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nice write up, i think my thoughts were pretty much along the same lines. I think they might have tried to do a little too much and could've streamlined the comps and games a bit better. good fun regardless.

zepph

wish i was there :P

Points seem valid Heard it from most people - you also didn't mention the stream which was another big problem because I guess you were there and didn't need to watch it but the background noise and lag was horrible.

Hopefully they take criticism on board as I'd like to go to one in the future!

All of these problems were pretty much expected I think. Except for the format because no one expects to see that format anymore and the barcraft because I expected it to be pretty awesome. But at an event like that, there's always going to be internet problems just because some people are socially retarded and think it's fine to torrent there. Also organising that many events is always going to create schedule issues.

As you said though, the best part about the event is just seeing people you haven't seen since the last event and meeting more SC2 people and realising everyone is so different IRL to what they are online (i'm looking at you asian Riichard) except for Iaguz.

I see these big lan events as just social events with the opportunity to fill up your hardrives with useless stuff. Though I guess with the prize pools it has changes that a little bit.

LOL! Yeah even though the event didn't go as planned and was disappointing in certain ways, I still loved it because of the sc2sea people there. I made the most of it and joined as many of the tournaments as I could like FIFA which was hilarious (ask dippa L O ******* L!).

ITS riiChard!!

I agree that having that kind of prize pool makes the event feel like it's trying too hard to be 'legitimate' and that feels bad when you have the normal problems associated with one tournament at a massive lan like that.

Also clearly you have missed all of TA making fun of skinny asian riichard at every possible oppurtunity...

Good write up Zepph.

Beginning an event 2 hours late without a word of explanation is unbelievable ... That's strange and sad for a tournament involving so much money and prize).

Swiss format is a very equitable format because it makes each turn the top players play among themselves. The "freekill" faced a "loosing" player at round 2 then a double looser at round 3 etc. And the guy that play the "free kill" is disadvantaged in the end because for tie-breaker, the results of your opponents are taken into account.

It might not be perfect for the middle of the ranking, but who cares if your 7th or 9th on 18 players ? Even in winer / looser bracket, having 2 defeats can place you anywhere in the rankings, from 2nd to last.

So watching the bracket, the results seem quite fair.

Elimination formats have the advantage to designate easilly one and only one clear winner since he's the only one to win all his games. But you can always argue that the winner can have an "easy" bracket.

In Swiss format, the winner can loose matches but he can still be the winner thanks to Tie-breakers. The advantage is that there is no "esay bracket" for him, the leader of the temporary rankings will always play the second (if he hasn't played it yet), so he is going to have the hardest matches every turn.

Usually Swiss format are used when draws are possible because of course in this case elimination brackets can't work. It's also used when you want a fix number of games for everyone and every turn. If you want to please the public with many games the whole day for example.

In SC2, draws on a BO-X are very rare and can be quickly decided by an ace match. The games are often streamed and can be watched on big screens so that's not so much a problem if there are fewer games in the end. Then again, the majority of tournaments are online, so if you come to the tournament for only 2 games, that's not really a problem because you didn't traveled, and you're still at home. So Elimination are the general rule.

For Chess, or Warhammer, it's always Swiss format.

The guy was Jinx and the only person in the top 8 who actually played him was Ninja (you dont count Yoon facing him in the last round because everybody faced opponents they 'favor' in the last round of a swiss format, the other games he played were against 10th, 16th and 17th), Swiss has big issues if you're using it to determine a top 8 especially when you're playing so few games although Ive been looking into quite a bit and found this on the challonge website explaining swiss

keep in mind that says winner not a conclusive top 8, although I cant find where Ive read it im sure I read for a statistically viable result it requires
N of Rounds = 2/3 Number of Players

There is a tie breaker score that is built into the Swiss System that designed purely so tie breaker games dont occur in this case 'Glade' did come 9th, this is by no fault of his own because the tie breaker score is determined on how well your competitors performed.

I have tested Swiss format with a League of Legends tournament recently and it works
http://challonge.com/chlol3finals3
however , as you can see I had 6 rounds for only 8 team so I was able to get an extremely definitive result.

you can also see then when I ran 5 rounds in the qualifier the week before that the results were extremely tight.
http://challonge.com/chlol3
however it must be noted that the tie breaker scores certainly helped determine to a top 3 and even a top 2 if you factor in the 3rd stage to break down tie breakers in Swiss which is head-to-head

Given a substantial amount of tweaking it could work in an opens tournament like the City Hunter LANs or ACL regionals, PiG mentioned an idea Ive been toying with too of having 10x Bof1s rather than 5xBof3s, however I still prefer to used seeded group systems similar to how Ive run the 8 or so SCII tournaments at CH tournaments over the last 18 months, it achieves the same result as Swiss only its usually quicker, involves no luck when determining tie breaker scores and in some cases opponents. Another option could have been having two groups of 9 people and 5 rounds of swiss top 4 go to top 8 playoffs,

The whole concept of "everyone getting the same amount of games" is silly just because a person is out of a tournament does mean they have to leave the venue (I tell people at my LANs to play customs, play some COD, BW, LOL whatever they want, at SGL there was dozens of other comps they couldve joined rather than have to play in a tournament when they knew they couldnt qualify once theyd already gone 0-3).



