AFGC Post Final Round XVIII Write-Up:

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This tournament was easily the most unorganized tournament I’ve been to, I’ve been to a handful and ran a few and I was very disappointed in the way things went down at Final Round 18 this year. So many issues and delays causing stress to the players, the floor staff, and the viewers on the stream that were looking at a schedule that was made and did not get what was planned. Everyone that went or watched this year was not happy and it showed this year.
I’ll just make note of everything that happened, from the time coming up to the event, all the way to when the event ended. Please bear with me, a LOT happened.

Registration was not going through for some individuals:

Some people that pre-registered for the event may have run into an issue. Two people I’m aware of ran into this problem. This was apparently due to change of the registration system they used from previous years that would make things easier but all it did was complicate things. People had to get in contact with one of the staff members via Facebook and have things taken care of there. This was an inconvenience to the competitors due to issues of technology.

Final Round Website is not up to par:

The website for Final Round 18 was lacking. There were links to good information of previous years but when it came to anything of the upcoming event, you clicked a tab and it gave you a text document to download and on that text document was a lack of information. This is very unprofessional and a bad look, people are expecting a link to another page of the website, not a page to a text document with little to no information. That needs to change to have more of a professional look, even if the schedule isn’t 100% another web page giving that information would be WAY better than a link to a downloadable text document saying that.

Lack of Pools information:

It was the week of Final Round 18 and from Monday through Thursday Morning, pools were not updated. However, if you were in Ultra Street Fighter 4, you got to see which pool you were in Thursday Morning. Now if you were in Xrd or Under Night In-Birth (The games of the community I’m covering), you didn’t know which pool you were in the night before. You had an idea of who was in your pool for the spreadsheet that went out Thursday Evening but you the time you were playing was unclear, but Pools for Xrd and UNiEL were done Monday Morning, so why the issues? The late registers were able to register but were not thrown in pools the night before the tournament, last year; this wasn’t an issue, you late registered and you got into a pool within an hour or so if you registered the day before the tournament. The website even had a web page where you could check your name and see which pool you were in. It was a GREAT System that was not implemented this year that could have saved a lot of stress.

What happened at the Top Half of the staff?

From what I got, Kyah BobSmack Hicks was the one in charge of the site but he had an unfortunate passing of his wife and was not able to tend to things this year (Acceptable reason), but the task of the website and updates were given to 2 or 3 individuals (whose names I’m unaware of), and they did not get the job done (Unacceptable). So this caused a lack of information to be sent out to those attending the event and started the downward spiral.

This lead to the floor staff having to pick up the slack and do a job that was supposed to be done by those individuals who were in charge of it originally the morning of during the time when Pools for Guilty Gear Xrd was supposed to start at 10AM but due to that, pools 1-4 were delayed for a whole hour (11AM). After they got started, things went smoothly but because of that, also the staff being shorthanded caused Persona 4 Arena: Ultimax not to run on Friday AT ALL and Under Night In-Birth: EX Late was supposed to start and end Saturday but only got to Top 16 that night, forcing it to start back up on Sunday at 2PM after the conclusion of Xrd Teams.

The Guilty Gear Xrd Tournament/Teams Exhibition:

Things were going according to plan as we got the Green Light for the event weeks before the tournament started. We got 7 confirmed teams and a Wild Card Qualifier set for the final slot. The Wild Card Tournament started 10 minutes late and ended 5 minutes behind schedule, we were done at 8:05PM Friday Night; when the Xrd Teams Event was supposed to be streamed by FunkyP at 8PM (Not bad TBH). All the teams were there and waiting for this to start and we kept getting held back since Street Fighter IV Teams was still going on (Which was supposed to be moved to Spooky’s Stream which Curleh was being held on). I was wondering what even happened to cause such a delay and why aren’t we playing now when we’re ready and had the time slot?

From what I heard; IFC Yipes added 6 ADDITIONAL teams to his exhibition last minute and that decision was given the green light, which caused the event to last even longer and hold everything up. This greatly affected our exhibition, especially since 3 key players in Xrd Teams were in Curleh (BT|MarlinPie, DC|FlashMetroid and TS|NerdJosh) which lengthened the original time of that tournament and affected the players for the Xrd Exhibition that happened 4 hours later (Supposed to start at 8PM, didn’t kick things off almost at 12AM...).

So, we waited, and waited… and waited… and waited… for SFIV Teams to end, so we could go up, it was until they got down to losers/grand finals of the USFIV Team Tournament that ShinBlanka was able to get Arturo (TS|Sabin) to stream the Xrd exhibition in the Salty Suite Auditorium in the back by the Smash Area. Its 12AM, people are tired but we all wanted to put on a good show because all the hype leading to the exhibition was REAL! It was obvious the players couldn’t play their best and people watching the stream could see it, even other teams could see that everyone was affected by it, but we did it anyway since this has NEVER been done before and, we wanted to show off Xrd at its best in the USA currently.

It got to the point where we were all too tired to even play and I made the call to stop it at Losers Finals so we could pick it up on Saturday after Top 32-8 which was scheduled to end at 10PM. I made this call because I wanted Top 4 there but with how everything was going, I didn’t think it would be possible to have the time for it tomorrow so, that shafted a lot of people into playing tired and having people to go to sleep around 4AM.

