March 20-22, 2015 Atlanta, GA (FINAL ROUND18)

[TheSlyMoogle]

I can't wait to see everyone Friday! HYPE HYPE HYPE!

 

Final round HYPE!

[Graque]

After seeing FR18 Xrd, I have a question about the finals where Kazunoko beat Marlinpie.

 

First though, congrats to all the competitors!  I had never watched a Guilty Gear tournament before, and don't really know the game, but it was obvious that past a certain point, all the players were amazingly skilled.

 

So about Kazunoko, he lost his first set as Sol to Marlinpie (Zato).  But after that he switched to Ky and beat Marlinpie 6-0.  That series was really the most interesting point of FR18 to me (even though I watched more USF4), because I couldn't really figure out how Kazunoko won.  To me, Zato looks like he has a ton of mixups, tricks, pressure, and zoning.  (And he's top tier apparently.)  By comparison, Ky seems to be a plain character that could easily be in a street fighter game.  I noticed Kazunoko killing eddie occasionally with stun edges, but other than that I didn't really see anything that Ky was doing other than fundamentals.

 

Anyway, I guess my question is: why did Kazunoko switch to Ky, a character he presumably was less comfortable with than Sol, and how did that switch help him beat Marlinpie?  Thanks!

[Sixfortyfive]

Now that I've had time to unwind and recover a little from the weekend, I wanted to make a full recap of Final Round from my perspective. Although there were plenty of highlights and good times to go around as usual, there were also a lot of things that went off the rails in comparison to the last two years, and there was so much confusion and lack of communication on a lot of it that people are still wondering and asking me about it. So, in the interest of (1) filling in the missing details for all of my stream viewers and (2) giving a full account of issues that I had to deal with so that FR staff and I can appropriately consider how to handle them in the future, here is what went down, starting from the top.

 

Let's check out the overall tournament schedule, and then let's match that to the stream schedule:

 

http://finalround.org/FinalRoundSchedule.xlsx

 

The majority of my allotted time is dedicated to "Open Anime," and it was never quite clear what this would entail. It shouldn't include Xrd or UNIEL; those are main line-up games with places already explicitly carved out for them in the schedule. I figure it'd probably be various side tournaments, but that doesn't make much sense either when you consider that the event info says that all side tournaments are scheduled to finish on Friday. So is that huge Saturday block supposed to be overflow? Exhibitions? Casuals? It wasn't quite clear.

 

Shortly after I received the schedule, KiT Vandy came to me with a concern of his own: notice that for the entirety of Friday and Saturday, Tekken Tag Tournament 2 only has a single 2-hour block of stream time and nothing else. If you know anything about Final Round, you should know that it's consistently a huge Tekken event, still pulling in strong numbers for that series even though it's died off pretty hard in a lot of other places. Vandy thought Tekken deserved more time in the spotlight, I agreed and wanted something concrete to run on Saturday, and the two of us asked Larry if we could fit some TTT2 pools into that Saturday morning block.

 

Larry's response was that he basically coudn't promise anything and to assume that the schedule would move forward as stated on the website. While I was setting up in the Savannah room on Thursday evening, though, one of the room leaders came to me and said that I was to be moved to the main ballroom, near the main stage and on the wall opposite to Spooky. This was right next to the Tekken pools, which they informed me that I'd now be running on Saturday from 10 AM to 6 PM. I assume that this is at least part of the reason why the anime games were now in the main ballroom and not in Savannah/Lanier as previously announced, and why some other games got shuffled around to fill those rooms. I'm not sure if there were other reasons for the move, though.

 

KOF had a rough start due to (1) my 4G card literally crapping out on me the moment I started (had to get a friend to bring a replacement) and (2) someone knocking the power cable to my stream station out of the wall, while a tournament match was in progress, twice. Things ran pretty well in top 8 though, other than the fact that Xian, Xiaohai, and Dakou were the top 3 placers in that game and ALSO teammates in SF4 teams, which was running at the same time as KOF. Scheduling conflicts aside, KOF finished strong.

