Before I start the discussion, I would like to spend a little time to acknowledge the work of SdF_Jin, Shiki and Alex for what they are doing for the gaming. I wouldn't be able to type any of this, if the league didn't exist. Do you understand what the situation is? There is HOPE at last. We actually have a company supporting us.
We've got the backing of TKA to fund tournaments, and encourage growth of the gaming scene. And this is all thanks to those 3 people named above.
Without your tireless work, we'd be back to square one, funding tourneys out of our own pocket and heading nowhere. It must be said that there are days when these people stay on the weekends to help run things WITHOUT overtime pay, they do it just because they love the scene and want to promote it. I say that's beyond noble.
Sdf, Shiki, Alex.
Thank you.
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Right, now I will bring up a few points regarding the VS league, and how we can help to improve it.
League FormatRight now there are 16 places available + a waiting list + an early bird bonus. And league matches fall on the second last and last saturday of the month.
Evade told me there are easily 32 players that would join the tournament league. So right now I'm concentrating on greatly increasing the quantity of players involved in the league, and making sure the excitement and desire to get "ranked" is there.
I believe the current league system doesn't do anything as far as creating this desire goes. It's basically earn up to 15 points
and then stop playing. And as such, I think this current system won't generate sustained interest in the long run.
So what's the solution? Refine the format.
We have 7 Months until December, during which I assume will be the grand finals.
So now for the month of MAY, lets do it in this format.
We have ONE, 3-hour time slot on the second last week of the month of May.
Okay so we get 32 players (using our publicity, see below).
The basic format of the league is
Single Elimation, set to "First to 5 rounds" (Best of 9 Rounds). Opponent selection is random, organizers will randomly pick, and create the brackets based on random selection.
STAGE 1 - "Round of 32"Each player is randomly assigned an opponent. There will be 16 games, set to "First to 5 rounds" (best of 9 rounds) each, 60 seconds, Single Elimination.
Notes : No capping of matches, both machines used to play, 2 games at a time. 72 mins max game time."STAGE 2 - "Sweet Sixteen"Down to 16 players, 8 games, set to "First to 5 rounds" (best of 9 rounds) each, 60 seconds, Single Elimination.
Notes : No capping of matches, both machines used to play, 2 games at a time. 36 mins max game time"STAGE 3 - "Elite Eight"Down to 8 players, 4 games, set to "First to 5 rounds" (best of 9 rounds) each, 60 seconds, Single Elimination.
Notes: Start Capping matches of Elite Eight. Only use 1 machine. 36 mins max game time"STAGE 4 - "Final Four"Down to 4 players, 2 games, set to "First to 5 rounds" (best of 9 rounds) each, 60 seconds, Single Elimination.
Note : Record Matches. Only use 1 machine. 18 mins max game time"STAGE 5 - "Grand Finals"Down to 2 players, 1 game, set to "First to 5 rounds" (best of 9 rounds) each, Single Elimination. Winner of this is champion.
Notes : Record Matches. Only use 1 machine. 9 mins max game time"Total possible GAME time = 162 mins, meaning 2.7 hours
The extra 20 mins can be spent on setting up, waiting for stragglers, and generally bracket organizing.
So we have 1 month to assemble the 32 players, I don't think it's hard. There's easily more than 32 players in Singapore, looking at Evade's 3v3 list of people.
So that's the new format that I've come up with, it's exciting, keeps players on their toes, and with 5 rounds, not as dangerously random as possible. I've helped to run at least 3 tekken tourneys in the past. When we made the rounds too short, it was exciting, but over too quickly, when we had best of 3 games, 3 rounds, people fell asleep. I know how to balance it, trust me.
Point systemIf you tell the people that once you get 15 points you're through to the grand finals, they'll get complacent. They'll think "oh, well i have enough points, i'm going to relax now".
What we should do is tally all the players' points over the months until November. And then take the top 16 players, and by INVITATION only, invite them to the Grand League Finals.
So lets say we managed to upgrade our player base to 64 players consistently by november. They would all have a good number of points each. We tally them all up, and choose 16 with the highest points. So people will fight, tooth and nail to get those top 16 places. That's what we want, hungry desire to get those positions.
1st place - 6 points
2nd place - 5 points
3rd place - 4 points
4th place - 3 points
5th to 8th place - 2 points
9th - 16th place - 1 point
PrizesWhat do fighting game players want above all? Respect, Fame and Money.
