SCTier: Pre-Final Round XVI Podcast

It’s time for Final Round coverage! This is a very dense podcast this time round with guests LP, Hawkeye, HumanTyphoon, mkl, Woahhzz, and IRM with some later GreatOne action. What made this podcast so dense aside from the massive guest list are the topics covered. Besides the upcoming event we got a bit in depth concerning how the game is currently evolving, how high level play is presented and opinions on who is on the top of the game character-wise.

As far as the podcasts have gone, this has been the most colorful concerning personality and thought and despite its length, we sincerely hope you enjoy SCTier! Also, it is not too late to make Final Round if you are considering registering at the door. Pre-Reg pools will be posted
Wednesday 3/26.

Additionally, we set up an interview with one of FR's TOs to give us an inside look at the event and some of the behind the scenes work that goes into the event. You can check it out here: http://8wayrun.com/threads/sctier-pre-final-round-xvi-podcast.16124/#post-607636

Night Fights has also progressed concerning future plans. Please leave some feedback concerning on who you want to see and express interest if you yourself want to be part of this! Here is the thread http://8wayrun.com/threads/sctier-night-fights-xbl-and-psn-weekly-sets.16097/

For those of you who are not in the know yet, SCTier is a budding Calibur de facto project designed to keep the community up to date on tournament listings, coverage, tutorials, and all things Calibur. At the head of SCTier you have your very own SCPartisan.

SCTier would appreciate it if you would also take the chance to follow us via Twitter @SCTier.
We also will be updating our Tumblr with articles, general updates, and potential recordings. You can find us here- http://soulcaliburtier.tumblr.com/

We also have a thread on 8WR: http://8wayrun.com/threads/soulcaliburtier.15690

Videos will be uploaded via 8wayrun media, and the YouTube account found here-http://www.youtube.com/user/soulcaliburtier

If you haven't already, feel free to follow Partisan.
@SCPartisan
(and again, of course, @SCTier)

 

Like I said loving this pod-casts. Keep it up.

 

3 1/2 hours aaaarrrrrgghhhh...

I will split into bite-sized bits for my listening pleasure

 

It was a marathon but so worth it hahah.

 

Greatone (or anyone who is interested) if you read up on people like sun tzu, miyamoto mushashi, niccolo machiaveli, robert greene, etc, you'll better understand the things LP was talking about. They explain the fundamentals of strategy in very thorough and easy to understand manner, especially robert greene who takes all their philosophies and puts them into two books. A lot of DrakeAldan's articles are influenced by these guys.

 

Hey guys, I've been talking with Icege (one of the staff members for Final Round) and he's willing to help address any inquiries, comments or concerns regarding the tournament this weekend.

If you've got anything you want to ask him regarding the event, let me know on my profile, this thread (quote this post please) or PM and I will forward the questions to him.

Additionally, SCTier will be doing a bonus interview with him tomorrow to clear up some of the "issues" at last year's event to give some insight on why some things may have been the way they were and what the Final Round team is going to do to improve them at this year's event.

I would personally like to thank him again for reaching out to us for this (as well as the SCV brackets) and look forward to helping him help everybody make it to FR with all of their questions answered.

You can reach Icege on twitter @Icege if you wish to contact him yourselves.

 

Loving these podcasts & also shoutouts to IRM for saying Leixia's Too Good on the podcast.

 

SCPartisan: Hey everybody! As promised, I am here with one of the FR XVI staff members doing an interview to help clear up any last minute questions and give some insight on the behind the scenes stuff of the event.

So first up, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us a bit about who you are and what type of stuff you do/have done at the Final Round tournaments.

Icege: My name is Josh McWhorter, though one... maybe two of y'all might know me as Icege
I'm a Tekken player from Charleston, SC that has been competing for 12 years and organizing tournaments for 10. I'm currently the "General" for Tekken and Soul Calibur at Final Round XVI. I do a little bit of everything from creating and executing brackets to being a liaison for international players. I've been running Soul Calibur for the last two or three years and Tekken for the last seven or eight.

