Event - Apex 2015 The SSB64 tourney is going to be a joke. We want Round Robin pools.

[Han Solo]

Well, it won't be a joke. It'll probably be the biggest and best NA 64 tourney ever, but I had to get your attention.

Brawl and Melee had 330+ entrants last year. 64 had 95. This year, Brawl and Melee look like they'll have similar numbers to last year, while 64 is looking to be somewhere between 96 and 128. I can't imagine the number of 64 entrants going over 128. There's no reason a tourney of 128 should be run using bracket pools if there's time for RR pools.

According to the last time I saw the Apex schedule (site is currently down), 64 starts at 4pm on Friday. Then we get 6 hours to play until top 8. Then top 8 is played out Saturday morning from 10 to 12:30-1:00pm.

We have players coming from all over the US, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, Peru, and Japan. Many of these players are going to be spending hundreds or thousands of dollars for what will only be a few hours on Friday. We don't even get a full day.

The reason for this? As far as I can tell, Apex staff is planning on using all TVs that 64 players are bringing for the 64 tourney for the Melee and Brawl tourneys at least until 4pm on Friday. Why is this happening? Why can't we use our own setups and the Melee and Brawl communities can use theirs? This is stripping down our tournament so that a larger tournament will run more smoothly.

Because of the schedule chosen, we can't run a Round Robin pools tourney. If we started earlier, and we had 16-20 dedicated setups that aren't taken away from us, we could run a 128-man tourney with RR pools down to top 8 for Saturday. Juggleguy and Crimson Blur ran similar number tourneys with RR pools in one day. I don't see why Apex staff won't let us.

 

[weedwack]

Can someone clarify to me this TV allotment plan? As someone who is planning to bring a setup for 64, the only game I have any interest in playing, the prospect of my setup being taken out of my sight for use in another game is unattractive.

We don't need subsidiary TVs from melee or brawl to finish our tournament on time, so this policy would do nothing for us except leave us with a shortage of setups for friendlies throughout the weekend. If melee and brawl are too big or unorganized to be self sustaining setup wise, a setup exchange between those 2 games sounds like a great idea. But leave 64 out of it.

All we're really asking for in this regard is to be left alone.

 

[banze]

Plz! if there is any chance on doing RR, help us out letting it start a little sooner and we would be much appreciated.
PS: I'm coming from Brazil just to 64!

 

[Cobrevolution]

now i can't copy my reply...

as taken from my facebook post, not including the obvious statement about property rights (which still stands. do NOT let anyone take your property from you. people have had things stolen from them before; keep an eye on your stuff and don't let anyone take it from where YOU put it. mark your name on it and keep close to it, or at the very least, try to keep friends near it):

the issue is that we're currently being given 4 hours to run 2 32 man brackets, then another 4 hours to run 2 more. we are then being given ~4 hours of stream time, for top8 (which i have heard is supposed to actually be top6 or something, which, if that's the case, is even dumber).

what that conveys to me is that top 8 will take about as long as a full local tourney, because it's basically the same amount of allotted time. that is, quite simply, not the case.

with round robin pools, they can easily be started two hours earlier, at 2pm. most people are already going to be there really early to play anyway, and if the venue opens at 10am, but 64 doesn't start til 4, that's 6 hours of just dead time used for friendlies/crews/warmups.

that time can be spent getting through round robin pools. there is very clearly enough time. further, if we're allotted almost four hours of stream time, we can get top 8 or even top 12 to fill that all up.

i am not saying i do not want friendlies or crews or OC teams. i'm saying there is PLENTY of time available.

a popular statement towards this without addressing any points in detail is "we want to keep the games uniform". again, as taken from my post in the pools format thread:

so by keeping everything uniform, we'll also have the same amount of time on stream, right? top 8 or whatever it is, at a good time of day when there will be a lot of people watching. (which is to say, not at 10 in the morning)

and all the tournaments we've had over the past year, some of those were qualifying events, of course, so people got ample "seeding points".

not to mention the staff is going to do everything in their power to hype 64 and all the entrants from around the world so that it's on equal footing with the other games, yeah?

oh and those nifty side events like na vs world crew battles or ec vs wc - those will be implemented as well to make sure everything is fair. (and will be streamed, of course, just like the ones for melee and brawl)

i'm also sure all of the staff is going to do their best to provide us with setups and televisions provided our community is lacking in that department.

