Southwest Salt Saturday

[Rapsul]

Starting December 2nd, the eSports club at Manor New Tech High School (10323 US-290, Manor, TX 78653; right next to the water tower), will be hosting monthly Singles Melee and Sm4sh tournaments in the Cafeteria building (the large non-square building) every first Saturday of each month (except January 6th) up until May 5th. There will also be Tournaments for BlazBlue: Central Fiction.

There will be a venue fee of $2 which will go towards funding the club for new equipment, and a tournament fee of $3 for each tournament which will go towards the prize pot. We will only accept cash for the moment. Sign-ups and warm-up friendlies will start at 10AM CST, and will close at 11AM. The tournament will start at 11:30AM, after seeding has been done (which will be done through Random.org’s list randomizer).

While we do have basic equipment to suffice a tournament, we still have a small amount. If you do come show, we ask that, if possible, you supply at least part of or a whole set-up. We will also take requests for casters and TOs, given that you have the ability/knowledge.

Equipment (including controllers) brought will be up to the discretion of the TOs about their legality. If your controller does not appear to be legal/may be maliciously modded, we will provide a spare controller.

The event will be maintained at a PG-13 language level, in attempt to keep the event fun for any age group playing or watching. The whole event, while it does have a prize pot, mostly has the goal to be a fun and social event. If you succeed in purposefully ruining other’s experiences, we may ask you to leave this event and/or place a temporary or permanent ban.

For inquiries and other information, please contact:

William.rodriguez@edu.manorisd.net
cheesemanfuu@gmail.com
PianZiKid@gmail.com
Emails received will be responded to ASAP, can nearly guarantee an answer within 48 hours.

 

[CheeseManfuu]

Hi! Event coordinator for the Salt Saturday Series here. I felt it necessary to add a few clarifications:

• Our fees are currently split 2/3 for our club, and 1/3 for the prize pot. We hope to change this rate in the future. Right now for earnings we can say:
  • 1st place will get ~$0.58 per entrant
  • 2nd place will get ~$0.34 per entrant
  • 3rd place will get ~$0.16 per entrant each

• We are still small, and we are rather shorthanded, so we do appreciate any setup equipment anybody will be willing to let us borrow for the duration of our event. Currently the amount of stuff we have alone is enough for two setups of Melee with an extra console, and three setups for Sm4sh.

• Our schedule is as follows:
  • Signups start at 10:00AM, and we will host a friendlies session until 11:00AM. Signups close at 10:45AM to allow for us to seed our bracket.
  • Tournaments will start 11:00 AM, and we have a soft-cap end time at 3:00PM, and can stretch to about 3:30PM. We will try to make more space to hopefully go until as long as we need.
  • We will offer a 20 minute break from 12:30PM-12:50PM if able to to give people an opportunity to grab lunch. If possible, try to prepare a quick lunch yourself or get a bud to help out with a quick meal from something nearby to speed up the process.
  • We will host a second friendlies session for half an hour after all tournaments conclude in the venue if we have enough spare time and haven't gone past our soft time limit.

• Our rules are as simple as can be: Keep it PG-13 (we're somewhat lenient about this) and exercise good sportsmanship. Excessive disruption may result in removal from brackets and/or future events without refund.

• Our event will host all of the following brackets (As of December 29th):
  • Super Smash Bros. Melee (Singles)
  • Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (Doubles)

• We have two rule sheets, both are available online and will be posted up in the venue:
  • Melee
  • Sm4sh
  • Note that these don't go too in-depth, these are meant as a "Competitive Smash Set for Dummies" sort of thing.

• We hope to offer Doubles in the future, and will only do so if we can get enough volunteers for TO-ing and a plentiful amount of people to keep the bracket sizable.

• Our brackets are Best of 3 up until Semi-Finals, which we start Best of 5 sets.

• We currently do not have a setup for streaming yet, since we're still needing to collect money for a capture card. We will start taking Commentator volunteers when we get to that point.

• We have a handy app that does brackets and seeding for us, and from what we can tell, is good for randomization.

Feel free to email any of the people mentioned above; I, cheesemanfuu@gmail.com, am mostly likely to get a quick response, followed by OP, PianZiKid@gmail.com, followed by William.rodriguez@edu.manorisd.net, our event chaperone.

