Barnard's Loop · @LoopBarnard
11th Jul 2020 from TwitLonger
EVO staff is incompetent: How they exploited and mistreated seeding teams.
I’m making this statement after having thought a lot about my experiences seeding events and seeing toph’s recent tweet on Mr. Wizard that confirmed suspicions I had about EVO.
I was accepted as a seeder for PG Stats Discord in 2018 because I had a lot of scene knowledge from various projects I had done, and was excited to put that knowledge to official use.
EVO 2018 was among the first events I seeded. While our TO, Bear, was wonderful and helped managed things, EVO did not provide us with adequate resources, and instituted seemingly arbitrary rules that made it difficult (read: impossible) to seed accurately or effectively.
I will list them and explain the absurdities in detail:
1: We were not given an attendee list. At an 1100+ attendee event.
2: They would only let us seed the Top 64. At an 1100+ attendee event.
3: They made numerous inexcusable errors in interpreting the “good players list” we provided that could have been fixed with a simple google search. When they only had to get 64 players correct.
4: They provided a limited number of swaps to fix conflicts. Some of these had to be used to correct errors they continuously made.
5: This led to patchworking and effectively reseeding after first draft was posted less than a week before the event. Each time we would get major errors in the top 64s we saw on smash.gg.
6: The pools structure itself was immensely flawed, making schedule fixes with retained seeding accuracy impossible, as each wave used the top 10 seeds – Wave A seeds 1-10, Wave B seeds 11-20, etc.
7: Communication was near nonexistent.
No apologies were given directly to the seeding team. No compensation was given for very long, abrupt hours spent having to fix their mistakes. People seemed to just assume the seeding team itself was incompetent rather than EVO staff being exploitative and grossly incompetent.
I want to carefully go over how insane this scenario is: I have never experienced in any other seeding position **any** of the six errors I just listed.
Let me go over in elaborate detail why all of this was bad and why that’s not even close to the extent of the issue.
1: Lacking an attendee list makes seeding effectively impossible at a high attendee supermajor. EVO 2018 was one of the biggest Smash 4 events that year and featured a lot of international talent, because it’s EVO. We had to make a “good players list” considering as many active players as possible because there really was no other option.
This is bad and forced errors. Often times when seeding a top 8 or 16, you move to account for frequent bracket matchups or regional conflicts. This is not reasonably possible if you lack an attendee list and one isn’t public to scrape yourself, as was the case with EVO 2018.
The many nuances that exist are erased, and you will inevitably miss good players because there are literally hundreds worth seeding worldwide, and EVO happens to be the most global event for Smash due to name recognition.
2: Only seeding the Top 64 is, for reasons already established, insane. While each individual member of a seeding team might not list out all players on a document, that’s why it’s a **team**, and typically you get a list that reaches into 200-400 for events the size of EVO.
Practically speaking, EVO-tier events usually have significant bracket threats as far as the 120s-150s, meaning they were limiting us to half or less the talent attending EVO. It’s an event with some of the highest likelihood for big international talent to break out, as Japan attends a lot, Latin American players attend, Europeans attend, Australians attend, etc.
3: The errors made were legitimately absurd. At one point they mistook Tristate player Gen as “Gen Miller Lite”, an unexplainable thing that could’ve been clarified with an ssbwiki search or simply communicating with us.
Even worse, then somehow seeded “errtight” top 64 despite him having not having a similar tag to any other player on the list. It’s insane for EVO staff to make this error and publish it even in a first draft. It makes US look stupid because it is NOT acceptable for a seeder to make these kinds of errors.
4: Providing a limited number of swaps seemed entirely arbitrary, but worse off than the fact it made no sense, we were forced to use these to fix mistakes continuously made by EVO staff. It’s like they took our Top 64 and translated it through Babelfish.