you know, to keep things uniform.

now, i am not ignorant enough to think that we're really getting all of that.

i know we aren't.

everyone knows we aren't.

i could, of course, go to the apex thread and find the conversation that i had with mike about "fair treatment", but i can't remember when it happened.

the gist of that particular conversation is that we are absolutely not getting fair treatment. we're being patronized. you can't say the games are uniform when you place an entry cap on some and have high pot bonuses for others and give a few a lot more stream time or you restrict the format of another and thus the enjoyment of the tournament experience as a whole.

i do not want us to be treated the same (which is not to say that i want us to receive all the perks and the others to receive none, of course). i just want people to realize that this is not fairness. just admit that it's not fair. fair isn't picking and choosing what to make uniform, what to make similar.

anyway, it seems that people have been ducking this issue, and with mike out of the country, there's no surefire way to communicate with staff.

 

[MrMarbles]

the outside community probably isn't very aware of this, but most of the 64 community is pretty discouraged by the way our game is being treated or perceived for this tournament. The thing is we understand that our game is much less popular so as a result we realize that we aren't going to have the most ideal time slots and stream times. But at the very least our community wants to be able to run our tourney in a way that will satisfy all of the entrants who are traveling in from so far away. And in this case what the community wants most is round robin pools. This is very feasible considering we will have 128 players max. Considering that this is smash 64's ONLY international tournament, and for MANY 64 players the only tourney they play each year we simply want to be able to play a decent number to tournament matches, and round robin pools provides this.

 

[Shears]

This "uniformity" idea isn't about making things equal. It isn't about everyone having fair treatment, privileges, and resources. It is not about everybody and everything being equal, it is about nobody having anything better than what melee or brawl has. If brawl or melee can't have it then nothing else can. If anything else can't have what melee and brawl has then tough for them, someone has to take the hit so melee and brawl can have what they need. This is about the people in charge of melee and brawl not wanting to get off their high horses. Its a power trip, and it can't stand. We are being oppressed people. They want to take our tvs and not let us have the right to vote on round robin pools. Taxation without representation is tyranny! We pay a venue fee just to get the table scraps of the venue. I call upon my fellow 64 smashers to unite on the days of January 17-19 and not let this injustice continue. They take our pools, they take our tvs, they take our HYRULE, but they will not take our FREEDOM!!

 

[Han Solo]

So is Apex Staff going to respond to this or are we just talking to the walls?

 

[pidgezero_one]

I can bring N64 controller adapters if anyone feels like having PJ64 setups. It's not much, but it's all I got

 

[MrMarbles]

i think most players would be deeply offended by the prospect of playing tourney matches on emulator

 

[pidgezero_one]

i think most players would be deeply offended by the prospect of playing tourney matches on emulator

it's a setup that can't be taken by melee or brawl, but go ahead and be offended if that's more important

 

[Supreme Dirt]

it's a setup that can't be taken by melee or brawl, but go ahead and be offended if that's more important

I think the point he's making is more they shouldn't HAVE to play on emulator. I'm not entirely sure on this, but i'd assume that even with a converter it wouldn't necessarily be 1:1, especially when it comes to control stick sensitivity.

 

[MrMarbles]

it doesn't feel the same on emulator. i'm an online player and love online play but i would be very disappointed to have to play on an emulator at a console tourney

 

[Bones0]

Can someone clarify to me this TV allotment plan? As someone who is planning to bring a setup for 64, the only game I have any interest in playing, the prospect of my setup being taken out of my sight for use in another game is unattractive.

We don't need subsidiary TVs from melee or brawl to finish our tournament on time, so this policy would do nothing for us except leave us with a shortage of setups for friendlies throughout the weekend. If melee and brawl are too big or unorganized to be self sustaining setup wise, a setup exchange between those 2 games sounds like a great idea. But leave 64 out of it.

All we're really asking for in this regard is to be left alone.

They cancelled all of Melee on day 2 (with the exception of 2, maybe 3 setups) at Apex 2012 just so barlw could finish their pools. Pretty sure barlw has and always will be the source of the problem when it comes to finishing on time because they insist on 3-stock matches that take twice as long as the average Melee match. Like I said in another thread, I don't see why there is any TV sharing going on at all. If a community doesn't bring enough TVs to run their events in time, they can expect to play straight bracket or pools starting at 7 AM.