So Saturday, things were running behind for the Xrd tournament since pools didn’t kick off until an hour later. Late Registers had to come down every 2 hours to see if they were in said pool that was starting and that is not how it should be handled. It was only this way because of the lack of work done by the top end staff leaving it to the floor staff, which got a lot of flak from the players. They eventually got all the late registers in pools and when they went down there, they were able to know which ppl they wre in afterwards, but it was too little, too late.

Xrd singles got down to Top 32 after pols were done. Top 32 for Xrd ran slowly, I think they planned for all winners and losers matches to be streamed which was not a good idea, Winners should be on stream and losers on the side, until Top 8 winners side is determined, but that didn’t happen until it was getting close to midnight, they choose to run losers off to the side to cut down on time which was a good call and things ended just before 12AM. Because of that, Xrd teams were pushed back another day, at the end of Top 8 for Xrd which started at 10AM.
Since FunkyP had another task, it was up to me to run the stream for Xrd Teams Finals. I learned how to run his stream and it was fine for those in the stream however, for those in the venue, they had no big screen to view the exhibition since it was being used by Smash. If you look into @TheArm05 twitter that weekend, this image explains it all.

https://twitter.com/TheArm05/status/579698981606821889

Under Night In-Birth: EX Late Tournament:

This tournament got it really bad. Under Night was supposed to start and end on Saturday. As a main game, they got shafted pretty hard too. The same issues with pools for Xrd happened with them as well. Pools didn’t get started until very late and people were waiting hours to see when UNiEL would start. It got so bad, people started dropping out as it went on, the stream setup was all the way on the opposite side of the ballroom and that itself caused issues with communication. They eventually ran all 8 pools for that game and got down to a Top 16 but it was almost midnight and they pushed it to happen after the Xrd Exhibition.

It started and I ran that bracket with VileMalik to get it down to Top 8, when we got to Top 8, he took charge and let me take a break. In the end, it had an outstanding Grand Finals but since there was no screen for it since the Smash Finals were happening on it, only the stream monsters could enjoy it. This will be the first time that the experience of being in the stream was better than being at the venue, which should NEVER be the case, especially for a game that is in the main lineup of the event. I feel for the UNiEL competitors that weekend, those guys were ready to play as well but were not able to start on time and had finals pushed an entire day due to the lack of organization.

Persona 4 Arena: Ultimax:

This one is going to be short and sweet. The tournament was scheduled to happen Friday, but got pushed back to Saturday. @TheGreatReptar ran the bracket for that game... that says a lot since he doesn’t like the game at all! People slowly but surely dropped out of this tournament due to it starting a day late. It was also ran slowly, @LordKnightBB played and won his first match and had to wait over an hour to play his next match due to the lack of communication and organization. Even though it was a side tournament, it wasn’t on stream until Winners/Losers/Grand Finals due to lack of communication with SixFortyFive, who had a ton of dead air on their stream and was unaware of what was going on.

The stream station could have covered Top 8 of Persona since it had that much dead air. Top 3 ended and it was during the middle of UNiEL Pools so there was a break in between games to get that covered. At the end of the day, that side tournament could have been handled better but things did not go well at all. The lack of staff and communication once again has made this tournament which could have been something cool to kick off Ultimax going into EVO, was another lack luster and a poorly ran side tournament due to the issues of the scheduling.

In Closing:

This was my 3rd Final Round in a row, and this was the first time I did NOT enjoy myself as a competitor, nor spectator. I went to this event expecting to run one thing on time and was ready but ended up having it delayed and found myself helping floor staff. It sucks to watch my bro’s who’s been doing this for years and doing it right get smashed with all of this and when players get at them asking for pools updates, it sucked to watch them be as helpless as they were due to how the upper chain messed up.

I feel for SilenShinobi, VileMalik, JDash and ANYONE else that was Floor Staff for Anime (Heck for anyone that was floor staff) at Final Round this past weekend. They worked their tails off even with all the holdups and issues of the people over them. Things didn’t go too well but they were able to pick up the pieces and repair some of the damage that happened at Final Round 18. Some things they cannot fix completely but it was patched up as well as humanly possible. I’m making note of this now; everything that happened was NOT their fault, they picked up the pieces and tried to fix the problem as best as they could. So if you see them, thank them.

Even though Final Round this year was a disaster organization wise, the fact that people came together towards the end and understood what was happening made things a little better. Hopefully things go better the next time around because it would be a shame to see all the talent in this genre loses out on outside competition coming back. The south has TOO MUCH TALENT to not showcase and when it had its chance in the schedule, it never happened.
Some people aren’t as forgiving, but some are, if things are done to change things for the better, I can see Final Round 19 being much better for anime, however things need to change and ShinBlanka has apologized. Apologies are good but he needs to show it at his next event. People are already saying they might not return after this experience so something has got to happen soon. The hype was NOT real this year and hopefully, they can change things to make up for what happened this year at the next one.

Christopher L. Johnson
JCS | ShinSyn

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