In a recent episode of Cross Counter, Gootecks and Mike Ross outlined all of the basic things you need to do when running a fighting game tournament. The video is a nice summary of important topics, and well worth a look for new and experienced tournament organisers alike.

This week I’d like to share this video with Bracketed readers and provide some highlights that I took away from what Gootecks and Mike Ross had to say.

First up, here’s the Cross Counter episode I’m referring to. An embed of the video is provided below. The video is aimed at local tournaments, but the basic concepts apply no matter what the scale might be. In particular, if you can’t do this stuff efficiently at the local level you’ll struggle to be efficient at a major tournament.

Let’s take a look at the various topics the video covers.

The Recording/Streaming Setup (Gootecks, 1:35)

“…if nobody sees what happened during your tournament, your tournament may as well not have happened.” – Gootecks

Gootecks provides a rundown of what makes up a basic streaming (or direct feed recording) setup, complete with mics for commentary and a webcam for showing the players and environment. I have no experience with match streaming or recording, but this looks like a pretty good summary to me. If you know of a better beginner’s guide to streaming, please let me know.

Location, Equipment and Players (Mike Ross, 8:13)
Mike explains that the tournament location, equipment needed and player numbers are all closely related. You need to have an idea of how many people will attend so you can have enough game setups and venue space available. However the venue location has a direct impact on how many people are likely to attend. You need to choose your venue with accessibility in mind, and try to estimate how many people will come so that you have enough setups for them to play on.

Registrations (Gootecks & Alex Valle, 9:33)

“Gamers are lazy…” – Alex Valle

It’s important to stick to your registration cut-off times. Adding late comers can delay your tournament and mess up your brackets. This is consistent with my previous comments on late registrations.

If you plan to run your brackets electronically, you can speed up bracket seeding by recording registrations electronically.

Preparing the Bracket (Gootecks, 13:00)
Gootecks likes to use ALJ Tournament Maker 2.1. It’s worth noting that Tournament Maker now includes regional seeding, and some quick tests indicate the underlying algorithms are very good. One downside is that you can’t see the player regions in the bracket; the BSG colour-codes players by region which I find easier to check. One solution is to add regions into the names of the players in Tournament Maker (e.g. VIC|ToXY).

Gootecks doesn’t like using Challonge because the presentation of double elimination brackets is hard to follow i.e. they hide the slots that don’t contain any players. Challonge is ideal if you want your brackets automatically published to the internet in real time but it does have drawbacks around its handling of double elimination brackets, including the way players transition from the Winners bracket to the Losers bracket.

Rank seeding is recommended here, specifically as a way to reward players that have done well at previous tournaments. It also helps to make sure your top 8 results are more reflective of your scene as a whole.

Running the Bracket (Gootecks, 17:57)
At the beginning, start running your matches from top to bottom. If people are unavailable for some reason you should just try to run whatever you can. It’s important to avoid having setups sitting idle while you still have tournament matches to resolve.

Gootecks recommends queuing up the next group of matches while the current group is being played. This minimises the amount of time that setups spend sitting idle during your tournament.

Results (Gootecks & Mike Ross, 21:00)
Once your tournament is over, it’s important to upload both your tournament videos (is they aren’t already archived via a stream website) and the tournament results. Be sure you upload this stuff in a timely fashion otherwise it’ll be stale by the time it goes live. Documenting the outcome helps to keep players motivated. After all, if you’re not serious about your tournament results, why should the players or spectators care about them?

Uploading pictures from the event and videos of the atmosphere is a great way to entice more people to come along next time.

Feedback and Future Articles
If you have any feedback about this article, or would like to request a subject for a future Bracketed article, you can send me a PM or an email, or make a post in the Bracketed Feedback thread on the OzHadou forums.

]– Ziggy –[