 

[pidgezero_one]

I think the point he's making is more they shouldn't HAVE to play on emulator. I'm not entirely sure on this, but i'd assume that even with a converter it wouldn't necessarily be 1:1, especially when it comes to control stick sensitivity.

Of course they shouldn't have to, you of all ppl should know I love 64, but if you don't get your way with the setups, it's better than having none

I'm offering to bring parts if worse comes to worst

 

[Han Solo]

We've got a guy coming from Australia for what will be about 8 hours.

 

[Cobrevolution]

Japan is making another appearance. they take their smash extremely seriously, and it would only be honorable of us to show them as great of a time as they are expecting.

 

[Fireblaster]

And in exchange for the 64 community being completely self sufficient and being told to give their setups to the other games, we get 6 hours to finish our entire bracket and 10 am finals on saturday morning. Now that's what I call equality.

 

[tekkie]

We've got a guy coming from Australia for what will be about 8 hours.

so, the one-way flight time is longer than the tournament. that's pretty disappointing.

i'm sorry, i'm not entering 64 or anything but i hope you guys can pull something awesome off. i look forward to watching the final matches

 

[ScubaF_ingSteve]

Wow this is kind of ridiculous. Justice for n64

 

[Han Solo]

I guess Apex Staff has been too busy trying to keep their website running instead of responding to this thread within 9 days.

 

[Combo Blaze]

Are we getting stream time for pools too? I thought someone mentioned we might but not sure.

 

[Han Solo]

We are, Combo, but I would forego stream time of "pools" so that we can have real pools. The biggest issue here is that they want to take our TVs away from us.

 

[Maliki]

I don't think they should be able to take ourTVs and if they try to cant we say no? If we have enough set ups and time we should be able to do round robin especially since the other communities don't care.

 

[Ref]

We are, Combo, but I would forego stream time of "pools" so that we can have real pools. The biggest issue here is that they want to take our TVs away from us.

Yeah i'm gonna be pretty pissed if they wanna take down all sb64 set up when the next game is going on. When people spend this much money to show up they need to get their money worth both in the tournament and in friendlies/practice.

 

[SSB64-Jel]

I would love to see RR pools as it gives everyone more games to play. But that's not going to happen unless we run are own event at one of the hotel rooms it seems. As for them taking TVs that you bring just for SSB you don't have to let them take your TV that you bring as No one has the right to take your stuff with out your "ok' or them having you sign some type of wavier saying its ok to take the stuff you bring. If they do it without your "ok" it can be grounds for theft. If I where to bring a TV I for sure would not let anything but SSB be played on it and if someone took it away from me I would get the authority involved. I think that's the last thing anyone would want to do, but if you tell them NO and they take it anyway what other option do you have?.

 

[MassiveMoo]

Hey, I'm a guy considering coming to Apex for the first time, only for ssb64. I've been really pumped about coming instead of just watching this year, and fully support what you guys are saying in this thread. The way you guys are being treated sounds ridiculous and now I am heavily considering not going. What I do guarantee is that if I do go, and bring a tv, nobody is going to use it without my permission, it'll be 64 matches or 64 friendlies. That kind of garbage is messed up. Round Robin Pools would be much better for us, especially considering the big investment we're making for travel. And this tv sharing Bull Crap sounds like it only exists due to the self-serving bias of the guys is charge. We don't benefit from that at all do we? I was already bummed that we don't have the same pot as melee (or even brawl??) And I can't believe this massive 64 tournament is only going to get 4 hours of streaming time. I'm a huge smash fan and I'd love to be a part of a tournament and contribute to the community, but if this is the kind of crap I'll have to deal with...I'm thinking not. So I might not see you guys there, but I really wish you good luck. Idk how all this will work out but I hope you get treated fairly and that it's a great tournament.

 

[Cobrevolution]

i am fine with 4 hours of streaming time for TOP 8. that is MORE than enough, in my opinion. i am also fine with our regular sets not being streamed by "official" guys like vgbc or ct or 8wr - we can just stream on our own private channels if they want to keep their viewers up, because of how many people drop when 64 comes on.
far as i can see, with that little bit, we're practically doing everyone a favor by keeping to ourselves.

i'm fine with not getting a huge pot bonus - fewer entrants means less venue fee and less pot overall, so there's no reason one guy should walk off with a free gball when there's 1/4 the entrants.

what i'm not fine with is tourney time getting cut down DRASTICALLY. how do you explain that to the people coming from all over the US and the world?

