TLDR: This is a 2500 word wall of text written off the top of my head, and is basically just to get stuff off of my chest and give part of my opinion on the recent Avant drama.
This is basically all lead-up to the event itself, so starting from roughly March to the day before AVCon. I'll post the rest about the actual event and after the event in the next day or two.
Sorry it's so late, I just totally forgot and was lazy. Basically I felt a bit 'eh' about the entire weekend as far as my side of things went, so I wanted to clarify some things, just so I get stuff off of my chest.
(For those of you that don't know me, all you need to know is that I've ran like 10+ LAN tournaments in Adelaide and like a billion online tournaments)
So basically, this started a long time ago, maybe early March. Thanh (Arena Internet Cafe 2ic, and person that organised sponsorships etc for my LANs) wanted to "have something bigger" than just the normal Arena LANs, so he suggested having a larger tournament at AVCon (www.avcon.org.au). Troy (the guy that runs the fighting game community in Adelaide) had lots of experience with the people from AVCon, so he decided to spearhead the thing. Basically Thanh talked a bit about it but then never said anything after, so I was like "meh". One day I was walking to Uni after going to Arena (Arena is like 2 minutes walk from Uni) and I ran into Thanh and his brother, and he told me that he, Troy and Seth (2ic of Avant, runs all the LoL stuff in Adelaide) were going to meet with AVCon and see what they could organise. I didn't go to the meeting (because I literally heard about it 2 hours beforeit was going to happen lel) but basically they went and said "Gvie us X amount of floor space, good internet and 100% control" and they said sure, and that was that. I was skeptical and we demanded 100% control because historically, the AVCon people have been AWFUL when it comes to tournaments, and anyone can back me up on this. Ask Satu about last year, lol. I ran WCG for Adelaide there in 2011, I struggled to make it work, and it only barely did, but anyway. So this was still a long way away, and in the very infant stages. The original plan was to have SC2, Dota2 and LoL, since I have loads of experience with SC2/Dota2 and Seth has loads of experience with LoL so it would've been pretty easy for us. We (Seth, Troy and I) trying to figure out a good way to set up the tournaments format, with qualifiers etc, which in hindsight would've never worked. So we're organising it all and it's going slow but okay, then Thanh calls me one day and says something along the lines of "Seth reckons he can get a guy that can get us thousands of dollars in prizes from sponsors. Now, here's where things get interesting.
My entire mentality for events (especially LAN events) is to have a slow, consistent growth and not to bite off more than I can chew, because when that happens EVERYBODY is negatively effected. For example, Reloaded (http://www.reloadgaming.net/) was a huge BYOC LAN that happened usually twice a year in Adelaide, and often had loads of pretty big prize pool tournaments. The CSS tournaments were usually spanning all 3 days of the LAN, and were always a clusterfuck because of poor setup/admins/etc, and often times the tournament would finish at like 2am or wouldn't even finish at all. I didn't want my tournaments to be shit like that, so I was very hesitant to the idea. Furthermore, our event was going to be at a venue that I had only run a tournament at once, and that was under wildly different circumstances. For WCG 2011, everything was provided (PCs, all manual labour, all prizes etc), and all I had to do was show up, meet the TGS lady and haymo, and run the tournament. For 2013 AVCon, we had to provide all of the PCs (10 sponsor PCs built in the days leading up to the event) and 18 PCs from Arena, literally lugging them down the stairs, into Thanh's car, and dropping them off to the Entertainment Centre the Friday night before the Saturday start. Backing up a bit, I wanted to have just a smaller tournament for LoL, Dota2 and SC2 with mostly local players, and maybe $1000 for each tournament. As I said before, we were entering a place where we have 0 prior experience and it's all a completely new learning experience, if it fucks up on a large scale noone will want to come back and everyone involved will feel really shitty about it, but if it's small scale and goes badly, we've lost less overall, but if it goes good then we can ramp it up the next year and be more confident in every aspect of the tournament. That's what I argued to Thanh, but I guess you kinda have to know him to understand why him saying "Yeah, I see what you mean, I'll keep in touch" really means "ok i dont care". The contact between Thanh, Troy, Seth, and I was really, really bad. We didn't really talk on a regular basis, so when I spoke to each of them, I got 3 different accounts of what was going to be happening.
