Absolute Blowup 8

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Imagine getting on a plane to fly to a tournament without knowing who your first round opponent is. So begins the tale of Absolute Battle 8.

Most decently-run tournaments release pools a couple of days to a week early so people can actually prepare for the matchups in their pools. Not here lmao. And I use “release” here very loosely. If you take a look at FGC Twitter timelines across all the games for AB8, they were very very NOT seeded upon first release. The Friday of the tournament weekend (aka Day 1 for games like KOF), pools were still jacked up and being moved around. For example, in GG, what would normally be our top two seeded players were scheduled to fight first round.

L. O. L.

I mean, even Saturday morning, the pools weren’t finalized. I would have liked to have been notified I’d be playing the May matchup before I flew 800 miles so I could prepare for it, but hey, what can you do?

Guilty Gear was scheduled to start at noon. As tweeted by the official Absolute Battle Twitter account, Pools 1 and 2 were to start at noon, and pools 3-4 at 2 PM. That is most definitely not what happened.

We had four Gear setups. In a normal world, you run two matches from pool 1 and two matches from pool 2 concurrently. Instead, they decided to run pool 1 in its entirety before starting pool 2. With me being in pool 2, being there on time at noon like a responsible player, and it's 1 PM and I haven't played a match, I'm not happy but it's whatever. I figured since there's only one TO, he's just doing what he can to keep everything smooth and organized so neither he nor anyone else gets jumbled trying to run two pools off one cell phone.

“Okay, so we just finished pool 1. We’re gonna do pools 2 and 3 simultaneously.”

Excuse me, what? So not only are you gonna run pool 2 an hour after start time, but you're gonna try to run another pool a full hour before people were told to arrive?

“Well, we’re running ahead of schedule. If you know people in the other pools, go ahead and contact them and let them know I'll give them some leeway since we're early.” Clearly you don't even know what the schedule is to begin with, but I guess all the matches got played so sure.

Speaking of pools and the schedule, for some strange reason the Gear pools were 3-out format on smash.gg. In the brightest move of the weekend, instead of having people come back for the “semifinals” at 4, of which there would be only four matches to finish setting the bottom bracket of top 8, they ran them as soon as they were ready to be played as pools were finishing so we could be done for the evening. And so we were told to be back on Sunday at noon for top 8, to be streamed on SaltyMayhem. People hit Twitter and spread the link so everyone was excited to watch.

Speaking of streaming, none of the pools got streamed, by the way.

Fortunately, BB was run without incident (DESYNC YOUR PADS, YOU MONGOLOIDS).

11 AM Sunday rolls around and we find that the secondary room that we played pools in yesterday was to be the location of the top 8...except all the anime setups were taken down already. So between my PS4 (never leaving home without it again), Gekioh’s laptop, and the stream setup, we were all able to get warmed up for top 8.

Noon rolls around, and predictably, “Sorry folks, but we gotta push the start back by an hour. Having issues setting up the stream, but we’ll be ready to go by 1.” At this point, I'm starting to sweat a bit knowing I have an evening flight to catch, and if everything starts running on Tournament Standard Time, and I have to play both GG and BB, well…

1:30 rolls around. No stream, no in-house projector working, no sound on the speakers, and there's one TO running Gear top 8 and apparently a huge Tekken snafu at the same time. We played the winners’ side of top 8 and I found out that they're using my setup to run losers’ side (not that that’s a bad thing, but how would we even get this done on time if players didn't bring their own setups? :thinking:). Through a couple of shaky cams, peering over shoulders, and livetweeting updates, we got through top 8. And then another two full hours of pestering to get our payouts (“they're cutting the checks right now” my butt) so I could actually catch my flight home. During this time, BB top 8 started and apparently the stream, finally “fixed” after four hours, had a ton of issues even then?

And let’s talk about the secondary stage for a bit. There's a comparison picture going around Twitter of the main room stage with the lights and the viewing monitors and the gaming chairs and the production values versus me and my training partner sitting on a rickety stage with no projector and with a staircase that was going to roll away from the platform and make you fall and crack your tailbone if you stepped on it wrong. You couldn't even scoot your chair without feeling like the whole thing was gonna collapse. The stage was literally the Nintendo 64 Rumble Pak of stages. You could FEEL your opponent’s mashing in your chair.

To wrap this up, on the one hand, I'm glad I got to mingle with a new, awesome crowd of people and play good games in a new area for a weekend. On the other, I could have stayed at home and played in Garage Gear with the locals, with a far better tournament experience, production values (yes, in an actual garage), and a working stream. Without having to pay flight, hotel, and major-level venue fees, mind you.

Needless to say, I won't be wasting my money on Absolute Battle again.

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