SCPartisan: Awesome! Before we proceed, I want to take the time to welcome you to this SCTier interview and thank you for joining me!

Icege: I'm excited to be a part of it!

SCPartisan: Glad to hear it!

So moving on, you mention that you've been doing TO work for quite some time now. Have you been a part of other tournaments in your area or around the country?

Icege: I've organized countless local tournaments in my area while also acting as a consultant of sorts for other rising TOs in the region. Currently I'm running the South Carolina Championship Series which is utilizing four of the more popular tournament spots in the state as qualifiers for a "state championship" of sorts. I provided commentary for TTT2 at Kumite in Tennessee and have a bad habit of rolling my sleeves up to run brackets at tournaments that I originally come to play in XD

SCPartisan: Haha, that's great! Hope that's going well for you.

As a competitor in SC, I can only imagine the work that goes on behind the scenes at the events I participate in. So out of ignorance, I have to give you (and other TOs out there) props for stepping up and being a big part of bringing us players great events!
But now I'm a bit curious. What type of work do people like yourself put into events like Final Round? You mentioned bracket organization and helping out foreign players but I'm sure there is plenty more you do.

Icege: Well... to be honest, those things require a lot of time, energy, and patience. Especially brackets. A bad bracket can throw the integrity of the results into question, which then throws the integrity of the tournament itself into question. As far as additional responsibilities, the usual applies. Setting up and breaking down stations, taking shifts at the door to check badges, rounding up players for pay out and finals, etc. Ultimately I'm the go to guy for volunteers, staff, and players when it comes to anything related to TTT2 & SC5. I'm also responsible for fielding any inquiries the players have, like now for instance!

SCPartisan: Sounds like a lot of work! Kudos on doing this for so long and continuing to do so!
Since Final Round 16 is coming up VERY soon, let's take some time to talk about the event as a whole and gradually progress into this year's.

Can you provide us any insight on how Final Round got started as an event and talk about how the event has evolved over time (if possible)?

Icege: Final Round originally began as an event for the best in Atlanta to show their stuff. What was originally held in a current staff members house with over 100 people competing in different games. Word traveled and soon Final Round became THE southeast regional. Hailing from the region myself, FR has a special place in my heart as I was very active during the EC vs. WC days. The south wasn't even included in the conversation, despite our strength in 3D games. Also, a lot of players in our region are not exactly well off financially. For many of the players that attend Final Round it is the only major that they can afford.

Now we're able to bring international competition to these players because of the respect we have earned by servicing the community. We make it our mission to abide by the needs of the fighting game community, but some times we have to make decisions in favor of easing the tournament process itself. What started as a 100-player house party has evolved into nearly 2000 players selling out the venue and occupying most of their available conference rooms/halls.

SCPartisan: Interesting stuff!

Larry "ShinBlanka" Dixon is the current organizer for the Final Round event, has he always been at the helm for the duration that this tournament has been running?

Icege: He has.

SCPartisan: Cool! Definitely have to give him props for running such a successful and growing event each year.

Anything you'd like to add onto the "past" of the event before we get into some of the more recent stuff?

Icege: Final Round is by far the hypest tournament on the planet and has had a huge influence on the community. The prevalence of the term "salt" for example. This was slang that you only heard in ATL until a couple of years ago. Final Round has also created moments that other tournaments can only DREAM of imitating.

SCPartisan: I'll have to make it out there one of these years. I'm definitely missing out this year by the sounds of it, haha!

But yeah, thanks for sharing all of that, it's really cool to hear some of the background info on such a huge event. I come from a city that is only beginning to grow a sizeable fighting game community so this really gives people like me an interesting sense of perspective...and scale.

But that's enough of me, let's get into last year's Final Round and discuss some things about that event and hopefully clear up some of the "notorious" mixed feelings some players had about the event. What can you tell us about FR 15?

Icege: Final Round 15 was a huge success but in many we ways I felt that we failed the players in several areas. As this is a Soul Calibur podcast, I'll focus primarily on that event.

