LiteralGrill
Smokin' Hot~
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Hey everyone, Sunday means time for another Mind Over Meta. Today, I’d like to talk about the meat-and-potatoes of any Smash scene, or any fighting game scene in general. In fact, it’s a requirement of any good grassroots scene for anything ever, from an Evangelion Club to a secret knitting society.
That’s right, today, we’re going to discuss running events, and how you can help make yours better. While I can’t cover all the important details, I want to at least hit on several points that I have found important in tournaments I attended.
Everyone Likes Cake
A lot of ingredients go into a successful event. It’s hard to run tournaments, get togethers, and general smashfests well, because running this types of gatherings can require time, effort, and lots of planning to go smoothly. Running events under heavy restrictions can be a real artform, because the amount of foresight and persistence needed can overwhelm even an experienced TO (tournament organizer).
Here’s a fact, for those of you unaware: people like Super Smash Bros. Quite a bit. Enough to meet up multiple times a year, even a month, and play for hours and hours until venues kick them out late at night. Here’s a fact less of you might know: the world is not that partial toward video games, especially Super Smash Bros. And of all the Smash games, Project M has, many times, gotten the short end of the redheaded stepchild love stick. Sponsors straying from PM due to legal grey areas and TOs dropping PM for logistical reasons, the scene should be exhausted from dealing with these hurdles.
And yet they aren’t. As we’ve said in weeks past, people want to play PM and will go to crazy lengths to do it, as people do with Smash64 and Melee and Smash 4. And the reason is always the same: for love of the game. People still host tournament after tournament to see others come and play some Smash, at insane costs to themselves in terms of commitment and hard labor.
So it’s no secret people want to play PM. It is easier, however, for people to do so if organizers of events make considerations for players to come. If an event is inconvenient, poorly run, or filled with negativity, players lose incentive to come and have fun, so attendance plummets. While running events is tough, I want to talk about some ways to make it better, from the ground up.
Flour and Sugar
In order to run any good tournament or smashfest, you need a place to go. You can’t just mill around in the street with controllers, people! Picking a good venue is a little complex, but I asked TO and community leader /u/solideem about the basic things he looks for in a venue:
"For me, the four things [that venues should have] are: Space, Price, Parking, Internet."
Wise words. Let’s take this rectangle of venue must-haves apart.
- Space: The more space you have, the more people you can fit. One great frustration I’ve had in Smash events is crowded, cramped conditions. Just a few weeks ago, I had the struggle of participating in an event for three games with different groups signed up for each. Even worse, the venue was essentially a short hallway with tables on the sides. Let me tell you, it took minutes to cross from one side of the other while pushing through throngs of players and spectators. This turmoil can be mitigated if your venue has enough space to fit your attendees.
- Price: Renting out venues can get steep prices, especially for nicer places. Ideally, your venue is provided by a relative or good friend or school letting you use their store, shop, house, church, or some other room out of the goodness of their heart. However, these situations don’t always happen. Instead, an organizer often must pay some fee to rent out space. Making attendants pay an entrance fee unrelated to tournament entrance fees will help make venue fees manageable, but be realistic; renting out a stadium for a thirty-man event is not a reasonable goal.
- Parking: People gotta show up somehow, and many will be driving with CRTs and consoles to bring to the event (more on these in a bit). To speak more generally, you want transport to and from your event to be a non-issue. Parking is necessary for cars, but for people traveling in via train, subway, or bus, your venue should be a short walk away from public transit stops at most. Accessibility is key. I know I have been unable to attend events I would very much have liked to play in simply because there wasn’t a reasonable way to get there.
- Internet: To grow your scene and broadcast the best of the best from your tournament, you’ll want reliable, reasonable speed internet so that you can have a constant stream on sites like Twitch or Hitbox. Additionally, internet helps your attendees advertise your tournament’s stream and bracket links, as well as keep viewers in the loop, and it just helps them go about their overall business. It’s convenient. Try to have WiFi.
So now that we’ve got a venue with good resources at a decent price, what else do we need for our video game tournament?
How about some video games?
”Not I,” Said The Cat
If people come to your event and there aren’t enough TVs and consoles for more than 30% of your attendees to play on at any given time, the players are going to be frustrated waiting for a turn. Even worse, your tournament is going to take eons to finish!
To rectify this, we gotta turn to grassroots. Ask your attendees to bring TVs and consoles. It’s not rude, it’s necessary, unless you have an amazing stockpile yourself. Offer discounts on venue fees for those who bring setups. You want to incentivize people to help your event run well; they want it to run well too. The amount of resources you need scales with the size of your event, and since you want to aim at big events, you need all the resources you can get.
The only way extra setups can ever hurt your event is if it simply takes up too much space while not being used. Power strips and extension cords help make sure the number of running setups can be maximized, but all effort preparing for TVs goes to waste if people don’t bring TVs or Wiis. If you want to enjoy the culminated effort of many people hauling TVs and consoles by car, plane, and bus, be prepared to do your share, so that events run without a hitch.
Eggs, Milk, and Butter
So now we’ve got a decent venue and enough setups that a tournament will run smoothly. It’s time to consider some other logistics from the competitors’ point of view.
Let’s talk health first. Specifically, basic human necessities. You need water accessible easily to every competitor. Hydration is crucial, especially in hot summer months, and is constantly an issue at tournaments, when it’s easy to forget to swig some water in between games after focusing on the screen for hours. Food is another important item. While you can’t reasonably be responsible for your attendees’ lunch and dinner, you should remember that people will actually get hungry after prolonged periods of sweating and waveshine workouts against opponents. Restaurants nearby to venues are absolutely appreciated, especially if they are only a short walk away. Finally, food and water have to come out sometime, so you need to have easily accessible and well-kept restrooms inside your venue.
