MLG Releases Statement Regarding Day 1 Issues

[Smashboards]

Solid Jake, longtime Smash community member and producer at Major League Gaming, released a statement moments ago regarding issues that plagued day 1 of the MLG Anaheim tournament. The tournament started nearly two hours behind schedule on stream and nearly 6 hours behind schedule for the open bracket. Many players who attended in person have been complaining about the experience on Twitter, and viewers at home have been complaining about the stream quality, amount of ads, and other downtime. Jake addresses most of the issues and stresses that from this point out, MLG will run a flawless event. Here is the full explanation:

"Hey Guys,

I wanted to reach out to be completely transparent as to why day one had so many issues. I can tell you right now it was by far the worst day I have seen since I started working events back in 2010 and I’m both frustrated and sorry that our community has had such a rough return to MLG. I’m not making excuses with this post, simply providing transparency.

As I am sure you are aware, our open bracket started insanely late. The reason it started so late is because our bracket software more or less broke around 2PM yesterday and we had to literally re-code the thing from scratch. We have our own software that we use to report matches, auto populate upcoming matches online and the info booth screens, and track / calculate seeding based on pro points. It is 100% our fault that it broke, but that is the only reason things started so late. As much as I wish we could have just used challenge, we our entire database and event is based around this software so it was a very crappy situation.

If that wasn’t enough we had the fire alarm pulled twice, the swat team showed up due to a bomb threat, and we had to re-run fiber cables in the venue due to internet issues. It was a freaking disaster. This morning many players were disqualified from their round 1 match, and we retracted that. This is literally the first time MLG has EVER retracted DQ’s. I know we started late Friday and it’s hard to trust our TO staff to be on time after yesterday, but we are definitely behind on schedule so we need to make up ground from here. Sorry for the DQ’s but we truly have to , and plan to run a flawless event from here on out.

Lastly I want to just say keep your feedback coming. Our broadcast team is a lot of first timers, myself included as producer and I am reading your feedback regularly. Ads were an issue during the crew battle and I take full responsibility for it. We adjusted and hopefully it was a better viewing experience. In regards to down time we experienced yesterday, we have now setup a warmup station for pro players on deck so that we don’t have to run to the opposite side of the venue to scramble to find the players. Severely reducing downtime is priority 1 for the rest of the broadcast this weekend. Again keep the feedback coming, I sincerely appreciate it.

Thanks for understanding guys, and thanks for coming out in full force. We have the most passionate crowd in the entire venue and I love all of you.

TLDR

**** hit the fan yesterday. We sucked yesterday, and will step our **** up."

Update - MLG has ad policy listed on their site

"Most MLG.TV Streamers serve between 12 and 18 ads per hour. Stay within this range for best results. Use durations like 90 & 180s to run multiple ads as a break automatically.

You should be running at least 90s commercials after games, and 180s commercials after major events like series.

Keep your downtime to a minimum, but make sure to fill it up with ads when you do have downtime."​

 

[Gameboi834]

Hey, sounds good to me.
So long as the championships run smoothly.

 

[Jarelo]

Why were people DQ'd from their first round matches? Did they do something bad, or was it a fault with the program that disqualified them?

 

[KayB]

20adsads tho

 

[Stubble]

I got bombarded with ads exclusively from Madcatz and Earth to Echo. I had 4 Earth to echo ads play back to back. I reeeeallly don't want to see that movie now.

 

[link2702]

fire alarm and bomb squad threat sound sketchy to me, almost like at that point he was making excuses....

but w/e I guess, just hope the rest goes smoother.

 

[WindMajor]

fire alarm and bomb squad threat sound sketchy to me, almost like at that point he was making excuses....

but w/e I guess, just hope the rest goes smoother.

how is that not a legit excuse

 

[link2702]

how is that not a legit excuse

lemme ask you...is there any proof that either of those happened?

by all means if they did happen, then its a pretty legit reason.

but the way he acts in this post, its as if he's just trying to find some excuses to make up for why they screwed up.

 

[Jarelo]

lemme ask you...is there any proof that either of those happened?

by all means if they did happen, then its a pretty legit reason.

but the way he acts in this post, its as if he's just trying to find some excuses to make up for why they screwed up.

You could hear the fire alarm going off during the stream

 

[link2702]

You could hear the fire alarm going off during the stream

alright then nvm.

sorry.

 

[MrTea]

Why the hell was there a bomb threat

 

[Geranimo]

ads ads ads ads ads game ads ads ads ads pause ads ads ads

 

[Daftatt]

ads ads ads ads ads game ads ads ads ads pause ads ads ads

I bought so much pizza hut pizza, baking soda, cat food, and oh so many turtle beach headsets yesterday.