So, this is where Wes comes in to the picture. Wes is the owner of Avant, and from the get go, I was kind of weary. As before, Thanh calls me up and says we can get huge prize pools and attract interstate players. The first number I heard was $20,000, and I laughed and basically dismissed it as ridiculous, because in my years in esports, anyone that appears from nowhere and promises ludicrous amounts of money especially in a region like Australia, they're either scamming or lying. As we got more involved with Wes (I still hadn't spoken to him yet, just hearsay from Seth/Thanh/Troy) there was lots of changes happening in format and games. With more money, they wanted more interstate and less local, which I was really opposed to. We'd given up on Dota2, since there were no real teams in Australia that would be willing to travel to Adelaide, while SC2 and LoL have established scenes and both Seth and I were well known and involved in the communities, so players wouldn't be concerned. Oddly enough, I get told we can't do Dota2 because of those reasons, but then apparently Wes wanted CS:GO to be on the roster, despite CS:GO being even less structured than Dota2, anyway, I basically said "there is no ******* way CS:GO will ever be at this event", and the idea was scrapped. So I hadn't gotten my way on the format and stuff, but I wasn't REALLY fussed, I just wanted the event to go smoothly, as that was the only thing I had a large amount of actual control over. We decided on online/LAN qualifiers for both games, with 16 players for SC2 and 8 teams for LoL. In an effort to promote local competition and give some potential money in to the scene, I was working on the premise of having 8 online qualifiers and 8 LAN qualifiers. I was really, really eager to announce what was going on, but since it was impossible to get a concrete number out of Wes (i literally just accidentally hit ctrl-W which closes the tab, thank **** you can do ctrl+shift+T to reopen tab, lol) or Seth for the prize money, I couldn't announce anything so qualifiers were going to be relatively late, and players would have to scramble last minute to get their flights and accom all ready. The number changed from the original $20,000 to $16,000 I think, then $14,000 (7k each game), then finally at $12,000 ($7k LoL, $5k SC2). I met up with Troy to discuss some stuff about this, and he told me that we would be using the Avant (AGS) website to do signups and registration and we'd be charging for online qualifiers. I tried to explain that online tournaments for SC2 were pretty much never behind a paywall, and we had a giant argument about how to actually price the SC2 online quals (the LoL ones were $100 per team as far as I know, and never changed). We had to charge because we actually had to buy the tickets in to AVCon, only staff got free entry, so there were 56 total tickets we needed. I tried to do the logical thing and just make everyone that qualified pay the $35 that was our price for tickets (retail weekend pass was like $80 I think), so we wouldn't have any problems with missing our target on the low end and I wouldn't feel bad about possibly getting money if we got more numbers than expected. Also in this talk with Troy, it was revealed that Wes wanted as few local players as possible, saying that they wouldn't be good enough against the online qualifiers. I think my exact words to Troy were something like "Well Wes has no ******* idea what he's talking about.", though on reflection I think saying "he knows borderline nothing" would've been more fitting. Normally, if Seth/Troy/Thanh wanted to know something about SC2, they'd ask me, and likewise for LoL and fighting games, but now someone that knew nothing was trying to make decisions for me and I was kinda annoyed.
That night I got Wes on Skype and tried to iron out the final prize pool, qualifier/main event format and pricing, and just get some more general info about stuff. My first impressions weren't very good, and honestly I should've spoken up and asserted myself then, but I'm too much of a pussy. Basically he told me that I was wrong about everything, and SA players would get buttraped by online qualifiers and spewed a whole bunch of "sponsor this sponsor that" talk, apparently clueless about my history and involvement with loads of different teams and events in loads of different roles in esports. Basically he treated me like an idiot. I can't remember how we talked about the qualifiers pricing scheme, he was obsessed with people having to put money in to play, which I understood since the qualification prize was entry into a LAN in another state, but I just had no idea why my idea of just having the qualified players pay for their cheaper ticket would not work. Anyway I just gave up and let him have his way of $10 entry for everyone in the online qual. I had no choice but to accept his decision of 14 online and 2 LAN qualifiers, even though I really really wanted 4 LAN spots at a minimum. Anyway, the qualifiers were a bit confusing for me, because the LAN one went pretty badly (on the plus side, I had an exam that morning and did really well in it, so I was pretty cheerful that day) and the turnout was really low and it was actually pretty relaxed, while the online qualifier had way way way more people than I expected, especially with an awful website/paypal registration thing that I had to use, and it went smoothly, but I was quite sad that Fenner didnt qualify, i really want to meet him