 

[Battlecow]

Japan is making another appearance. they take their smash extremely seriously, and it would only be honorable of us to show them as great of a time as they are expecting.

Japan does best of 1 single-elim at their tourneys, lol. They'll have a fine time.

That said, I don't think it's right to give a 128 man tourney 8 hours. RR pools are really pretty necessary.

 

[Cobrevolution]

they do best of 1 single elim 150 man tourneys with a lot of hype, not mini 32 man bracket pools without gf.

 

[banze]

Still waiting on some response from staff

 

[R3N0]

Apex will share one format of running pools, that is Bracket Pools. Yes, we understand people are flying in from all over the place, but this applies to Melee and Brawl as well and every other fighting game, two losses and you're out. You will have a lot of time to play 64 Friendlies.. the entire day Saturday, and Sunday.


As for the TV sharing situation, we won't be moving any 64 tv's. Hope this clears up everything.

With regards to stream time.. 64 has 9hrs and 30 minutes of total stream time stemming from Friday-Saturday Finals.

 

[Nintendude]

^^^^ Well, there you go guys.

 

[Engo]

RR pools for a 128 man tournament is not hard at all. Why's Apex so picky about always using bracket pools?

The whole "you guys will get to play lots of friendlies" excuse is really silly. This is a tournament first and foremost not a smashfest or convention.

 

[Mahie]

Personally, from a spectator pov, Double elim pools are much more appealing to me, for the same reasons running a bracket for the later stages of a tournament is more appealing to me than running swiss.

So much more exciting to watch winner and loser finals in each pools. The loser finals especially have this "Do or die" thing that's especially interesting.

 

[Cobrevolution]

glad that nobody is taking our tv's away, yet that does not address the other concern we had - if we have MORE than enough setups to run RR ourselves, what is the issue?

and if someone says uniformity, just read my prior posts and remove that word from the argument.

 

[R3N0]

The short answer here is still going to be "uniformity"

Every event at APEX will be using Bracket Pools. That is what was chosen by the tournament hosts, so it is what is going to be used. There is nothing from stopping you from running a RR pool side tournament during your off-time afterwards as we will not be taking any of your setups, so you are free to run them! But for sake of stream time management as well as tournament fluidity, our stance on how we run our pools is non-negotiable.

 

[Cobrevolution]

i have already discussed things regarding uniformity in my first post in this thread. nobody addressed any of my points.
i shall repost it here, just in case you missed it, and even expand on them to be less sardonic.

so by keeping everything uniform, we'll also have the same amount of time on stream, right? top 8 or whatever it is, at a good time of day when there will be a lot of people watching. (which is to say, not at 10 in the morning)

we are getting 10am again, when the stream is basically dead. melee and brawl are spread across three days. oh, and pm finals are occurring at the same time as 64 finals. but like i said, i'm content with less stream time because of less entrants. it's only fair that less people participating = less time shown on stream. ideally, we'd have most of our own matches streamed on our own private channels.

and all the tournaments we've had over the past year, some of those were qualifying events, of course, so people got ample "seeding points".

but no. on the east coast alone, we've had over ten tournaments with good showings. there have been like two or three in florida, maybe two or three on the west coast. yet none of these events act as "qualifiers". we don't get seeding points. how are the brackets organized? by TO preference. ELO ratings. who-we-think-should-be-seeded-here-and-not-there.
am i complaining? no. we have a drastically smaller community and it would take much more effort to do the kinds of things melee/brawl to's do with regard to seeding. i am completely sympathetic with the way players are seeded.
you may say that the lack of tourneys is a reason for this - well, there are melee/brawl tourneys every other week in the tristate area, and seldom do the to's include 64. if you host it, they will come. trust me on that one.
but i digress. it's not awful that we don't get these things. but we certainly notice that we do not, and nobody has ever said one word about it.

not to mention the staff is going to do everything in their power to hype 64 and all the entrants from around the world so that it's on equal footing with the other games, yeah?

