Saturday, 4 August 2012
Last week Loki shared the inside scoop on how things went down with the Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 final 8 at SS2k12. Loki explained how the switch to best of 5 was made and provided his thoughts on changing official tournament rules midway through the competition.
Today we reach the end of Loki’s 8 part series recapping Shadowloo Showdown 2012 from an organiser’s perspective. In the final part Loki covers the last game on finals Sunday, namely Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, and how the team coped with running overtime. Loki also shares his thoughts on how to avoid these overtime issues in the future.
THE FINALS – FINAL ROUND
After UMvC3 finished with yet another fantastic reset bracket runback we moved straight on to Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition (SSF4:AE) and every match was a nail biter. By this time we knew that we wouldn’t finish on time but thankfully the venue was very patient with us and allowed us to finish without getting security involved. This left us in a bad spot to pack up after everyone left, but thankfully we were able to leave much of the gear packed up in the venue and pick it up in the morning. If not for that favour I think we would have had serious venue issues due to simply trying to fit far too much content into one day.
A Glimpse of the Future
I think perhaps the simplest way to avoid running late at the end of a major like Shadowloo Showdown is to cut down on the amount of content that we put into the Sunday finals. One possible method would be to cut down many games to top 4s, and that may be the right answer. Another would be to cut out some games entirely, especially the old and less popular games, but with so many players travelling from overseas to compete in these games, I wouldn’t want to be the one to make the decision to cut say King of Fighter XIII from the line-up when several Chinese superstar players flew over just to play that game. The final suggestion I can think of is that perhaps we could run two streams on the finals day, but that would literally split our crowd and halve the hype for each game.
What will we choose in the future? At this stage I’m not sure. Perhaps the public will choose for us. If community interest in Street Fighter x Tekken falls further it may not make the schedule the next year. Perhaps some of the other games will fall further into obscurity. Will Skullgirls last? Only time will tell. One thing is for sure: we learned a lot from this year, through both good and bad experiences. Whatever happens I think the important thing moving on from here is not to forget the lessons we learned and to always attempt to improve things for next time.
Closing Comments
This has been a really long article and if you’ve stuck with me up until the end I really want to thank you. For as long as this ranting diatribe already is, there are a lot of things I probably could have mentioned here that I avoided because it simply would have made this even harder to digest. I hope if nothing else you’ve learned something from the things we did right and the things we did wrong, and with any luck we will see some of these lessons applied to other tournaments with success.
Many of the systems I came up with were inspired by innovations made by the Evo staff in previous years and also logical extensions of what I’ve tried at BAM, especially in 2011. I hope in the way that I’ve learned from those ideas and bettered them, someone can learn from my ideas and better them again. I’ve seen already that CEO this year used a similar registration system to the one that Shadowloo Showdown implemented, with a similar system for player registrations in a Google Document online. I don’t know if this is a result of the online registration and pool system for SS2k12 or whether it’s simply a coincidence, but either way I think that as a worldwide community we all move forward together, and though our successes and failures may be made individually, as a community we all benefit.
Thanks again for reading. Big shoutouts to the Australian FGC.
- Brendon “Loki” Watson
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
Isaac Newton
Thanks very much to Loki for submitting his very thorough post-SS2k12 analysis to Bracketed. I’ve certainly enjoyed reading how things went down on the organisers’ side of the curtain at SS2k12. Hopefully the community now has a greater understanding of what goes into a large-scale event like Shadowloo Showdown and tournament organisers will be in a position to avoid some of the more common pitfalls when running major events of their own.
If you have any feedback for Loki or the rest of the Shadowloo Showdown team, please post it on the OzHadou forums. I’m sure the team would welcome any input the community has to offer.
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 –[
