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
Quote:
Originally Posted by TekChampi
Oh wow, i was under the impression u signed up really late. sucks to here u got jipped like that...
but what satu has written about is not even half of the ridiculousness of the event. the map pool was bad, half the monitors were NOT WIDESCREEN, the internet cut out more than once, the same admin kept asking me what my ID was after EVERY.*******.GAME to put it on the score sheet...
i daresay the highlight of the weekend was the Diamond level Terran pretending to be top16 GM by having a high level terran and protoss play his account for a while before he came. all the evidence i had when calling him out was damning, and yet he still tried to deny it, he then proceeded to almost lose to a gold zerg, and got CRUSHED 2-0 by Flamga, not even GGing his games, this ADMachine guy is the new CHoBo lol
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.
Oh wow, i was under the impression u signed up really late. sucks to here u got jipped like that...
whats even more surprising is to hear that the next day was no better... i mean, i had a fun time, but 50% of that was due to how hilariously bad the tournament was run... you would think they would fix their mistakes :/
but what satu has written about is not even half of the ridiculousness of the event. the map pool was bad, half the monitors were NOT WIDESCREEN, the internet cut out more than once, the same admin kept asking me what my ID was after EVERY.*******.GAME to put it on the score sheet...
i daresay the highlight of the weekend was the Diamond level Terran pretending to be top16 GM by having a high level terran and protoss play his account for a while before he came. all the evidence i had when calling him out was damning, and yet he still tried to deny it, he then proceeded to almost lose to a gold zerg, and got CRUSHED 2-0 by Flamga, not even GGing his games, this ADMachine guy is the new CHoBo lol
either way satu, im glad you stuck around and chilled out with jak and i for the rest of the event. was cool catching up with u again
Was good to see everyone there, and yea I agree the organisation was shit.
To top it off me and my friend played about 5 hours on Saturday to qualify for the ultimate gamer tournament. Which is a big deal every year, its real hard and we managed to get to the finals on Sunday.
We rock up Sunday, they only had 11 people hand in sheets for it saying they managed to qualify, so rather than go with those 11, they just picked up people from the audience to compete.... LIKE THE HELL!!! On top of that they lost my mates sheet to show he qualified but wouldnt let him join in unless he did so through the audience and start with them.
Athough me and Satu had to play on stage first round, to which the staff were complaining we were taking too long. We literally couldnt kill each other, although at the end Satu did get the better of me (I had the shakes and was tired :/ ) but still very unprofessional
Regardless grats to Champi who I hear won an exhilarating game of rock paper scissors against Jak! ♥
Avcon is a joke for gaming, let alone competitive gaming. Last year I was 'hired' to run it by TLS (the company WCG went through to run the WCG events in Australia) and had 0 things to do with AVCon or Street Geek or anything (haymo did all of that stuff, though even that I didn't know if he had much control over what happened) so I just rocked up on the day and did my thang, so maybe that's why it went better than expected. That's why I didn't go this year, in case you were wondering.
And lol, player limit when you have 0 entry fee and thousands of people that spent $60 on a ticket and want to get every cent worth, gonna work out well.
On the plus side, next Arena events should be announced in a few days :O
I agree that the problems were ridiclious a 360 controller... seriously? they need to get people that actually play Starcraft to do these tournaments.
But on my thoughts on this is my second ever LAN i had ever been too. I just started practising and i had about 10+ people watching me saying "omg" and stuff when i was playing i have never had this much adrenalin before especially playing people saying that i'm good since i've never thought of myself as a very good player just good mechanics i guess.
the tournament computers on the first round were utter shit not even widescreen could barely play on Low, but 20 min rule kinda borked it a bit, 2 base all ins were the way to go since at 20 minutes THEY CUT THE GAME OFF >.< that pissed me off since going a macro build there was a chance you could lose if they had a hidden expo that you didn't punish stuff like this which is just not really acceptable in my opinion at least.
But at least i got to meet some great people including you Champi and a bunch of other guys. I still can't believe i beat a former GM so proud of myself hope to verse you guys at some point at the next LAN event in Adelaide.
Ah damn! Thats bad!!! and as if the prize is an xbox 360 controller.. i guess thats kinda what happens when people who do not know how to run a SC2 tourney would go..
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