So after the qualifiers and leading up to the event it was all logistics work, and I tried to keep in touch with players and managers as much as possible to let them know every little thing that changed and to make sure they were aware of everything I was aware of. Anyway, fast forward through everything to the Friday before AVCon. I let the managers and players know that they could pick up their passes that night from Arena, and we were in the process of manually lugging the machines, monitors, mice/kb/etc etc etc from Arena to the Entertainment Centre all during that time, roughly 3pm to 8ish. The biggest problem with the event setup was that we only had the Friday night to set up, and we literally had no idea what specifics we were working with (power points, cable length, switches etc), so we had to figure all that out the ******* day before the event, as well as plug everything in and make sure everything was working. I actually wasn't even going to go there that Friday, but I figured i should probably go and see the setup before I was meant to spend the next 2 days there. I walked in... and there was nothing. I was pretty terrified, the PCs on stage weren't plugged in, the PCs off stage weren't even set up yet, and there was literally 0 cable ready to go. We (Me, Troy, Thanh, Jun [cryingpoo, who came to visit and ended up being the biggest help of the weekend], 2 of Thanhs friends, Johnny [Arena owner]spent the next 4 hours working our asses off, literally just setting up the PCs with power, cutting and measuring network cable, connecting everything onstage and updating it all, and we even had to rush out on the Saturday morning to buy a 2nd network switch to actually have the event run at all. Basically Johnny was the hero of the night, he was up till about 4am making network cable to ensure that we'd actually have an event. AVCon staff were super helpful too, a much bigger improvement from the horror stories and pretty dismissive stuff ive heard and experienced over the last two years. So yeah, getting home and eating at midnight and sleeping never felt so good, Jun and I got back to the entertainment centre at about 8am, and kept working with everyone from the night before until 11am, when the tournament started.
Most of all, I was pretty pissed off with Seth and Wes. Arena got $0 in direct profit (actually a huge loss in money since 18 PCs were at AVCon and not in the cafe), yet we put in 100% of the manual work when it came to set up, yet it was the Avant Gaming Series name and brand that was being given all of the attention. Wes was meant to come, but ended up not coming, "got no money", since apparently the AVCon prize money wasn't actually set aside for this, but just was being used as Avant general money, hence why some of the LoL teams haven't been paid yet (that's just speculation, I don't know if that's the real case). I actually yelled my lungs out at Seth on the Saturday morning, but I don't think he took me seriously, and just kinda laughed it off. "I had to drive the LoL guys around", apparently adults aren't able to figure out how to use public transport or taxis, and there was some mix up with their hotels, either way I was pretty ******* pissed and it was a miracle thanks to Johnny and Thanh and everyone there that we got the event running in the time we did.
EDIT: On reflection, I was pretty harsh on Seth, since he did help in the afternoon bringing stuff to the venue and also so much free V drinks, i was just annoyed that there was such a basic error in hotels and stuff and i felt like some of the LoL people were kind of dicks, so it just tainted my view on everyone.
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EDIT: Day of the event + aftermath
So on the day I kinda had to just put everything that was on my mind in the lead up behind me, and just focus on making sure the event ran. Only Rossi/Jaz/Miles/Edge/Bigbird came Friday night to pick up their passes, so it was nice to meet them. I think the SLCN guys came later while we were at the entertainment centre setting up, so just decided to give them their passes Saturday morning. We scrambled to get everything plugged in and working in the morning, and thankfully everything worked perfectly fine, through the entire weekend there were 0 technical problems PC wise, and the internet was PERFECT (http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/2833528706 was the speedtest), only hardware problems were with the on stage EIZO monitors, which kept changing brightness, and i had no idea how to fix it, but it seems like it wasnt too huge of a problem. The schedule was to have SC2 groups A and B played offstage in the morning, with LoL on stage, and then we'd swap for afternoon groups, then LoL on stage in the evening and if we could, have the last few SC2 games on stage. Originally, we were going to have everything on Sunday played on stage, which would've been LB LoL final, LoL gf, SC2 3rd/4th and grand final, that's why I had the ro8/ro4 played on the Saturday too. I was expecting stuff not to run so smoothly, so just wanted to cram everything in Saturday. Anyway Saturday morning we started ~11:30am with games, 30 minutes late given the ridiculous last night setup and that morning setup seemed way too good to be true, and when the groups finished ahead of schedule with 0 internet or hardware problems, I was kind of shocked, since theres usually always a problem at any tournament. Meanwhile there was about a 1 hour delay on the on-stage LoL match, because we had no way to test the casting setup before hand, and the projector was ******* awful and forced the casting PC on stage to use 4:3, and the audio setup was AWFUL, players on stage could hear the casters perfectly. This seemed to be a pretty