Then, just a few little irks on my part that i don't get the reasoning behind. Nothing too bad, just wondering about it:
- Why was all the info released only a few hours before the tournament?
- Why did you chose to keep telling people their rosters in helpdesk rather than just making the form responses public? I don't understand why you would keep this hidden. I can literally see no benefit you would get from that. Releasing it however is way more convenient and also would have helped catching the players subbing for other teams...
- Why were there hardly any TOs online during the event?
Now something that bothers me quite a bit more, why in the world does it take this long before finally having a place for feedback? Would you rather not have feedback at all? Even if you want to stick to squidboards so much, why does this topic take 2 days to make? Also, how hard is it to do both? Have you noticed how feedback channels get way, way more people talking?
The DC rule had my mind blown. I don't know where this came from but it should not be possible to DC in the last second of regular time and get a free replay. This felt like we went back in time rather than progressing forwards as far as rule sets are concerned.
Now the actual tournament was not terrible. But a lot of these situation add up and made me enjoy the tournament less than i should have. To sum a few up:
- Initial seeding had some pretty big errors in them, and when people asked about it, no one answered for a while until finally Rocket showed up and decided to fix it.
- Adding Rocket to staff was btw probably your best move for this tourney. He was friendly, responsive and made me believe that he actually cares.
- Rest of staff (and tbh i don't even know who that were for this tourney): very unresponsive and occasionally unfriendly.
- DC rule...
- Not knowing any info about the tourney until a few hours before start.
I realize that aside from the terrible DC rule, these aren't really fair to complain about because it's your choice how you run your tourney. But then again, (hopefully) your goal is that i and everyone else have a good time in your tourney. And unfortunately, all these things combined prevented me from doing that. Do with that what you will.
1) The necessary info with all intents and purposes was meant to be released the night before the tournament. Unfortunately, I was drawn away from my computer, and therefore I was not able to post everything. I was expecting the information to be released by the other members of the staff, however, I was wrong, and apologize for that being such.
2) There was a few reasons I (personally) didn't want to release the rosters sheet. For one, we intended later to put the gametypes on the same spreadsheet. I don't find it particularly professional when people can literally watch you edit the gametypes into the sheet, and a simple copy/paste would still leave some things to edit. Secondly, I don't feel it right for teams to be able to look at other teams' rosters leading up to the tournament. It just feels a bit wrong to me. I agree that releasing the roster sheet makes teams editing everything much easier than the way we had it set up, and of course, we did not do a fantastic job of keeping rosters of teams editing their rosters private, so in the future we will more than likely release the rosters ahead of time. Apologies for adding another layer of complexity.
3) A mere lack of communication. I expected there to be more active staff for the duration of the event, which obviously was not the case when I realized that more than 3 quarters of the staff would be playing in the event.
4) With my involvement in the community, I was moreso focused on helping out with the SAI (not to mention, you know, actual schoolwork) the days after the event, and therefore I was not able to get a feedback thread up. That is my bad, my fault, and my apologies. We had extremely little feedback in the eSPL feedback channels that were opened, and I have always felt that threads are the best place to leave feedback regarding the tournament, as it is more permanent. In a feedback channel, it's hard to skim over the discussion and memes that happens from the valuable feedback, here, you can easily skip the meme posts.
5) The DC rule was posted long before the tournament, and yes, it may be cheap. It will be reviewed, and we have not heard outrageous complaints prior to this tournament for that. However, the rules document was posted with registration. Had the DC rule been brought up to me or any other staff member, we would have easily considered reviewing it pre-tournament.
As a complete response to your post, Njok, I will attribute the mistakes mentioned as a result of the following:
- Having used a ruleset that has seen little minor adjustments since October
- Not having run a tournament in 2 months
- Not having kept up to date with many of the individual rules that were generally accepted in other tournaments and praised
- Lack of dedicated staff on the day of the tournament.
All of the points listed above fall back on the responsibilities of EndGameTV and it's staff. Thank you for your time and comments on the matter.
