Venue Fees -> More Setups

[Unwavering_Canadian]

Hey all, we're underway with our new tri-weekly tournaments here in Winnipeg MB. We just finished our fourth tri-weekly and had 56 entrants for melee, and 38 for pm. We're trying to grow our pm scene, there's lots of interest in it but a lot of players or potential players don't have wii's or access to wii's to play/practice. We're thinking about using venue fees to purchase a few Wii's for our tournaments but we'd like to get the most mileage out of them without being biased to certain players in the community.

We're thinking a possible solution is to raffle them off to smash players in the community. There would be the condition that the winner(s) ensure that the setup makes it to our tournaments. We like the idea but we see potential problems with it: some players entering just to get a free wii, players not making it to tournament or just not bringing the wii's to tournament, or players who already have setups just entering to get another. So I'll ask you, the smash community, to improve upon our idea so that we can get setups into the community and back into our tournaments.

 

[Juggleguy]

Honestly, the notion that a tournament series would funnel Wiis, or any equipment for that matter, to its players is a bit silly to me. If they are motivated enough to improve, they'll buy their own Wii to practice on.

However, using extra venue fee revenue to buy your own Wiis for future tournament hosting purposes is an excellent idea. I just don't see a need to lend them to players outside of tournaments.

 

[Unwavering_Canadian]

Thanks Juggleguy. We really just want our Wii's to be used rather than sitting in boxes in between tournaments. It's pretty easy for people to get gamecubes and melee, especially from friends who have old cubes sitting around. Wii's are a little bit harder to come by and spending $150 to buy a wii, game disc, and sd card for a single game is a bit too much for some people when they'd rather just turn their cube back on.

In a sense it is kind of silly. But I do know players in our community who come to our tournaments and would play pm if they had a setup, they typically just go over to a friend's house to play it. Number of setups in our community and in our tournaments is still a problem. I do like how you used the word lend. I'm kind of thinking now that it would be best to lend out any Wii's we buy in a raffle. We take down their information and the players get to keep the wii until they stop coming to tournaments.

If it still sounds non-nonsensical, I totally get it. If you have any other tips for expanding our scene I'm all ears. Recently, we've started tri-weekly tournaments, run melee singles/doubles pm singles (not enough time/setups for pm doubles), added amateur bracket for those who don't make it out of pools, we stream when we practice and we stream our tournaments, some of the guys are looking into building add-ons for challonge to organize matches being played on setups, added posters/ advertised over the city, and we might have some of our more daunting players sit out next tournament as to not kill the scene (happened in like 09 where one person entered our tournaments, 4 stocked everyone, and people dropped out before playing).

 

[metalmonstar]

You should be able to pick up a used Wii for less than $100 dollars. Finding a brawl disc that isn't full price is going to be a bit trickier. SD card will be cheap but finding one that isnt' High Capacity these days can be a challenge.

The logistics of your lend program is going to be challenging. It may be more trouble then it is really worth. Maybe the better option is to hold more gatherings and smashfests for them to practice.

Maybe if you had community leaders that you could lend the wiis to that would setup gatherings in there area to service the local players. That way you could spread out the Wiis and keep a bit better control.

 

[Unwavering_Canadian]

Thanks metalmonstar. We have a lounge at the university where we plan on doing that but are space limited. I think we could use an extra venue for something like this. Good advice, we'll give it a trial run soon enough.

 

[MrJeff]

I have been to tournaments where people who bring equipment have the entrance fees waived. That might provide incentive for some in your community to invest in their own systems.

Long ago, I ran a Nintendo club in high school. We ran into a similar situation but with controllers. So the club bought a set of controllers and sort of "rented" them out to members. It was sort of what has been proposed above. Certain members paid a fee and took the controllers home for the year. Every month when we had our meetings, they would bring them. If they couldn't make it, they'd arrange to send them with someone else.

 

[Vortex 4]

The solution that comes to my mind comes from when I was a little kid.
Back in the N64/PS1 days, Blockbuster would not only rent video games, but also the consoles themselves. If you can gather enough money to buy a few PM setups, you can rent them to people at a reasonable rate. This not only will eventually cover the cost of buying the setups, but will ultimately lead to a modest profit that you can use to improve your event. Legally this can help because people renting the console/game/sd can be held to a contract, and if it is lost or damaged, they would have to compensate you. Plus you can make sure the rental period ends before your event; so you can ensure those setups will be available for the tournament.

 

[pidgezero_one]

After I ran a 40-man SSB64 tournament with 5 events on 6 setups, the setup problem became very apparent to me. My initial thought was to increase the venue fee, take a cut of it, and go to purchase setups myself and just keep and supply them for tournaments. Since I am the TO it would make sense since I would ensure that all the setups get there on time. IT might seem wasteful for one person to have that many setups, but I also host smashfests occasionally and am usually pretty nice about letting people borrow stuff. Just something to consider, because someone responsible for the tournament would be the best at remembering to bring setups, it's basically another type of equipment that you will need to pack up, BUT better yet that same person could also host more casual gatherings if they have the means to do so.

This didn't end up happening though because I hounded my attendees more often to bring setups and because my SSB64 scene is awesome they happily co-operated.

 

[Astraea31]

SubZ I remember from the North Gate tournament that some people had to wait to play because they didn't have enough controllers for everybody (lol). I think if people are interested they'll come, whether they have a set up or not.

 

[Unwavering_Canadian]

Perhaps we should be selling controllers at our tournaments? It could be an easy way to make $10 here and there. Order a bunch, save on shipping, sell them at tournaments for a small profit when people forget their controllers or just want a new one.