Also, because they only allowed us to seed the top 64, regional conflicts were very common and we couldn’t properly mend many of them due to the limited number of swaps we were allowed to use. This is another forced error: We had minimal control over fixing the simplest of things that are a cakewalk to fix in literally all other seeding environments I’ve ever been a part of.
5: As stated above, they continuously messed things up, and we had to work days to find and fix all the egregious errors within the long, long list of pools. We’d fix things and think things would be done and then they weren’t because they made a new change we were only informed of because a player noticed a bracket shift and spoke up on Twitter.
6: The basic structure of the pool format itself was badly flawed as it compounded other problems – from the imprecise seeding, to the errors, to the limited swaps – by also making it hard to rectify due to the time issues this presented. With each top seed in one wave of a pool, repairing scheduling conflicts required drastic over & underseeding “fixes”.
7: They did not communicate much at all with us. Smash TOs did, mind you, so our Smash-side resources were as good as they could be given the circumstances. Bear and PracticalTAS guided us through the process and we made multiple google docs to keep track of notable unseeded players, conflicts & swaps, etc.
We would not be informed formally by EVO staff that the matter was concluded and while on limited time constraints new conflicts consistently arose after then-current ones were fixed.
We took blame for all of these issues publicly and at least a couple of top players called us some varying kind of idiot. I don’t blame them: The seeding was horrendous, but we effectively had zero control over it because anytime we attempted to exercise common sense, EVO randomly, with no communication, upended things.
This was in an environment where we had to race against a clock where every time we think we’re done with an hour left, EVO swaps something for no reason, leaving us to scramble to fix errors. It was highly stressful because we all recognized the importance of seeding an event as big as EVO.
Bad seeding means lopsided sets, poor skill alignment in late bracket, and sets that happen much too early. This makes the tournament less fun for players and viewers alike.
But. But. But. That’s not all. This was NOT unique to EVO 2018 Sm4sh. If it was, I might be able to excuse this as a one-time error. It’s still awful that they never apologized to us, but this went on for YEARS in both Smash games.
I know this because PracticalTAS, Lovage, and Pikachu942 have all alluded to Melee side seeding being a similarly awful experience. The timeline of this roughly means that it was like this for both games in 2017 and 2018, and I know for a fact Smash 4 EVO seeding in 2016 was bad because I’ve talked to the people who did it in the past.
One described the seeding environment as so stressful that they cried over it, which I can understand due to the time constraints & workload we were given in 2018 with almost no support from EVO staff, combined with the sheer pressure of how big the event itself is.
Further indication this way the precise same environment in 2016 is the fact that KEN was mistaken for Liquid Ken at EVO 2016. While KEN wasn’t as well known and it was common for spectators to make this error at the time, it demonstrates a lack of research on whoever’s job it was to clarify players, and shows that it went on for several years and in fact got worse, possibly.
What I’m describing here is exploitative behavior on EVO staff’s part. It went on for years and nothing ever went anything even close to smooth: It was a riddled, misfired mess of negligence and shitty decisions and awful philosophy on how seeding events should be managed at the expense of people who sink a lot of time into learning about the competitive scene.
I don’t want compensation anymore and I can only speak for myself on this issue, but I am furious at how many smart people who work hard on this kind of stuff were used by incompetent morons who didn’t care about anything.
Take this advice: Don’t seed EVO. They will overwork you, not communicate with you, fail to provide even the most basic resources all other industry events provide without question, refuse to acknowledge their errors, not pay you for it, and then you get the blame for how garbage the seeding ends up.
To end this scathing piece on EVO management on two positive notes:
Super Smash Con is a delight to seed for, happens within the same month, and is run by people who know how to both an event and how to communicate with its volunteers and provide them a low stress environment to seed in with plenty of time.
The Box, an online event TO’d by RedNekra with 8000 attendees, was significantly easier to seed than EVO 2018. A full list was provided, and we were compensated for our work, as it was on relatively short notice. In addition, and in my opinion most importantly, despite being very busy, RedNekra actively assisted us when necessary and was sure to keep in communication with us.