[[An important note to competitors: make sure you wash your hands! In close-packed conditions like Smash tournaments, diseases can spread easily, and washing your hands helps reduce the chance of both you and others getting sick.]]
Next to discuss is layout. TOs should plan how to arrange their venue space optimally. If your TV tables are scattered haphazardly through a room, it’s going to be hard to walk from one space to another. Worse, climbing over setups is dangerous, and can even ruin matches or damage equipment if something goes wrong. Make damn sure people can move from point A to point B without hassle.
Now onto the crux of most events: the tournaments themselves. Just to be clear, the basic standard for Project M tournaments is a double elimination bracket. Generally, all matches are played as best-of-three games, except for Winners’ Finals, Losers’ Finals, and Grand Finals, which are played best-of-five games. Each game is a 4-stock match with an 8-minute timer and no items. This is generally not much surprise, but I have seen events run by people not aware of standards who tried to run a single elimination two-minute-timer tournament.
One particular issue for PM, though, is stagelists. Make sure you have a consistent stagelist that everyone is aware of. Literally every event I go to, every match I play, someone has to pull a TO aside to ask about what stages are starters and counterpicks. Small measures like setting the stagelist in the random stage select screen up ahead of time on each setup goes a long way. Make sure you pick a stagelist that makes sense and is agreed on.
Signups for tournaments should be done smoothly as well. When a player signs up, make sure that they pay you their venue fee and tournament fee quickly. This is not only a logistical issue for time, it makes sure that players are not scamming the system by playing for free when others need to pay. If any scoundrels try to cheat the system, you should stand firm as a TO running a public event and let them know that bypassing entry fees is not tolerated.
Finally, I want to bring up another important point in running events. Ideally, your event has a great venue with lots of setups and a well-run tournament that allows plenty of extra friendlies time. Hopefully, this means you get a lot of people attending. Yes, we’re on a good track!
The natural consequence of players flocking to your event in droves is that you see a lot of types of people. I’ve seen people from a variety of lifestyles and backgrounds in Smash; in fact, Smash events may be some of the most diverse places I’ve ever seen. All types of ethnicities, sexual orientations, backgrounds, gender identities, hobbies, lifestyles, and skill levels exist in the Project M community as a testament to Project M’s universal appeal. You as an event organizer must see to it that Smashers at your events are treated with the respect they deserve. While I have almost never seen any issues with respect at events, I do know that many have reported unfair treatment based on issues irrelevant to Smash, and I have seen at least one instance of a player shouting racial slurs during casual smashfests. It’s quite likely your event’s attendance will dip if certain players feel unwelcome as a result of vitriolic speech toward them. Taking stances against negative attitudes or bullying and effecting those stances when confrontations arise can help keep numbers high.
All of these things are designed to make people want to come to your tournaments repeatedly and consistently. The less you think about the player’s experience, the less likely players are going to be supporting your events. People want a tournament that is run efficiently at a place where they can find basic necessities and feel welcome. They just want to play some Smash with a nice crowd in a convenient place, so keeping that in mind will help focus your event-planning process.
The Icing
Now that your venue is set up and convenient, and has a lot of attendance, what can we do to boost that attendance even higher?
One option is attracting big names. Players like to have a go at taking on top names, so luring well-reputed players to your event is likely to draw in a crowd. Pot bonuses for tournament payouts are another good way to help bring in such a crowd. The bigger the better; if you’re giving out a lot of extra money to winners, then who wouldn’t feel incentive to attend?
Extra tournaments are also great ways to boost numbers. Lots of players love side events or extra main events, like doubles tournaments and a variety of games. With Project M introducing a lot of fun extra gameplay modes like Turbo Mode and different Percent Mode options, the sky's the limit. And for extra hype, and to pull people from surrounding regions, you can possibly host crew battles between different groups. Use your creativity and see what other people would like.
Differentiating your tournament from others is also a great way to up your attendances. Extra gimmicks are great ways to make events more fun. The Foundry’s Melee tournaments take place where alcohol flows like water. Smash’n’Splash recently occurred in a water park/hotel, so players were able to slip’n’slide without picking Squirtle. And I’ve had a great time playing in a tournament hosted in an arcade where venue fees paid for a whole night of free play. These are things that help players remember your event as notable. “You remember that time we had a tournament at Disney World? That was amazing!”
There are ways to go an extra mile toward running an extra-special event if you have the resources, but remember that having basic equipment and a fully functioning event is absolutely priority over anything else. If everything else is planned out perfectly, then you can think about ways to take your tournament one more level.
...And Eat It, Too
Running events is tough work, especially so depending on what kind of event you want to run. Resources are usually limited, particularly setups, so doing everything you can to make sure all the necessary ingredients are on the table will help before you and all your players can start cooking up an amazing tournaments.
I know I haven’t covered more than a smattering of topics today, but I hope that I have mentioned enough that community members looking to run their own event or experienced TOs hoping to increase the quality of their next event can both take something worthwhile from this week’s Mind Over Meta.
Thanks to /u/solideem for contributing. Take care, and we’ll see you all next week. -The Mind Over Meta Team.
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SmashCapps hoped this was as enjoyable to read for others as it was for him and that it will help Smash fans if they go to host an event. To keep up with his own writing adventures follow him on Twitter.