 

The Open Anime block on Friday was initially slated to have the Top 4 of a variety of side tournaments: Blazblue, Persona, Melty, +R, and/or DFC (I think), but KOF bodied that time slot hard, and it turned out that the anime side tournaments were having their own issues staying on track regardless. Ultimately, I only had time to fit in some Blazblue and Melty on Friday evening, which both ran pretty well. The Persona tournament itself ended up not running at all on Friday for reasons I do not know. I never heard anything about +R or DFC all weekend.

 

Ben and I mutually decide that we'll throw a bone to Persona the following day and attempt to fit at least some of that game's final matches into the UNIEL block since it was supposed to be finished and streamed a little on Friday.

 

Saturday comes and I run Tekken from 10:30 AM to 6 PM. Other than a minor late start, those pools were pretty much on-point from start to finish; no issues to note of here. Awesome matches, great crowd reactions, etc. The Tekken runner (Icege) and I touch base and confirm that Tekken is to be wrapped up on my stream at 6 PM and moved over to Spooky for Top 32 at that time. 5:30 PM comes around, and I message Ben, letting him know that Tekken is on track to move to Spooky in half an hour and that I'll be ready for a UNIEL/Persona setup at that time. 5:45 PM rolls around and I haven't heard back. I tell Icege that I currently have nothing on deck for 6 PM and that he can continue using my setup for Tekken until I get word from UNIEL staff on when to expect them. He declines, though, and switches completely over to Spooky as planned.

 

It's 6 PM and I've got nothing to stream. I physically walk over to the anime setups (which are literally on the opposite corner of the ballroom that my stream is, which was a continual hassle in and of itself) and ask Ben and bracket runners when I can expect UNIEL or Persona. I'm told that that is impossible to know because Xrd is running behind and they need to clear out a lot more of Xrd before they can even think of running the games that I'm supposed to stream.

 

So, Spooky is running Tekken, FunkyP is running Xrd, and I'm running a whole lot of nothing. I ask if there's literally anything that I can run, as my stream is just dead air now. I'm told to just wait. I stall, roll ads for a while, and eventually decide to just re-stream Spooky's feed for the time being so that something from FR is at least being shown to my viewers. Some time between 6:30 and 7:00, I go back to the anime area and ask for an ETA. I am told that I won't have anything for 45 minutes. I leave, get a bite to eat, return, check in with the staff again, and it's still the same story.

 

I twiddle my thumbs at my station again for a while, then walk over to the anime pools again for an update at just past 8:00 PM... and they're playing UNIEL. They've been playing UNIEL for a while. Glancing at one of the brackets, it looks like they're at least 2 or 3 rounds deep. "Why is this not happening on stream? I am supposed to be streaming this game. There is NOTHING on my stream right now." I am told that they do not have a setup for me. "Why can't we just move one of these pool stations to the stream?" I never got an answer to that question. ShinSyn (I think) had to personally deliver his own PS3 to me before we had a UNIEL station to use on the stream, almost two and a half hours behind schedule. Two plus hours of dead air while I begged for literally anything for me to run.

 

We run UNIEL for a while, and then the question becomes what to do with Persona, which is being played off-stream right now. I didn't want to cut Persona from the stream entirely because we had promised that it would be there in some capacity, but UNIEL also started so late that I also felt it would be bad to cut into its stream block any further, especially since UNIEL is a main game and Persona is not. After some back and forth, Ben and I mutually decide to run winners final, losers final, and grand final of Persona once those matches are ready. After finishing those, we'd switch back to UNIEL and let that rock for the rest of the night, as that tournament was supposed to finish on Saturday night on my stream.

 

During the grand final of Persona, the room leader comes up to me and the poor guy helping me on commentary and demands to know why we're still here. That is not a question I expected to be asked of me; the schedule said I'd be running UNIEL through to the end, and none of the other streamers are currently being asked to pack up, so why am I out of line? It turns out that Capcom Fighters was expected to have this area available for setup at this time. I was never told this until it was already happening, in real-time, during Persona grand finals. Why Capcom needed this area on Saturday night even though they weren't scheduled to stream until very late on Sunday was an absolute mystery to me, but I'm sure as fuck not going to be the one to argue with the people running the Capcom Pro Tour, so that was that and I had to shut down my whole operation immediately.