massive oversight by Troy, I noticed itw hen I first saw the setup and said "where is the sound going to be coming from?" and he pointed to the big speaker in the middle of the stage, in front of the casters, "okay so the side ones arent going to broadcast the casting audio?" "no theyre just for the on stage (stand up mic thing) for when I do giveaways and announcements and stuff" buuut that was apparently not the case. So while LoL took forevre to get started, we were doing fine and casting was going fine, until the stage audio got working, at which time the audio was SO ******* LOUD that the sc2 casting had to literally move the table to f ace it a different direction to pick up less sound. I tried to tell them to turn it down, but to no avail. Anyway there was nothing I could do about that, so we just had to work with it. Once the morning session was done, I was really happy with how it went, but i didnt know how I was going to tackle the problem of the matches on stage, because of the audio and projector problems. Anyway, we got up there and started casting and stuff... and it wasn't very good. The players could hear the casters perfectly and I think Petrify was raging pretty hard about it, and so was Jazbas, but in typical humble Korean style it was politely phrased and non-threatening. So in the end I just decided to scrap it, and just have the players play with the casting all online and no audio piped through the speakers on location. I feel really, really bad about this, because it meant a few things: 1) players weren't getting the real 'big lan' experience, 2) The audience didnt get that experience either, 3) it makes the event on a whole less impressive, so effects everyone really. The players well being and having a fair, honest tournament has always been my #1 goal and so I just decided to scrap the stage casting, it sucks, but oh well.
Anyway, the 2nd groups on stage happened, and then we went in to bracket play. This was about 6:30pm (we were scheduled to finish SC2 groups at 7pm... ahead of schedule? what the ****?) and we got in to the Ro8 pretty soon, most ppl had a small break and then came back. Now, the worst part of the weekend was about to come. Walking around AVCon you will see... some... 'interesting' people. Lots of euphoric fedora wearers and hundreds of basically-wearing-nothing cosplayers that certainly dont mind some attention. I've never been in to that kinda stuff, so when Neko Nation happened at 8pm Saturday, I was taken by just a little bit of surprise. Basically, Neko Nation is a ******* rave with anime/game music instead of regularly shit music. The problem here isn't with shit music and weird people, it's that this was being blasted from about 70 metres away, and it was really, really, REALLY ******* loud. No real good footage of it on youtube, but this euphoric individual (complete with fedora-cam and i can only assume le epik meme spouting) took some footage of it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7_eXmHx9lk - and trust me when I say that it doesnt seem that loud from this video, but i was basically unable to hold a conversation from where I was sitting because it was that loud. Everyone playing was really, really annoyed and so was I, but i was helpless to do anything and that made me feel even worse. At least everyone was being effected the same (except KingKong since he's a korean robot), so it was a fair playing field but poor conditions. Troy pulled PiG aside and had a word and apologised about it and all, since there were a few angry tweets after that. I just need to remind everyone that I had literally no idea that was going to happen, and everyone at AVCon (other areas in the same hall) were really frustrated too, and AVCon are probably not going to have it in the same hall next year since everyone complained about it. It was a really sour end to the night which had been actually so smooth for SC2 and had ran AHEAD OF SCHDEULE. I still feel really bad about the sound problems and neko nation. After like 15 minutes I thought "Surely, they're going to shut the **** up soon aren't they?" but nope, i wasn't kawaii enough to handle it.
So Sunday comes and since we couldn't play the games on stage because of the sound, we had them offstage. Rossi/KK played first then Pet/iaguz after. Some really cool games and I enjoyed watching as much as I could, i was still running around trying to figure out what the LoL people were doing too. I won't even get in to the Riot qualifiers which happened on the same weekend, meaning half of the teams in the LAN had to play a different tournament online on the same weekend. I was not very happy. Also we had a sponsorship from V energy drinks, so we got loads and loads and loads of free V (seth brought like 15 pallets to arena/avcon and still has more, i dont even drink V but it was free so..) and that was pretty much what got me through most of the weekend. Troy in his we-are-the-fgc-and-everyone-does-everything-together-and-loves-eachother mentality got Thanh to organise a group dinner with everyone that played at AVCon. The owner of a restaurant called Lemongrass on rundle street is good friends with Thanh and Johnny, so we at arena get some cool deals there. We got $30 meals (i dunno the word, it was just htem bringing up like 10 different dishes and loads of rice) for $20 and cheap beers and stuff. It was nice to just relax and talk to people, and watch KingKong absolutely devour anything that was put in front of him, he is a machine. Also I was kinda confused why Pet wasn't eating, and then realised he was vegetarian after he got a separate meal, hehe.