 

[BullRush98]

So there was no online Sign-ups for this Tourney?

 

[CheeseManfuu]

So there was no online Sign-ups for this Tourney?

No, sorry. All signups are up-front, cash only, starting at 10:00 AM.

 

[CheeseManfuu]

First tournament concluded!

To sum up today's event: An unexpected mess, but that's natural due to growing pains, but it was (hopefully) still enjoyable. I'll cover as many issues as I can here.

• We had to move from the Cafeteria building to our event chaperone's classroom, due to some random party that was supposedly scheduled to have that area already, and it doesn't give much room. From what I know, we'll probably be using this room from now on, unless we can make sure to reserve the Cafeteria. It'll kind of suck, but hopefully we can make it work. We very much hope that this doesn't reduce our credibility, as it was an honest mistake that shouldn't have happened.

• Our prizes were pretty dismal, 1st place of Melee getting $4, and 1st place of Sm4sh getting just over $5. This is an issue I hope we can fix in the future with more participants and a better pay split.

• We had an issue where one of our rental controllers was (most likely accidentally) taken. We didn't notice until we were cleaning up and most of the people were already gone from the venue. We, however, have gotten in contact with the person and will hope they can return the controller in our next event in February. If this starts becoming a prevalent issue, accidental or not, we will no longer offer rental controllers, and you'll either have to bring your own controller or be able to somehow reliably share a controller with another player. We may also require an addition of an email contact when signing in, unless we already have one that we know is from specifically you due to past inquiries, simply so we can contact you if a mistake is made or something else happens.

• And finally, the time crunch. Because we had only 5 people sign up for Melee and 7 for Sm4sh, we thought it would be fine to do just one at a time, right? Well, unfortunately, that was just barely the case, almost uncomfortably close to not being so. We had a group of people that had to leave by around 2:00PM, and we got them out at a bit before 2:30PM, giving them their prize money at the points that they were eliminated from bracket, and the final bracket (Sm4sh) ended at just before 2:40PM. Our soft time limit, which I didn't know we had, is 2:30PM, and our hard time limit is, well, pretty much until we're kicked out, to which extent I have no clue. While the move to the other room may have caused this time delay, it definitely wasn't the only, or most impacting cause.
  • Our lunch break started just as planned at 12:30PM, and we got back to brackets by about 1:10PM. 40 minutes is simply too long for us. To stay in favor of our soft time limit, we will likely have to cut down lunch break from 45 minutes to something closer to 20. While we do need to keep scheduling in favor of our limitations, we do hate having to cut down on people's eating time. Your best bet is to scope out places beforehand that likely won't get packed on Saturdays or bring something on your own, or get a bud to help out getting food to you faster by going out just before the lunch break through the drive-thru.
  • The fact that we thought to do two tournaments one after the other was safer for not having conflicting brackets, but we didn't know that despite having so few people that it would take as long as it did. This also may emphasize our point on needing more setups in the future to occupy more people as our event grows. We may have to make each player exclusive to one bracket just to be safe on conflicts so we can do them both at the same time, or go between Sm4sh and Melee each event, whichever works for people more. If any other TO's can give us their two cents on how we could possibly manage this easier in the future, it'd be greatly appreciated, since we're still an amateur rag-tag team.

However, overall, it looks like most people enjoyed hanging out, and enjoyed the handful of games they played, and we're really glad to know this.

TL;DR: We had struggles with timing due to unexpected events, we may be using a smaller room for our venue in the future (stay tuned), our prizes were low due to low amounts of participants, and we had a bad time crunch, so we may make brackets exclusive in the future, or simply go between Melee and Sm4sh for each event, and/or shorten lunch break. We're sorry if this causes inconveniences in the future and we hope these issues won't reduce our credibility.

Happy Holidays, New Year, and whatever you may celebrate in January! We hope you enjoyed today's event and that we see you again in February, on the 3rd! (Remember that there won't be an event in January due to our absence in our Holiday Break)

 

[BullRush98]

All in all the tourney was solid. Sorry about the controller though! I hope there will be more people next time for the loooooooooooooooooong drive. But there is good BBQ out that way looking forward to the next tournament!

 

[CheeseManfuu]

Hi, I'm really sorry for this last-minute announcement.