 

[ERayz]

LOL @ Sorry for those who were DQ's at their first round.

WOW man that must be an amazing event and experience for the new players who traveled and paid to participate in MLG, but got DQ'd just because MLG's software crashed! Hope those people will at least get refund FFS. Of course we can assume no top or known player was DQ'd, as always in this elitist, ****-riding community.

+ The fire alarm and bomb threat that prevented people from playing friendlies.....

Similar stuff happened to me and my friends when we went to Apex earlier this year, being threatened to get DQ'd if I played friendlies, friends getting'd DQ'd without prior advice, getting kicked out of our setups for a "MM" when it was obvious both players played friendlies etc. This made me never want to travel to the USA for Smash, ever. They only care about stream viewer count and the top players. Other players are just there to increase the prize pool.

/rant

 

[TGAP37]

So the policy says to fill up downtime with ads. But yesterday on several occasions (including during the crew battle most notably) the players were ready and then a series of ads were run causing unnecessary delays

 

[KnitePhox]

mlg should hire juggleguy

 

[LOGIA666]

Why the hell was there a bomb threat

Because some a**hole wanted to ruin the things going on there. I remember kids back in my middle school who would call in bomb threats just so we'd have to go out to the front of the school and we'd kill an hour of class.

The thing about bomb threats is that it's tricky to get caught, and always causes the biggest of disturbances. Law enforcement aren't allowed to just say "Yeah, we're not coming"

 

[Player -0]

LOL @ Sorry for those who were DQ's at their first round.

WOW man that must be an amazing event and experience for the new players who traveled and paid to participate in MLG, but got DQ'd just because MLG's software crashed! Hope those people will at least get refund FFS. Of course we can assume no top or known player was DQ'd, as always in this elitist, ****-riding community.

+ The fire alarm and bomb threat that prevented people from playing friendlies.....

Similar stuff happened to me and my friends when we went to Apex earlier this year, being threatened to get DQ'd if I played friendlies, friends getting'd DQ'd without prior advice, getting kicked out of our setups for a "MM" when it was obvious both players played friendlies etc. This made me never want to travel to the USA for Smash, ever. They only care about stream viewer count and the top players. Other players are just there to increase the prize pool.

/rant

This morning many players were disqualified from their round 1 match, and we retracted that. This is literally the first time MLG has EVER retracted DQ’s​

Lolwhut?

 

[Anuran]

Just fix your mistakes and do better thats kinda the way the game is played

 

[8BITRayn]

Im confused, as a TO how do you perform better and be timely when people pull fire alarms and call in bomb threats. I understand why they have to take the blame for it all (even though they really should only have to take responsibility for the software crash). But where is the outrage for general disrespect

 

[Stubble]

Why the hell was there a bomb threat

Because having that many Call of Duty virgins in one place at a time is a very real and very dangerous explosive hazard.

 

[ERayz]

Lolwhut?

I must admit I didn't know what "retracted" meant (English isn't my native language). Now I sounded like an idiot Maybe I am, after all...

But still, the fact they originally decided to DQ people for the sake of catching up with the schedule is unacceptable IMO. Glad they changed their mind

 

[Gef]

fire alarm and bomb squad threat sound sketchy to me, almost like at that point he was making excuses....

but w/e I guess, just hope the rest goes smoother.

Are you kidding me? Sounds to me like some idiots are at the maturity level of twelve year olds and pulled the fire alarm. If that happens, it needs to be addressed and that takes time away from the tournament. That is in no way the TOs fault and in no way an excuse, it's just what happened. Are you suggesting he made that up? Or are you suggesting the guy pulled it himself to make more time? lmfao get out. Both of those are impossible. Idiot...

 

[link2702]

Are you kidding me? Sounds to me like some idiots are at the maturity level of twelve year olds and pulled the fire alarm. If that happens, it needs to be addressed and that takes time away from the tournament. That is in no way the TOs fault and in no way an excuse, it's just what happened. Are you suggesting he made that up? Or are you suggesting the guy pulled it himself to make more time? lmfao get out. Both of those are impossible. Idiot...

like how you didn't even bother to read my other replies before throwing out insults.

Shows who the real immature one is.

I never got around to watching the stream, so I was going juts by what I read here, had i known before hand that you could hear the alarms on the stream, i wouldn't of doubted the guy.

 

[SacaSuMoto]

Jake is very much concerned with the quality of the main stage. The main stage was great, there is no doubt about it. The issues mainly came with how the open bracket was ran.