Lots of stuff I missed but isn't really that important, but if anyone is crazy enough to ask I'll try to remember more. I had an incredibly hard, fun, personally rewarding, and education weekend, and I hope that those that came had good memories of Adelaide and of our work at the event.
I hope you didn't get much Avant hate from this by the way, Seth wasn't very happy at this post but I said what I thought. And on that note: I read the contracts between ToR-Av and Seth has kept me pretty well informed about everything they've done in SC2, he really only wants the best for the community as a whole and yeah their stuff comes off kind of rude sometimes, but (and get ready for some bold) PEOPLE THAT WON MONEY AT AVCON HAVE BEEN PAID, AND WERE PAID WITHIN 1 MONTH.... except for one LoL team I think woops. As much as I disliked Wes and his attitude towards me, the money is real and people haven't had to wait 12+ months like other 'real' tournaments (IEM, MLG, lots of others) to receive their money, if ever. All of the Avant LoL guys got to the event, so as much as you're going to shit talk them for some questionable management decisions, they've pulled through with more goods than 99.99% of other teams that have been around this long.
Biggest thanks to all of the players, Jun for helping out so so so SO much, Johnny, Thanh, Troy, all the other Arena staff that helped out, Seth for making a LoL tournament somehow not run 5 hours late, the AVCon staff (i forgot the one guys name) that were incredibly helpful and really wanted to see us succeed, etc etc basically everyone.
I'm not sure what's gonna happen next year, hopefully something similar, but we'll see!
___________________________________ www.twitch.tv/switchaus@andrewthomasrrr
"The hardest part about playing Protoss is not choking on your dad's d--k" - Kreamy 2013
If Johnny and Thanh are the same guys that were there when I was down at Arena (two?) years ago, they are indeed both awesome and just seemed to be happy to have a community there for an event, as well as extremely accommodating to players needs.
AFAIK the reason the LoL teams haven't been paid is because Palit - who was supposed to provide the LoL prize - pulled out and refused to provide the prize money.
I remember walking past you guys on Friday night during set-up, I don't recall seeing anyone with an Avant shirt doing anything.. hell I think one of them was literally just standing there while you were all running around setting up.
Sorry I didn't go to help; after the whole "AVCon people should have nothing to do here." thing I felt pretty put off and walked. Would've been glad to help you guys out that night otherwise.
Quote:
Arena got $0 in direct profit (actually a huge loss in money since 18 PCs were at AVCon and not in the cafe), yet we put in 100% of the manual work when it came to set up, yet it was the Avant Gaming Series name and brand that was being given all of the attention
That's just fucked. It really is, you guys should've been paid to do everything, and given credit for doing all the setups and making sure the event ran in the first place (huge props to you all for running it despite the whole messy admin/event organising work).
___________________________________ NA | KR.
Known for a time as mGGCrayonPop and mGGxJieun
Q_Q'd.
AFAIK the reason the LoL teams haven't been paid is because Palit - who was supposed to provide the LoL prize - pulled out and refused to provide the prize money.
I can verify that you told me twice on the day that PALiT pulling a runner was the reason exactly 4k was missing.
Unfortunately there is no hard evidence though.
To freq sorry for being a tad bm in my blog, didn't know it was you but I was standing by my players.
You did an amazing job, I had my doubts in regards to how soon it was happening, being in Adelaide etc but it seems to have gone really well on a logistics level no doubt thanks to you.
___________________________________
I keep it real bruv.
I was so confused when I heard that as Roccat and OCZ were listed as the "primary sponsors" for the event. o.o I just naturally assumed when I discussed this with someone, they were meaning OCZ.
Good stuff Onofrio I think any event manager goes through at least one "oh shit" event. I have definitely experienced it in my prior employment outside eSports. It's a love/hate relationship.
All we can do is learn and educate each other (event managers) to not make the same mistakes and/or expand on what works.
Writing 2nd part now, I think I made it sound worse than it was, really everything actually went pretty fine, I was just nervous because I had relatively little control over the things leading up to the event
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