We must focus greatly on these factors when considering the prizes.
..And I love the prizes. Come on, 100 bucks for 2 dollars participation fee? That's insanely good. Custom Card titles? It's better than I imagined. This is the joy of having a company back you.
So lets get into the details...
- Custom Card Titles
I know you guys want to promote VS, so you'd rather put "VS champion *insert month*, but tell me, what impact does it have on the community. I guarantee you, this will spiral out of control, and it will lose its "specialness" after a few months. Imagine going to the arcade and seeing any tom, dick, or harry with a "champion *insert month*" card. Make it special, Make people COVET it. Make it insanely hard to get. Make people want to train to get it. Only make 1.
I suggest you remove custom card titles as your prize each month because it waters down the effect of having a "custom title". I suggest you only give the ONE card at the GRAND finals in december, and it should be labelled,
"SG Champion 2007" - 16 characters!
Believe me, alot of people are going to want that card. Exclusivity is the key here. and moderation.
- Cash Prizes
To be honest, a $100 prize per month is awesome, for only a $2 investment. It's brilliant. I'm only worried if TKA feels it's wasting it's money. So really, if they can continue with the $100 dollars for the months to come, it's would be really really good.
And as we increase the number of players, maybe they might even RAISE the prize money hahaha..
MY job is to make sure more and more people join each month, until TKA realizes they're holding something special in the VS league, and throw more support into it.
Promotion/PublicityOh dear, you guys haven't made much headway here. Maybe it's not your fault because you're so busy running all the tournaments. But anyway, I'm here to offer solutions.
I'm a concert promoter, when Tommy Emmanuel came to Singapore I did alot of travelling, dropping off fliers, speaking to people at schools, music shops, and so on. It was hard, rough but it was also fun. When people weren't receptive, I picked up and moved on to the next person. That's how publicity is. You don't lose heart over 1 lost client, you keep pushing and pushing. My company spent ZERO on publicity, and relied on me (+ my family) to do the publicity, and guess what? We sold-out the concert on a non-existent publicity budget, 900 seats all filled up, for an artist who has NO exposure. Granted, we did it for the love of the artist, but it's the same here.. it can be done.
(BTW please check out Tommy Emmanuel, he's coming back to singapore July 21st @ the Esplanade! I'm doing publicity again!)
I'm greatly heartened that unknown people signed up for the first few months of Versus, it shows there are people outside of our visible scope, joining in within our knowledge. Treasure these people, treat them very very well. You want them to come back. Over and over again.
So you spend a little money, print out cheap grey / B&W fliers, and give small stacks to responsible community people who are willing to pass out fliers to at their neighbourhood arcades. Need a nice spread of distribution. Anyone of the forum members who visit neighbourhood arcades, or arcades on the extremities of the island, should help by giving fliers to people they don't know, playing tekken in the arcade.
Your Flier needs the following information
-A Big Header at the top, VS LEAGUE with nice graphic
-Put the list of games played
-Put the Prizes,
-Put the location of the TKA bugis
basically all the information about the tournament format, the date of the competition, so on and so forth. Get straight to the point.
Don't clutter it up with nonsense like "You don't wanna miss this!"
Capping of VideosDo NOT use Youtube.
DO NOT USE YOUTUBE.
It's an absolute disaster. Crappy Flash Video quality, crappy sound. You should have a MPG quality file, nicely compressed to 20-50 megs, using Divx or Xvid.
When capping, record the big screen so as to get the crowd ambience. The crowd ambience is SO damn important.
HOWEVER, if you have the technical brilliance to somehow sync the crowd ambience with a direct signal through to the camera, such that you get high quality recording + crowd sound, that would be the best. But there's nothing wrong with using the camera to record the big screen, the quality is still decent.
How to distribute the files? Yousendit, Megaupload, rapidshare. Let the community share it peer to peer. We'll help with this.
Youtube is not an option.
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To end off, i'd like to say that I have no interest in the other fighting games in the league. I want to make the tekken tournament so successful, that the organizers will have to cancel the other games and give the extra time slots to us, so we have more time to play with. 3 hours is really too short don't you think?
There can be only one. And I'm supporting Tekken.
Cheers,
Nick