 

Persona's grand final match is thus marked with some extremely flustered commentary as I try to relay what precious little information that I know, and that I specifically don't know whether any more of UNIEL is going to be streamed or if that tournament is even still running at all. Ben is on the mic and seems completely overwhelmed, implying that we're about to be thrown out or something for streaming "illegal anime," which I think sounded a fair bit more dramatic than what actually transpired. The room leader was sympathetic once I explained the situation.

 

One point to make before moving on: For much of the weekend, the pools of the games that I was running on stream were placed on the exact opposite corner of the ballroom that my stream was. Combined with the fact that the pools staff seemed to be spread too thin to spare anyone to help me (my stream is a one-man operation, and I can only do so much by myself), this made communication pretty difficult. Often, after a match, there would be no one on deck to put on stream next, and I'd have to personally walk to pools to drag two more players over. I made it very clear to the bracket runners that I'd need them to send over two matches for the stream, one to play and one on-deck, and to send another match to be on-deck every time I send the players back to pools in order to keep the stream moving along at a brisk pace. Despite this, I still had to make that trek across the room pretty often to get more players. It's not like I think that the bracket runners forgot or ignored me or anything; help just seemed to be that overworked and spread thin.

 

Anyway, I sign off for the night, and my desk is swarmed with people moving their equipment into my area, making it harder than it needs to be for me to tear down and keep track of all my gear, which is now interspersed with Capcom Fighters' gear, and slowing me down. Eventually, I manage to wrangle it all together and dump it in the hallway right outside the ballroom doors. I spend some time fumbling with my phone (which only gets a usable signal in this area of the venue roughly 20% of the time), desperately searching for any of my friends who could help me watch all of my shit that's strewn about the floor as I move it to my car bits and pieces at a time. Anotak and Launchpad fortunately happen to walk by me shortly thereafter and do exactly that. And some FR staff also happened to arrive right after that and ask if I needed any help, but by this point we had it covered between us.

 

I spend the remainder of Saturday night mostly swearing and cursing among friends who have never seen me even remotely this angry.

 

After a decent night's rest, I head down to the ballrooms on Sunday afternoon and see FunkyP doing his usual camera work on the main stage. Normally, he doesn't stream anything on Sunday. He uses finals day to collect a bunch of footage for next year's trailer, which is what he's doing now. But he's also streaming Xrd teams (which has somehow become a 3-day tournament in and of itself at this point) and UNIEL top 16 (which got pushed to Sunday). I end up taking the wheel on his stream station so that he can focus on his official duties. The stage layout kind of sucked (Smash audio was being pumped through the house mic, no projector output for FunkyP's audience, etc.), but we kind of had to make due with what we could at that point. And despite how rocky UNIEL was on Saturday, I was really glad to be able to see the top 8 for this game in its entirety, because that grand final match was fantastic.

 

 

 

That about covers everything from my perspective for the weekend. There were other minor issues that came up but aren't really worth going into, but I also wanted to touch upon one pretty big general problem that the tournament had.

 

Things got off to a rocky start well before FR weekend even got here. You might have seen Shin Blanka make a bunch of posts on Facebook pleading for players to make sure that they received confirmation e-mails for their registrations, and, if not, to go through the registration process again or get in touch with staff to make sure their registration went through. Turns out that there was a glitch in the system that was just throwing out registrations without anyone knowing about it until much later. This was a real bad case of Murphy's Law; FR had been using this software for registration in years past with no problems whatsoever, but all of a sudden it's just not working properly and there were no tell-tale signs of it for tournament staff to be alerted to the issue as it was happening. You can see how that would snowball into a major problem, right? Players making hotel reservations, buying plane tickets, etc. and thinking that they're all set with their tournament registration but actually aren't? Yeah, not good. There were reasons why it took an eternity to get pools posted on the website, and this problem was at the top of that list. I'm not sure if this problem was ever completely squashed before the tournament started, either. Larry said that people just kept coming to him with issues until the day of the event. This made bracket creation and at-the-door registration a much bigger hassle than it should have been and set things off on the wrong foot right out of the gate.