SC5 at FR15 had over 250 players along with a sizable pot bonus courtesy of Namco Bandai. It was our a first year with corporate sponsorship (which went to the players in the form of pot bonuses). We hold regular meetings throughout the year while preparing for Final Round and the week of the tournament is when it's crunch time. Unfortunately, the Final Round family suffered a huge loss in the passing of Larry's mother. In the wake of the tragedy, our focus shifted from the finalization process to making sure that our friend was okay. We did what we could to lessen the strain on him and at one point thought that he might not have been able to be a part of Final Round. He pushed himself for the community though, and as anyone can see from last year's opening speech, he was hurting in a bad way.

To give you an idea how important the week of the tournament is, I've spent more than eight hours over the last 3 days balancing pools and filling in brackets. The pre-registration list between TTT2 & SC5 combined is still a couple of players short of last year's SC5 crowd. Not including my time helping out with Marvel, I've still put in about six hours for those two games.
Last year was also the first year that I did not create the entire bracket by hand. Instead we had used a dot matrix printer to print computer generated brackets. This was our first year doing this, and unfortunately we did not perform a test run with the printer. If we had, we would have noticed that the printer would cut off one or two matches that happened to be between the pages. This is why the tournament started as late as it did and people saw me filling out a large paper bracket. Remember that I've spent about six hours on the same amount of entrants this year. Last year, the original bracket was missing matches, and I felt that rather than refunding those players that it would be better to give them the opportunity to play. This resulted in the cut off matches being placed at the bottom of the bracket. I had to first find out who was exactly was missing, and then did my best to have them play their original opponents. I believe in the end that only 3 players were left out of the bracket out of the 30 or so that were missing.
This was just the beginning of a series of unfortunate events that plagued last year's event.

SCPartisan: Wow, had no idea all of that went down. Also have to give my condolences to Larry. Can only imagine how hard it was to deal with such a loss and STILL tough out running an event of this size. That is honestly incredible... mad respect for him and the rest of the FR crew for pulling together in such circumstances.

As far as all of the things you mentioned go, I'm going to assume they were the cause of the "delays" I've heard people talk about from last year? If so, what are you and the other TOs doing this year to improve the event and prevent such things from causing problems again?
And before we get into the above, you mentioned that this was just the beginning. What other things did you and the other FR staff have to deal with?

Icege: Aside from the usual distractions such as players asking when they were going to play, who they were going to play, whether or not they were allowed to do something, not showing up for their matches, being scheduled to play in other games, not reporting who won their matches, etc. we had two tables with about 6 - 8 set-ups suddenly lose power. We had matches that were going restart with the round + match count the same, but it happened again a little bit later. After the third time, the systems never came back on. The area in the floor that we plugged those into had failed. Now we were running a 250+ player tournament with nearly half of the systems, and half of those were open because either players weren't reporting who won, not waiting to sit down and play when told that they were next, or playing casuals/money matches on them.

Before I go any further, I'd like to say something in regards to player behavior at tournaments: TOs are not your parents. We are not required by law to hold your hand for you. When you show up to a tournament, you are there on your dime (usually). Be smart about it! If you've been waiting for three hours to play before being told to go wait at a station to play next and decide that you've been waiting for too long and need to smoke, eat, whatever, then you are making your wait even longer. TOs aren't running the show because of the money, it's because of our passion for competitive gaming. So the next time you're criticizing a tournament, ask yourself if YOU did anything to make it better. I am only one person that is responsible for 250. This also isn't our primary source of income, it is something that we do for the community. Therefore it's probably not a good idea to be mouthy because you feel that you're entitled to complain while we're in the middle of trying to salvage your tournament. It's a great way to get DQ'd, as one or two people from last year can testify.

I would like to clarify that a VAST MAJORITY of players were cooperative, helpful, and on top of things on their end.

So at this point we've had a printer issue that resulted in the tournament starting late and a death bracket. Then we lost half of our set-ups to an electrical failure while having to find out who won their matches, whether or not those that are playing are playing casuals/money matches or "Get thrown out of the venue by staff" matches as I like to call them. This is going on while we're trying to locate players for their matches and waiting on players to finish other games as well. Despite all of this, we started to hit our stride and we were able to cover a lot of ground with what we had left available.