I was a backup for the entire tournament and never ended up playing, so I can't really speak for most of the other issues with the tournament, but I will pull no punches in saying that the Last Hope/Hightide Era speedtest situation was handled abysmally. The entire situation was fishy, and it seems that I'm still the only one who has realized this. They waited until after they had lost the set 1-2 LH to bring up that our dynamo, Graf, was supposedly lagging. Slimy had actually already submitted the score, and the bracket had been updated in Challonge before they even said anything. If he was an issue, why not bring it up after the first or the second matches to attempt to get rid of the issue and restore fairness as soon as possible? This is further compounded by the fact that video evidence shows that Game 3 was won via comeback in the last minute, so it's more than likely there was some salt going on, but none of this is really an issue with tournament structure. What was a problem was the fact that TOs blatantly lied regarding their own lag rules. hE did actually provide a video that they said was evidence of Graf's lagging. I watched said video at the indicated timestamp, and lo and behold, neither Graf nor any member of Last Hope was demonstrating even the slightest of latency, let alone the teleporting that was claimed. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt and watching the entire match proved fruitless. When I confronted them about this, the person who supplied the video said that it wasn't him who thought Graf was lagging, it was two other members of the team. This means that he submitted video evidence of lag fully knowing that it wasn't actually present in the video. Whether he knew TOs would assume any evidence was valid and not bother to watch it or just made a lucky bluff I don't know, but when I attempted to bring up this obvious violation to TOs I was completely ignored. I then messaged helpdesk saying that TOs should be reviewing any video evidence of lag before calling a speedtest, and I was responded to by some member of staff (don't remember who, but almost everyone involved in Cloudburst took part in this situation so there's no need to point specific fingers anyway) telling me that they do indeed watch any and all video evidence. Now this was obviously a lie, as there was no lag present in the video and Graf had been told to speedtest immediately after hE reported it.
While I was going through all of this, Graf was fully complying with EndGame rules and running both the Wii U and computer speedtests required. He completed them and gave them to Slimy, who forwarded them to the proper channels within a couple minutes. Unsurprisingly, he passed both tests, but TOs decided the computer one was invalid because he went through a site other than speedtest.net. So even though there was evidence that he was well over the cutoff limit for removal, he had to speedtest again. Speedtest.net had some sort of adverse effect on his computer, and messed up his internet in such a way that he was unable to connect to any tests after the first one. It took about 30 minutes for him to fix the issues with his internet, and speedtest.net still refused to work for him. He went to a third speedtest site (not the one for the original test he submitted on time or speedtest.net), and passed that one fine. This was submitted as well, but not until after TOs had given LH a forfeit for Round 1 for refusing to submit a speedtest on time. So they ignored his perfectly valid test and punished LH for using a different site than the one EndGame arbitrarily decided was the only one that could be used (not even sure if that's in the rules). Meanwhile, hE and even some ETGV staff were belittling us, saying that if Graf can't connect to a speedtest, he certainly couldn't not be lagging. Then, after dqing us from the first round, staff did a complete 180 and decided to accept Graf's other tests, letting him play in the rest of the tournament. So why couldn't those tests be applied to the situation that they were intended for? No reason whatsoever. I can only assume that LH was still being punished for taking too long (when the tests that were ultimately accepted were submitted more than on time), or that TOs were bandwagoning and punishing the team that was said to be lagging to comply with the lag witch hunts that have been going on recently.
TL;DR Last Hope was given a loss in a set when hE if anyone should've been punished for it due to poor and wishy-washy calls regarding speedtests and TOs openly lying about their policies. Seeing how EndGame constantly tries to be professional and esportsy, I'd love a formal apology to Last Hope, but that's never going to happen because nobody in this community seems to respect us just because we're more concerned with getting things right than everyone's feelings and inclusivity when it come to bringing up issues.
The situation with LH vs hE was certainly a sticky one to be in. I do not recall revoking one of Graf's prior computer speedtests, and if we did, the reason we may have revoked it was because it did not include the ping test, which is the number used on the computer test. This mentioned, all lag situations must be handled in a specific sense, and if a player is found to have evidence of lagging, a result of a set may have to be overturned, which is why the situation was brought up. I also do not particularly recall seeing the video evidence mentioned above.
Perhaps this was a miscommunication between staff members on the situation, as many different staff members were popping in and out. All things considered, the event was holding up the rest of the tournament, and needed to be taken care of, by one some means necessary.
Condolences go out to the parties afflicted: Last Hope, The Hightide Era, Squids for DAYS, and In The Ink specifically. The situation was not handled to the best it could have been handled to, and we appreciate your time to continue challenging the staff's position on the topic.
