large anime and video games convention in Adelaide. A lot of the local sc2 players turned up for the sc2 tournament, expecting an event that was going to be as good as last year's WCG qualifier held at AVCon. Last year's tournament was one of the most memorable tournaments to be held in Adelaide, with Bielsko winning against TAVoices.

I turned up, waited in line for an hour to get my weekend pass for $60, then proceeded almost immediately to tournament signups, to sign up for the sc2 tournament. I then derped around for a few hours, checking out the games they had on display while waiting for the sc2 tournament. When the time finally came for the tournament, there were a lot of familiar faces (many of which were at the GSL finals barcraft the previous night), but also a lot of unfamiliar ones. It turned out that a lot of people at the convention had sc2 accounts, although they might not have all been too good at 1v1s. There were around 60 signups for the 32 player tournament.

Of course, because I had signed up so early, I wasn't too worried about not getting in to the tournament. I just calmly waited for my username to be announced. Unfortunately, it wasn't called. Thats ok, I thought, I'd probably be pretty high on the reserves, although something had to have gone wrong for this to have happened in the first place. So I waited, and my username was never called. It turns out that some of the signups had been misplaced somehow.

A quick explanation of how the signups worked: AVCon would signup the players, by scanning in the pass they had and registering information on it, as well as adding it to the signups list. Half an hour before the tournament started, they brought the signup information over to Street Geek, who were the people in charge of the lan area. Street geek would then proceed to run the tournament. Somehow in this process, they lost a portion of the signups. How they could manage that, I have no idea.

So, I stuck around to see the rest of the tournament. The internet cut out in the semis, which is when the last zerg player forfeited. The tournament had been going on for a fair while by then. The finals was a PvP Champi vs Jak (Spider), which turned out to never really happen as the internet dropped towards the end of game 1. It resulted in them doing rock paper scissors to decide the winner.

So, Champi got first place, winning a razer xbox 360 controller. Yes, they had an xbox controller as the prize for an sc2 tournament. It wasn't even a good prize for how much money we had to spend to get in to the convention.

The next day was a similar deal, I turned up, registered for the league of legends tournament with flamga and friends (who had pre-registered on the avcon website as well), then proceeded to wait for the LoL tournament. We'd set up our rune pages, our masteries and our strategies, and then find out they had yet again screwed up signups and we wouldn't be able to play.

I think its pretty disgusting that they could screw up this badly multiple times in two days, and not try to fix any of the problems they were having. Whenever they said there were signup problems, they said they were sorry and there was nothing they could do. Then continued on with the tournaments and repeat the same mistakes. At this point, I'm not too interested in wasting my money by going to AVCon next year, unless they can promise these mistakes won't happen again.

Edit: Stuff from Champi's Post
I was near the end of the line when champi and jak were signing up for the tournament. Both of them got in, I didn't. Was like rolling a dice. As for the screens, they had 10 widescreen monitors on computers that could run sc2 decently and 20 small screens. Some of the computers for the smaller screens could only barely run sc2. That admin was super annoying too lol

Also, ADMachine was one of the players at last year's broodwar tournament. He was saying how he doesnt play much but that hes pretty much masters. He proceeded to lose in the broodwar tournament well before I was put against him.