 

Larry knows that you expect and deserve a better event. People setting aside money and time to travel to FR should not have to put up with even a fraction of the nonsense that transpired. He said exactly these things to me very late Sunday night / Monday morning as he was blowing off steam about how poorly things turned out, especially for the anime scene in particular. All of the FR staff wants you to have a good time, of course, because they're not happy if you aren't, and there were a whole lot of people who were not happy with how things were going, myself included. If you attended FR this year as a player and ended up getting the short end of the stick on a lot of these issues touched upon above, then I can understand if you're not feeling enthusiastic about FR in general in comparison to other tournaments that also compete for your time and money. Do know, though, that the staff was largely in the same boat as you, and they accept criticism about what needs to be done in the future. Please also let me know if you think I dropped the ball on anything and I'll do what I can to prevent it in the future. I tried to make do with what I had over the weekend and have some of my own ideas on how to take preventative measures for some of this nonsense in the future now, but I'm also all ears.

 

 

 

I am very, very grateful to everyone who helped out with the stream in some capacity, whether it was on commentary, running brackets, bringing me setups, or putting out a variety of fires. I am sorry if I was rude or inconsiderate to anyone while my patience was being stretched thin.

 

I'll start editing match videos for Youtube today. I hope to have everything up by the end of this coming weekend.

[ShinBlanka]

Hello everyone,

 

I'm here to address the problems we had during FR18 when concerning the anime portion of the event.  I would first like to thank everyone that attended FR18.  FR18 was a great event because you guys attended.  Let me address the scheduling/pool issue.  I would like to state that these are NOT EXCUSES!  They are just facts on what happened during FR18;

Instead of having everything run straight out of paypal, we used a system call wufoo.  This system would  is supposed to auto populate the games paid for and separate them in each game you enter.  Once it does that it will send the player a confirmation email.  Well if anyone has me on facebook they have noticed me posting if you got a blank email for confirmation error you needed to contact us asap to clear this up.  Well we continued to have this problem and when we are trying to look through over 1100 players that pre reg it can be like finding a needle in a stack of needles.  Even when we thought we had everyone covered we still had over 50 people come to the door with the same problem.  So once that happens we must go over each person in the list to try and make sure we get everyone.  We even made a pending list because the process of finding and correcting each person was a serious problem for attendance and us as organizers.

 

We had to delay pool assignments to our volunteers due to this fact also since we never had a true accurate count on the players attending FR18 until we did the tally after door registration.  This pretty much added another step into our check off system which was to check the pre reg, check the onsite reg, and then check everyone again one by one to make sure everyone was in every game they sign up for.  Obviously we missed the anime games and that's my bad 100%.  We should have AT LEAST put what we had on the site so at least half the people would have know what pools they were supposed to be in and what time they was suppose to be there.

 

We also didn't explain the color code for the pools that was on our site.  We told people the tournament started at 10am, but didn't explain that each pool had a 2 hour block on the schedule.  If we had done that better people could have figured out what pool they were supposed to be in.  Those 2 things could have eliminated a lot of confusion and frustration the players, but it wasn't done.  None of this was done to disrespect the anime community in any manner.  With FR being the 1st anime major to top 200+ way back in the day when nothing got 200+ that I can remember I'm really upset I let you guys down with this years event.

 

If it's a official event or a side tournament I want every tournament at my event to run smoothly.  if you guys don't want to attend FR ever again I will understand.  These are not excuses.  They are just facts on what happen throughout the scheduling process.  We are already talking with the guys that helped run the anime part of fr18 to make sure any issues we had this year are corrected.  Sorry about that guys.  I let the anime community down with this event.  It will be corrected moving forward for sure.