1. Day 1. They told us to be there and signed up ready to go by 1pm. However, due to their issues bracket wasn't started until 7pm or 8pm i don't remember exactly. I had a bye first round and so my first set of the day didn't start until around 9:30pm and 2nd round didn't finish until around 10pm. With that they decided to start round 3 10 am the next morning (i don't believe they announced it on the mic). Winners side of the bracket was supposed to be over in Day 1.
https://twitter.com/MLG/status/480017307494645761

Day 1 was quite a catastrophe, some people didn't want to return to day 2 because of it or care about their next sets in day 2.

2. For quite a few hours players were not allowed to play friendlies (probably because they thought that would resolve their issues faster), eventually they let us in to play. This tweet is from 3:40pm
https://twitter.com/tafokints/status/480118907202592768

3. The way they ran bracket seemed to be really inefficient. They had several staff members (that we're just local people from the area, for the most part) run chunks of the bracket with clipboards. The TOs would announce a couple sets from a rd to stations.

The TOs with clipboards would have printed out info cards for each set they were responsible for in which they would fill out things like who won first game and which character players used each game. I believe most of these people had not ran or been to smash tournament before.. they got better as the days went on, but there was a great disconnect between players and TOs. (someone was able to play sets in someone else's name, if the TOs were locals they would have figured it out instantly)

For the most part, they would wait for the chunk of matches called to all be over before calling the next few or would have to wait until they had their little clipboards of info ready to go before calling out the next chunk.. this lead to 20mins of waiting time (where everyone played friendlies) between chunks...

Because of this there wasn't a good sense as to when your next match was going to be called. You could look at the bracket online to find out where you are, but overall you couldn't always tell how far along they were in a rd...

4. We all found the bracket online and could see who our next opponent was. However, we couldn't start it until it was officially called out and there was an official TO that told you it's ok to start. This lead to some people prematurely starting their set, finishing a match or so, and then having to replay the set out from the start because it wasn't officially started.. even though the players were fine with finishing out the set as it was...

The TOs weren't very understanding with that respect. In Day 2, Shroomed vs Poor_Zhu, shroomed's set was called he went to the station, no TO in sight, he plugged in his controller and decided to go to the restroom. The restrooms sometimes had a decently long line to wait to get a stall. Shroomed came back and found out his first match had been forfeited because of his tardiness... even though his controller was plugged in at the station.


5. The main stage and the area where open bracket was played was disconnected. If you went to the main stage, you ran the risk of missing out on your next match being called and getting DQed. They didn't announce that next batch of matches was being called on the PA of the main stage, so if you weren't in the immediate area you wouldn't know that your match was called. I didn't like going to the main stage for this very reason. Often times, I would listen in to matches called of people that i know and try to find them or text them to make sure they didn't get DQed. "Can you text me if you hear my name?" was a common request this weekend.

Kira, a socal sheik player, wrote on an FB post in Socal Melee:

"After 2nd round of losers I went to watch some of the hype matches on the big screen. Mango vs Armada started, literally one of the biggest matches that day, I only watched ONE match before leaving to check if my match had been called. When I got back, friendlies were being played on Brinstar Depths and I was told I was DQ'd.

My opponent was willing to still play out the match (great guy, didn't have to do that), and we got our ref and he said he would be okay with that but needed to talk to the head TO.

When the head TO got there he blew me off multiple times, I chased him down twice just to have him completely ignore me and tell me it couldn't be done. All this while half the TVs were playing friendlies."

Sure, Kira could have been "smarter" about checking up on when his next match is played, but the same can be said about the MLG staff and their organization.


6. The main TO that called out matches would often times get mad at players trying to find out where their set needed to be played after hearing their name, but missing out on the station. Isn't that what the TO desk is for?

Even worse was that the same people would also be calling out killer instinct and injustice matches at the same desk.

7. The beginning of Day 2 was quite a rollercoaster. They started the day off with around 30 DQed players. 10am was when the next of matches was scheduled to start, but of course with how things went in Day 1 there was no faith in them keeping up with those times. At around 10:15ish, i arrived to venue around that time, I had found out that my friend and players like Shroomed, PPU, and Crimson Blur had been DQed. The issues around this are very controversial though some players that arrived early said TOs started calling matches at 9:40am

Keep in mind that these sets were rd 3 winners, sets that should have been finished the day before.

https://twitter.com/MIOM_PewPewU/status/480403391365918720

Eventually the retracted this decision. Should have they done this? There will be people on both sides of the argument. Think about the "legitimacy" of the bracket ( a bracket that was hilariously randomly seeded) if that decision had not been made..

8. They did not communicate their issues of Day 1 to the players in the venue, if they had told us about what was going on over their microphone the players would have been much more understanding about the delay. We all know that issues happen and tournaments starting in "smash time", however they didn't do this. They left us in the dark the whole time with no public statement until Jake posted this on reddit... after Day 1 ended or something around that time.

