Seeing as there doesn't seem to be a results/feedback thread, I'll post this here.
This tournament was managed pretty poorly. I'll do my best to explain what I thought was done badly and what can be improved on, but I don't expect Hank to take any of my advice.
Firstly, signups were done in a needlessly complicated manner. As far as I know, Ink or Sink and both Booyah Battles had signups done using a Google Doccument or Squidboards thread. This tournament instead made teams sign up via Youtube comment, which just seems ridiclous; it's easy to impersonate someone, to lose your signup message, or similar. It's also more convenient for you, because you can just funnel all the signups onto a spreadsheet, rather than having to type them out yourself. I expect that this was done in order to farm video views and comments. Even if you wanted to promote your video, you could have still disclosed a signup form, or email address, in the description of the video.
The Squidboards thread is poorly managed. When I wanted to see the bracket and map/mode listing, I came to the thread expecting to find it, but it wasn't there. Obviously it's simple enough to google 'nintendome 10k challonge' but I shouldn't have to. The
Skype as a communication medium is bad, put simply. It's a resource intensive chat program that not everyone likes, let alone has an account for. As much as I dislike Discord's marketing and target audience, I can't deny that it's a good program for discussing stuff like this, where it's effective for an entire team to be observing a chatroom, the captain communicating with another captain. Further, as I'm sure you want to promote the game's competitive scene, it sets up a communication medium between captains and other players for scrims, squads etc.
Onto the actual tournament days:
Too many byes. Byes are awful in any tournament setting as I know from experience, leaving you to sit around for an hour waiting for your next match.
The first day was difficult, to say the least. I woke up at 5am for the 6am start, and was made to sit around until about 6:30 for the lobby to go up - The captain of the opposing team wasn't communicating with us, and apparently Skype had not delivered the messages properly. By the time we got into the lobby, there were 4 of us, and 3 of them. One of their players left, then they decided they wanted to play 2v4, explaining that they didn't know where the other players were. Between games a third player joined, but it made no difference and we quickly won 3-0.
The second round was a bit smoother, for us, and we started at about 7:10, pleased to be playing against a team of 4. Other teams didn't have it so smoothly though, some examples that I can include from memory + screenshots (bottom of post) are:
A team not showing up because they thought they were knocked out.
Hank showing a despration to 'control' the player that he later kicked out.
A captain being kicked out of the skype chat because they didn't understand something.
Two teams agreeing to "play later", and this only being discovered towards the end of the first round (I believe).
It seems that many of the players didn't understand what was expected of them, despite having played in tournaments before (See: IU). You can't really blame Nintendome for this, but at the same time it's not enitrely the players fault either. Booyah Battle had signifigantly clearer expectations of the players.
There's also the issue of the rounds; The Squidboards post says that 7 rounds would be played on day 1, then the top 8 would play on day 2. This allows players who do not expect to make it to the top 8 and are only playing the tournament as a 'sampler' to commit to other things on day 2. Instead, we were told towards the end of day 1 that the 7 rounds would be split across days 1 and 2, then the top 8 would be played immediately after the last 2 rounds had been player. As I said, this obviously has consequences for people who commited to doing something on day 2 only to be expected to show up, but it also affects their opponents; round 6 had 6 forfeits, which I would guess is because the players didn't show up. This leaves those 24 players to sit around waiting for round 7 to start. In addition to those, it also boosts up players who otherwise might have not scored as many points, causing round 7 to be less enjoyable for both teams if a highly skilled team was matched against a lower skilled team.
The top 8 was run fairly smoothly apart NSTC being cut. It's well known that BI aren't skilled enough to hold their own in top 8, as has been said in this thread already and proven in the tournament, but it also denies NSTC, a more skilled team, from playing against people on their level. While I don't think NSTC should have been cut from the top 8, it's worth noting that their Buchholz score and their Points Difference were both lower than NSTC's, I'm assuming it was the TB score being 2 and not 1 that boosted them up.
Commentary: BestTeaMaker is good at running tournaments - better than Nintendome - he was reasonable on what I saw of the podcast, but he isn't a good commentator. His game analysis was shallow and didn't focus on anything that couldn't be seen by an amatuer player, such as commenting on map control, X just got a triple kill etc. FLC did a better job, was still lacking in some areas, but his commentary felt signifigantly more forced than TeaMakers. Neither person had any flow, exceedingly in depth analysis of what was happening, and it was uncomfortable to watch. In most 'professional' casts, I'm used to seeing a player, ex-player or similar, who is able to analyze what's going on in the game in a more in depth way, and one 'caster' who does the 'fast' commentary, often raising their voice when something is happening. Typically the caster has practised enough that they are able to have good flow, a reasonable analysis of what's happening at a fast pace, while still creating a good viewer experience. The two work together nicely. This wasn't done here. In future, I would recommend contacting a player who was knocked out, but still placed reasonably, and inviting them to cast - this is often done in Dota tournaments, notably The Summit, which sometimes has 4 knocked out players casting one game. Signifigantly nicer to watch than a caster and an ex player.
Hank: Your method of PR and running the tournament is embarassing. I'm not sure what experience TeaMaker has in running a tournament, but he handled the first Booyah Battle signifigantly better than you handled your first event, and that was with a single tournament before him, whereas you've had the opportunity to look at a handful. The prize support is nice, but that shouldn't be enough to make up for what was otherwise a shoddy event. Your damage control on Twitter is even worse; I would've prefered to see NSTC in the top 8 than Blooper Ink.
Stan64: I won't go too hard on this because the thread has already summarised what your issue is, but you can't really make excuses. Watching the replays of the matches, your team was lagging too. Everyone in this game has to deal with lag, don't play if you can't accept it. Also, this isn't eHarmony. You should change your avatar, I don't want to feel like taking a shower every time I look over these forums.
Good job to those who played. With any luck Inkstorm will be better.
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