With 18 people and given that it was running behind schedule and that there was countless other comps losing players could have joined a double elimination tournament should have been used straight up.



Ive gotta get ready for work so I may edit this/continue later today

swiss format always has to be bo1 and you need to play 2/3rds of the players in the bracket for it to find the best players. We only played' 5/18 players. But yes, double elim is probably a better system.

This event would be amazing if you go to socially have fun, and compete in some LAN games. The news I heard through benji, chris and rocky all pointed towards this being a highly competitive event that would be really cool to go to. with something around 7K of cash and prizes devoted to sc2.

Then the event got closer...They split a ridiculous amount towards the lower leagues and 2v2 and then lowered the previous amount to like 600cash/800hardware for gm/M on the day (correct me if i remember the figure wrong). Also the schedule came out a day or two beforehand with the sc2 tourney time as: 6pm saturday-5pm sunday. Wtf is that? was my first response... I intended to only go for the sc2 tournament and leave afterwards due to it being my girlfriend's birthday that weekend. But we'd already agreed I should go try to win some money, cos there isn't such big prize pools (didnt know it was so small yet) very often in esports. Ended up playing with 3 second spikes, retarded delay, and luckily winning games at 1-3am despite being tired as shit... glade wasn't so lucky. He copped tough aggressive opponents with lag such as tgun and iaguz and went down while playing at a time of night which he never practices at.

Oh wow, ok glade isn't making it through to top 8 of an 18 man sydney bracket??... already i think everyone senses something is wrong with this tournament. After sleeping fitfully on a peice of stage under a table for 15 minutes some people decided to take the table from above my sleeping body to use for themselves. Now I had bright white light in my eyes fml. The sleeping room is full with iaguz taking the last spot that doesn't involve spooning a nerd, but with no sleeping bag even he gets crap all sleep before returning to his pc. After 4.5 hours of "sleep" I wake up and get stale bacon and egg rolls from the hot food place (the hotdogs were awesome, the roast dinners looked good too but these things sucked ass). Play some table-tennis to wake up: yes this was awesome.

Play zvz with 3 second spikes, lose. Play zvz with 3 second spikes, lose.

Ok. So I just wasted my fkn weekend. Fk i wish someone told me this tournament wouldn't be not only a complete waste of my training schedule but also missed my gf's bday party completely so I was especially pissed.

My fault for ever putting any trust in an unproved event. Found out the prizes will be estimated 6 month delay... atleast they told mafia and tgun etc straightaway after they won rather then the dodginess most big events do. They also said some tourneys didnt get played so extra prize money is around.

Oh and me and iaguz won the joke 2v2 tournament which didn;t have time to even finish properly so got $200/hardware each to be sent to us at mysterious time. Atleast that covers my $50 entry and food once I ebay it.

All-in-all there was not enough information about this event prior to it. It was advertised as having massive prize pools for games that are played ONLINE. All they needed to do was book dox a plane ticket and the event would have been amazing. he would have made sure we had seperate internet and it started on time and used a proper format.


Benji, Chris and Rossi: These guys are all nice. I don't necessarily hold them responsible in any way. But as myself, glade, and several others stated at the tournament, this was a joke tournament and a $@&$()@$ waste of a weekend. Glade had to get a ticket from BRISBANE.

That all being said... I'm putting it behind me and I don't want people to boycott their events. Just go there for fun LAN games. don't go there for competition or prizes because they showed it was a joke. They put no effort into ensuring a good tournament and we got to waste our time and money.


edit: forgot to say Thanks zepph for putting alot of both sides of the story in your post... i wanted to post on the event but felt with my experience would ignore to many positives so thanks for putting an informative blog up

Although I wasn't there and I may be entirely wrong here, I think ultimately it comes down to:
* Lack of planning (ie. Not having a dedicated connection for SC2)
* Lack of staff/support (Apparently there was like 5 people running ALL the tournaments)
* Any tournament starting at 9pm is going to be HORRIBLE. Most tournaments start at like 11AM and don't finish until late, this was just suicide.

Such a shame to hear.

Thanks for all your input guys!
I understand how Swiss is supposed to work a lot better now.

@PiG : Thanks for replying with your thoughts...good to hear how things went from a player point of view.

@Dox: I think you're absolutely right. I suppose I had very high expectations given the scale of the event and the standards people such as yourself have set with previous events.

@Pig:
On the plus side you got to play some sweet ass table tennis with me.

:@JoFritzMD yeah that was pretty baller!