Honestly, i gave the MLG staff a lot of **** throughout the tournament. I didn't care about the statement on reddit, they didn't apologize or explain things to the people at the actual venue and that pisses me off the most out of everything that happened this weekend. I'm sure others would've been more vocal about their feelings at the venue if they weren't worried about publicity.

Many smashers felt that all of these issues made MLG one of the worst tournaments they have ever been to.

9. On top of it all, MLG didn't even provide the TVs. Crimson Blur and the SoCal community bought all the amazing trinitrons and transported them to venue (now they will have to take them back). MLG provided some cubes and discs but still relied on the community for quite a few of them. The TOs didn't have memory cards plugged into the consoles (idk why) and only had one memory card to go around to load the game file... they eventually lost it since you kept hearing over the microphone "does anybody have a memory card?"

If anything MLG just provided an expensive venue for the players. Crimson and Toxic Reflection had VIP passes, that seemed to be more useless than a spectator pass. I don't think Crimson and Toxic ever got their promised hoodie or promised special time with the "top players".

Doubles weren't even ran by MLG staff, they were ran by Sheridan (Hyuga) and Juggleguy. I am sure that if they had not stepped up, doubles would have not happened. The tournament was also ran on challonge and I believe it ran without too many hiccups other than conflicts of doubles and singles sets for some players.

The melee community put a lot of work into trying to make this tournament great, but we didn't have a voice at the actual tournament.
Is this what we give up for the sake of e-sports?

MLG issues in general:

1. Buying a spectator pass did not allow you to play friendlies or even spectate your friend's set in the open bracket.. you pretty much only had the choice to go to spend your time at the main stage or stand around the edge of the open bracket stations.. where you could only have a view of two set ups.

3. At some point late in Day 1, competitors weren't even allowed into the area unless you had a match to play.. The excuse was something along the lines of "helping the tournament run smoother."

Personal issues:

1. As big as the venue was... the open bracket setups felt very cramped.
For every table table there was 2 TVs right next to each each other, with really only reasonable room for two chairs...

https://twitter.com/SolidJakeGG/status/479822594586071040

2. I wish there had been someone with a laptop recording open bracket sets. Chibo was occupied with streaming killer instinct (and injustice?) for a long time.. so we didn't get much content from our side of the venue. It really feels like the open bracket was an afterthought.


I may be a random but I know I am not the only one that feels salty or understands that there were issues with this tournament.

https://twitter.com/MacDsmash/status/480407703425007616

https://twitter.com/MMG_DocShroomed/status/480443455835865088

https://twitter.com/ConnorTheKid4/status/481198671652868096

http://ask.fm/kirbykaze_/answer/113468024106

http://ask.fm/HugS86/answer/115069766049

https://twitter.com/EG_PPMD/status/480215731829612545

Fly Amanita's MLG experiences and thoughts: http://pastebin.com/2TBtvzDz

Of course there is a lot of great things that happened this tourney, all of us smashers love the times we get to see one another. We also love meeting new smashers. We love playing this game for countless of hours.There were also hype sets. Day 3 was overall great. However, I will never be able to forgive MLG for what happened this weekend. I feel terrible for anyone who thinks that Day 1 is indicative of a regular smash tourney.

 

[ShrieK1295]

MLG should really just pay for Sheridan or Juggleguy to fly out and run the tournament. I'm sure expenses paid plus one or two hundred bucks and either of those guys would be eager to do it.

 

[Juggleguy]

MLG should really just pay for Sheridan or Juggleguy to fly out and run the tournament. I'm sure expenses paid plus one or two hundred bucks and either of those guys would be eager to do it.

100 bucks to deal with that mess? lol

 

[ShrieK1295]

100 bucks to deal with that mess? lol

My bad, shouldn't have made assumptions. But didn't you fly there and pay for your own accommodations? That's like 500 bucks, and organizations that pay for accommodations for their staff generally also pay for food and crap as well.

Plus, it wouldn't be a mess if you ran it!

 

[Juggleguy]

My bad, shouldn't have made assumptions. But didn't you fly there and pay for your own accommodations? That's like 500 bucks, and organizations that pay for accommodations for their staff generally also pay for food and crap as well.

Plus, it wouldn't be a mess if you ran it!

The issues go well beyond just the execution on tournament weekend. Doesn't matter how much someone is paid, it's no fun trying to save a sinking ship.

 

[ShrieK1295]

The issues go well beyond just the execution on tournament weekend. Doesn't matter how much someone is paid, it's no fun trying to save a sinking ship.

I see. I guess as a player I just think of running the tournament as seeding a bracket, calling matches, and handling issues that come up on the fly. Do you think that MLG sucked for people because of issues leading up to the weekend?