oh and those nifty side events like na vs world crew battles or ec vs wc - those will be implemented as well to make sure everything is fair. (and will be streamed, of course, just like the ones for melee and brawl)

everyone knows we're treated like a side event. we don't get doubles. we don't get streamed crew battles. we don't get cool sponsors. and again, it's because of our size, how much less known we are, how many fewer people play. and that's OKAY. we're FINE with not getting all of those things. we do it ourselves anyway. we still run an unofficial dubs tourney. we still have draft crew battles. we still have people make clans. we do it for fun and we do not ask to be included in the hype videos, we don't complain that everything we have to do, we have to do alone, without the backing or interest of staff. never has the offer been made to stream a crew battle. but it's alright! seriously. we don't really mind.

i'm also sure all of the staff is going to do their best to provide us with setups and televisions provided our community is lacking in that department.

suppose we didn't have enough televisions and 64s. would the staff take tvs away from melee and brawl? at most tourneys, 64 is hosted with the express statement that participants MUST bring their own systems and tvs, as the venue/staff will NOT provide them to the players. everyone complies. i have seen a surprising amount of times where we have the most setups at an event, and staff will ask us to lend our tv's out to melee or to brawl. this happened at zenith, i remember, and i couldn't stop laughing at the fact that the community with the least players had an excess of setups.
but we do not expect tourney organizers to provide us with this kind of stuff. we already know that we have to bring our own.

now, on to the schedule at hand.

at 10am, melee and brawl pools start and end at 7pm. that's 9 hours. which is to be expected if the turnout echoes last year's 300+.
these pools will run concurrently, so a lot of people will have to run around playing people in different games and really keep the schedule tight. most melee players play brawl and vice versa, or at least, the proportion of m/b players to those two games is a lot closer than 64 players participating in other events (which is to say, most people who are entering 64 are ONLY entering 64. look at the registrants list)

64, which is projected to have less than half of the entrants for melee/brawl, is given 7 hours.
let me break this down real fast: from 4pm to 8pm, there will be 2 pools of 64 occurring, each with 32 entrants. there will thus be two mini tourneys of 32 people going on. 4 hours to run a tourney in its entirety is plausible; the issue of time usually comes with people going to get food or playing friendlies or brackets being held up by people participating in other events or waiting for stream/recording setup. let it be known that pools 3-4 get one hour less, which is REALLY pushing the limits, but it can be done if you put all the pure 64 guys in it and no cross-game players.

i am going to ask one final time before i give up trying to explain this.

what is the issue with elongating the 64 tourney, having it start at noon, run round robin pools until 8pm, then continue with the bracket until top6/8 until 11pm, and then having top6/8 on stream the next morning?

all the while taking in to consideration the fact that we will be recording our own games and have the ability to stream our own sets, THUS freeing up LOTS of stream time for the other two games, which will get more viewers.

i cannot see a reason why this is problematic, nor can i see a reason why we should be forced to adhere to this notion of uniformity only when it suits staff. i have illustrated that we are not treated equally, and though this unfairness could very well leave a lot of people with a sour taste in their mouths, that is not the case at all.

what we are asking for is the best tournament experience possible, and to be frank, when we're fed statements like "everything must be kept uniform" and then witness that next to nothing is kept uniform, we have less respect and less trust for anyone organizing these events.

i'm going to let everyone else go on discussing this, because i can't see a point in repeating myself if nobody is going to listen.

 

[rjgbadger]

If pm finals are occurring at the same time as 64 finals, prepare to have 7000 less viewers on stream

 

[Sedda]

Honestly, just say you don't want to instead of saying it has anything to do with uniformity.

 

[MattNF]

The short answer here is still going to be "uniformity"

Every event at APEX will be using Bracket Pools. That is what was chosen by the tournament hosts, so it is what is going to be used. There is nothing from stopping you from running a RR pool side tournament during your off-time afterwards as we will not be taking any of your setups, so you are free to run them! But for sake of stream time management as well as tournament fluidity, our stance on how we run our pools is non-negotiable.

So Smash64 gets shafted under the guise of "muh equality", screwing over people traveling literally across the world for this, Project M gets an unnecessary player cap (despite Brawl having a 1056 player cap even though it has way less entrants than PM and Brawl matches take way longer to play out), and the apex website is down almost 24/7 making registration nearly impossible anyway.

Blunder of the century.