And then while in the middle of calling out matches, I got a phone call from my dad telling me that my grandfather had died. This devastated me as I had been providing care for the last 4 years of his life. He had acute emphysema that progressed to the final stages of COPD and was on 12 liters of oxygen. He could barely make it from the couch to the bathroom directly across the hallway without his blood oxygen levels plummeting dangerously low (which would often result in a panic attack, which wasn't helping the tear that had been discovered on his aorta). I was especially crushed because I had moved out to make my commute to work and school easier (we lived 45 minutes away from campus and my job) and was planning on coming back home to stay with them during spring break. He had been hospitalized a few days prior to FR and I was assured that he'd be home soon. When I came back and told Angela and Eric (two great friends and the best assistants a TO could ask for), they removed me from the hall and took over while I processed what had happened. After about an hour and a half, I was finally calm enough to ask myself what he would've wanted me to do. That was simple: Finish what you started.

So I did.

SCPartisan: Geeze, really sorry to hear that about your Grandfather :( Sounds like it was a really rough time for you having to deal with that and some pretty notable tournament issues. Props for keeping it all together... can't say that many others would be able to do the same.

As for everything else regarding last year's event, it makes sense why so many players were frustrated. All things considered though, it sounds like you guys did a good job of getting everything back on track to salvage the event.

Icege: Fast forwarding to this year's event, we are now using a pool system instead of one large bracket. This has allowed us to set up a pool schedule, and part of the algorithm for our pool placement is that a player can only be in one pool for one game during a time slot. This will prevent us from having to wait on other players that are playing in multiple tournaments. We've also done away with the dot-matrix printer and instead I have printed out 16-player brackets for all of the pools which I'm almost finished filling out. As a result the tournament will not start as late (I wish I could say on time, but with so many players not pre-registering it will likely cause a delay).

We also have specifics on the amount of set-ups that we have and the venue has been changed back to the airport Hilton where we have more confidence in their infrastructure. We've effectively eliminated searching for players and having to wait on their matches to be completed.

I forgot to mention that we also had an issue with the patches. Systems were supposed to be patched the week of the tournament, but as you've found out that wasn't able to happen. We thought that we'd be able to update the systems at the venue but no dice. This part especially upset me because I was forced to run top 16 on 3 set-ups that didn't have the same version of the game on them. There were also characters missing on some of the consoles.

SCPartisan: Nice. Hopefully things will run much smoother with these additions and changes.

Icege: We hope so!

I was told the other day actually that SC5 was the best ran tournament last year. I don't know if I'd agree with that, as I prefer a smoother ride.

SCPartisan: Oh wow, haha!

And yeah, I hope so too.
You mentioned at the door registration, how exactly will that work out for the players in regards to pools and what not? I know quite a few were interested in hearing about that.

Icege: We will be taking each player that registers at the door and place them into the next available spot in pools which we rotate. For example, if Player A, B, and C are at the front of the line, then A would go into the first available spot in pool 1, B would go to the first available spot in pool 2, C in 3, etc. After pool 8 we will rotate back to pool 1 and continue the process.
So if you're there with your friends, it would probably be a good idea to stand in line together and not have 8 people between you.

SCPartisan: Ah, good to hear. I'll pass that on to the number of people I know who didn't pre-register.

That was one of the few things people wanted me to ask about.

Another one was about some of the rules. What can you tell us about the infamous "no wireless controller" rule at FR?

Icege: The wireless controller rule has been in effect for 3 years now. Due to the size of the tournament and all of the responsibilities that we had, staff was unable to check every controller and we instead left that to the players. Unfortunately most players don't want to look like the villain and kept mum on it. The reason for this rule can be traced to Ryan Hart vs. Gandido during the T5DR finals at Evo2k8. Somebody in the crowd paused the game at a moment when Ryan Hart was about to lose the round, and as a result, Gandido was never able to fully recover from the interruption and Ryan Hart took the tournament.