For the event of February, it is possible that we may not be able to have either of our sponsors at our event (one definitely cannot), which would leave us with a lack of supervision, and the school district central office would absolutely not allow that. We will hopefully have a certain response by the end of tomorrow (Wednesday), and we will come back to this thread with our conclusion.

We are really sorry for the inconvenience so last-minute, and will use the time we get from not having this event for the month to make the next even better.

In the event that we do still hold our event for February, we will make signs to make it more apparent of where to go for the event so people don't have to walk around guessing where things are.

 

[CheeseManfuu]

Hi, I'm still sorry about this last-minute announcement.

We still do not have any certain answer; neither of the staff who sponsor our event can make it, and are trying to see if they can find a substitute, so I still do not have an answer of if the event will still be held. I personally am not for the decision of having a substitute, as I would more appreciate having our supervisor being somebody who has the gist of what we're doing, but whatever works for us at this point.

TL;DR still unlikely and looking more and more bleak but still fingers crossed.

 

[CheeseManfuu]

Hi, sorry for the recent scare and late conclusion.

We now have confirmed that we can have somebody supervising, and we plan to hold the event on this Saturday. We look forward to seeing people show up, even after our messy situation, and enjoying their time.

Happy Groundhog's Day.

 

[CheeseManfuu]

Second event concluded!

This month's was a bit primitive, only because so few people showed up. About 4 or 5 people showed up (shoutouts especially to the cool group who brought a whole melee setup but unfortunately forgot the SD card), and each bracket only had 4 people, including some of the staff (hi), so we made the bracket only for fun this time around, to avoid essentially sharking people of money. It was short enough to do both and avoid a lunch break, so it worked out that we didn't have any problems with the lunch break, technically. We also figured out a couple things that need a bit of fixing or clearing up.

• We really should've thought of this sooner: Discounts for people who bring setups for our event. The current idea on the table is voiding the $2 venue fee, or just making it an overall discount (likely still $2 for venue fee but $1 per bracket).
• Our format for signup is Name(alias)/Game(s)/Rental. Some people didn't seem to understand what the Rental column meant. To clarify, it's just asking if you're borrowing a rental controller. Just to keep track of who borrows what.
• Signs were posted up both on the side of the cafeteria building (which pointed toward both to the event location and parking) and the front of the school on a light pole for directions. The wind kind of messed them up for reading, probably, but it seems like people for the most part were successful.

But again, it seems like everybody who went had a good time talking around and all that fun stuff. See you guys next month, on March 3rd!

 

[Ricxcc]

How many people do you think are going march 3rd me and my friends are coming from port lavaca which is a 3 hour drive so we can face new people hopefully there will be a bit of people

 

[DeltaPlays]

So I have some bad news. I won’t be able to come on that day, since my family is out of town and my Grandparents can’t drive me to Manor for McKinney that day. I apologize for the sad news

 

[CheeseManfuu]

How many people do you think are going march 3rd me and my friends are coming from port lavaca which is a 3 hour drive so we can face new people hopefully there will be a bit of people

Right now our best estimate is about 5-8 people total, between both brackets. It's all we have, unfortunately, but so far it seems like everybody's had a good time despite smaller brackets. We hope that this doesn't deter you guys from showing up, but if it does, we totally understand. We also hope that this number increases as we get through more and more times of doing this event, though; people showing up at all is the only way we'll grow, and we appreciate anybody who does.

 

[CheeseManfuu]

Third event concluded question mark?

Unfortunately today was a complete no-show, and nothing happened.

Hopefully whatever it is, we hope there’s reason for people to show up next month; April 7th!

 

[CheeseManfuu]

Sorry for the last minute update.

Unfortunately due to the swamp of work of a grade period ending, we do not have any staff to supervise us for this month. We have to postpone it for this month, and are debating whether to keep going for the next couple months or leave it as it is.

Sorry for the inconvenience on anyone planning to come.

 

[CheeseManfuu]

Sorry for not checking back in a while.

The chances of hosting our event this weekend is bleak, mostly of our dismal success in the past, and this is likely to be the last, unless a future line of students maintain it at our school.

If we can get certainty of people's attendance in a good amount, we can maybe make an exception, but it's unlikely.

It was fun hosting the few events we could pull off, and we're glad that anybody had fun at all.