[ShinBlanka]

I also wanted to say my bad to shinsyn for messing up his efforts on putting together a great 5v5 for xrd.  It was mad hype in the salty auditorium, but it was mad late when it started also so my bad on that.  I'll hit you up on facebook when I get a chance bro.

[Hotashi]

No pools until 12 hours before the tournament, no pool schedules, 4 hour delays on the team tournament, zero casual setups in any ballrooms on saturday...

 

But I believe it can be better. I'll go next year. 

[Chris Chaos]

As I read the last few posts, everything I wanted to say has been covered. I'm also in the middle of doing a Post Major write up (As I usually do for every event I go to) so, I'll keep it short here.

 

Final Round this year was a let down. So much promised to us and things kept happening to make things fall into a downward spiral. I had no idea what was going on but after hearing about SixFortyFive's side along with hearing about what was leading up to this event, it sounded like things just fell apart at the top and trickled to the bottom. I came to this event expecting to run one event and because my boys on staff were having issues, I took it upon myself to help them out. I was even gonna drop out of singles to help but Silent Shinobi told me not to. After what happened, I felt I should have dropped out anyway because my performance was garbage this year...

 

Even with everything falling apart, I was still glad to have met up with a bunch of old faces and befriend new players I've heard of, or just met in ATL. The South has WAY too many talented Anime Players for things to have happened this way it did, and this is one of their 2 big events to unite and show what's up. Unfortunately, it didn't go too well... Even though the event was not the greatest, the people I met there made up for it. Hopefully the Final Round Crew learns from this event and make things better next time around because we got the shaft for sure... Anime has gotten WAY bigger than it used to be, and this event numbers showed it. This should be accounted for in the future.

 

I also wanted to say my bad to shinsyn for messing up his efforts on putting together a great 5v5 for xrd.  It was mad hype in the salty auditorium, but it was mad late when it started also so my bad on that.  I'll hit you up on facebook when I get a chance bro.

 

Alright, tag me up when you do. I'm Christopher L Johnson on Facebook, I've posted in the event page as you already know so, I'll be looking for it.

[dumba989]

Just wanted to say that if it looked as if I was pissed off about things or whatever it was, I apologize. I was running on little to no sleep and not only do I look pretty angry, but the way I might have been responding to certain people probably wasn't the best, and I didn't mean anything personally. If I'm staff again I promise to get some actual sleep so I don't appear to be so intimidating while running/making brackets & everything else.

[ShinBlanka]

We also had 4 ps3's and one or two 360's die on us which is why we didn't have enough systems for casuals or enough for the tournament to begin with.  Someone broke my projector screen we used for 645 on Saturday that could have been used as a viewing screen on funkyP stream during sunday.  Just posting about other things I've heard was a problem at FR18 with the anime side of things.

[ShinBlanka]

NOthing was done on purpose to shaft you guys and best believe it will be corrected.  If you guys are too sour on fr to attend next year I will understand.  Like I said, I had a post tournament meeting with ben and malik to get what went wrong and how to fix it next year.  We will continue to talk to make sure nothing of this nature happens again.  Yes the Anime scene has grown, but no scene should have this happen to them if it's big or small period.  That's my bad, period.

[Sixfortyfive]

Like I said, I had a post tournament meeting with ben and malik to get what went wrong and how to fix it next year.  We will continue to talk to make sure nothing of this nature happens again.

I'll be sending along some things to discuss after I sit my ass down and get through all of these videos. (Friday is done; Saturday is in-progress. Everything might be up late tonight.)

[ShinBlanka]

oh yea blacksnake your paypal email didn't work sir.  Can you give it to me again? 

[Chris Chaos]

oh yea blacksnake your paypal email didn't work sir.  Can you give it to me again? 

blackSNAKE hardly uses Dustloop so I'll text him about the issue and have him get back to you ASAP.

 

EDIT: Just got in contact with Prucha, he will contact you after he get's off work.

 

EDIT2: He won't be getting off work until late, he will contact you around 10PM tonight.

[eric]

This will NEVER happen again everyone. We love the Anime Fgc.