Now some SC players might ask how is this any different from last year's finals when Hawkeye's controller came loose a couple of times. The difference is the controller was in his hands, not somebody else's in the crowd. We believe that any controller that can improve your performance (ie: programmable, turbo, macros, etc) is an unfair advantage as is a controller that can interrupt other players' games.

So in actuality, this isn't a new rule. It just hasn't been as heavily enforced until this year, and we're looking out for it this year because we had some Home button issues last year as well from third parties. With the new format we have using pools we will be able to now check and see who has equipment that is in compliance with our rules.
However, as a player, I sympathize 100% with the players. You want to be at your peak performance. I know this is frustrating, but this is one of those compromises that we have to make for the sake of running a fair tournament.

Besides... some of you young bloods should learn how to play on stick like we had to if we wanted to play Soul as soon as it was released in arcades! ;P

SCPartisan: Haha! I've actually been learning to play on stick for fun! Hoping to get competent enough to actually use it in tournament sometime :P

I think the rule is fair though, it helps eliminate those random home button presses/pauses almost entirely which is a huge plus in the long run.

(For those looking for a future solution, I would personally recommend getting a PS2 and a converter pad (both easily found on Amazon or Ebay)if you play on PS3 pad. I've been using one since EVO 2012 and it has been a very reliable replacement... of course stick works very well too!)

Aside from that, I think the only other big question I had was about SCV stream time. Can you tell a bit about the schedule?

Icege: I regret to inform y'all that from the current schedule that I have that only top 8 will be streamed for SC5. It is currently scheduled to start at 7pm on Friday, but will see what Friday brings. Team Spooky is operating the stream in the room that SC5 will be and currently has the Curleh Mustache Teams event scheduled until the Darkstalkers Exhibition put together by Capcom. Top 8 will be on the 6:45 (name, not time) stream which will be airing KoFXIII most of the day. I've been doing some leg work to try and find a way to get footage recorded for you guys. I haven't gotten anything yet, but I promise I won't give up!

SCPartisan: Sounds good! Too bad we might not get to see more but I'm definitely looking forward to watching the event regardless.

I know a few people who might be bringing some gear to record in their hotel rooms, maybe they will be able to help you with recording. If you're cool with that, I'll let em' know that they should ask you about it!

Icege: I think that might end up being our best option. Worst case scenario I can get together with those willing to record and keep them up to speed on what matches are where. Only the top 8 I think cannot be recorded by players.

SCPartisan: Good to hear. I'll definitely let them know then.

But yeah, that's all I really got in terms of questions so if you have anything you'd like to add before we wrap this up, by all means go ahead!

Any shoutouts you might wanna give are also welcome haha!

Icege: I hope that I've satisfied some of the questions surrounding this year and last. I'd like to extend a huge thanks to everyone in the Soul Calibur community for their patience and understanding. Shout outs to the Final Round mafia, South Crack, IFL, Real G's Do Real Things, Namco Bandai games, and bk4k (in one PM on SRK he broke down SC2 Yoshimitsu and completely changed the way that I viewed the Soul Calibur series... I've still got it archived I think!)!

And don't forget... 3D nationals aren't in Vegas. They're in AYE-TEE-ELL SHAWTY!!!

SCPartisan: I wanna thank you again for taking the time out of your no doubt busy schedule to help clear things up and give some closure on some last minute questions!

I wish you and the rest of the FR staff best of luck running the tournament and I hope everything goes as planned if not better! It's looking to be a real blast!

Hope everybody has a fantastic time out there in ATL this weekend! Get hype!

 

im assuming that the setups are being run with HDMI so im gonna go out and buy a HDMI cable tonight so we can record some of the matches this will result in a lack of bounty money

 

im assuming that the setups are being run with HDMI so im gonna go out and buy a HDMI cable tonight so we can record some of the matches this will result in a lack of bounty money

Decent enough trade off in the long run I guess.

 

Oh shit you guys interviewed Icege? That guy is cool as all hell, and tells some hilarious stories. Marduk player iirc.