[Seattle, WA] Ragin' in the Rain

It does suck about the controller, but yeah, being able to play on stick and pad would have helped mitigate that. I don't really care to rotate, but if some people want to practice we can always bust out the playstation on the big TV and use the xbox on the small screen.
 
good to hear you ended up having fun in vegas cam, although its a shame about the controller troubles. who were your two wins against? did you hang out with omega and swap some zas talk? did you end up playing many matches outside the tourney? and did you end up watching the SCIV finals? i saw it on their live stream, and that was some damn good shit.
 
I didn't see many SC players before the tournament started on Saturday morning. There were only two SC stations set up on Friday, and the only people that I got the names of were Rigel, Manta, BlackMamba, Oofmatic, OffbeatNinja, and NeoRussel. Omega was also there, but he left right as I started playing. I played a little but, because I didn't have a controller with me (note to self: bring a goddamn controller next time, you bloody idiot), I mostly wandered around and played wherever people had a spare controller sitting around. I rented a controller from another guy in my pool during the tournament for a couple of bucks to avoid DQ. I don't know the aliases of the players that I won against. I hadn't heard of them before.

I watched all of the pool C matches (RTD vs Ceirnian and Oofmatic vs Rigel were especially fun to watch from the crowd) and all the matches on the big screen at Evo live, but I was on the plane back to Seattle while the finals were going down, unfortunately. I caught them online last night.
 
LiesIncorporated said:
The tournament was a bit of a disappointment, but Vegas was interesting. Met some nice girls on the plane flying down, we hung out, went swimming, etc. It was a fun time.
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Hey Cam,
Glad it all worked out for you. The room stuff go alright? I knew we should have practiced with the PS3 sticks last Friday. All well, there's always next year and PAX right? But one more thing Cam...

Nice girlS huh? Hung out, huh? ETC.huh??? I bet it was a fun time. Lol!
 
Oof was using Vader for that match against Rigel's Cassandra. I didn't see any Yodas at all.

The hotel stuff went off just fine GreatOne. Thanks again for helping to set that up.

We playing this Friday?
 
Hi Seattle soul calibur players!

Ive been playing SC4 for about 6 months and decided to check out the community here. I have never really played super competitivly but I plan to try to get better. And what better way than to play with the people around you! I actually live out in north Seattle, shoreline to be precise. But I will be checking this page frequently and I hope to become part of this community.

Thanks

P.s. If there are other ways you guys communicate, or you just have tips on how I could get started I really appreciate it!
 
Wow, that's about perfect for your location. We've been meeting at a place around 85th, so its not too far for you. Welcome to the club!
 
I saw the EVO SCIV finals and was surprised that SCIV was played at a high level. I dismissed the game as a button mashing ringout fest when I kept running into Kilik spammers online. I think I might get into playing SCIV. I live in Wedgwood, a crummy little residential area.
 
it's good to hear that evo did end up generating more interest in the actual game. calibur has always been pretty input-friendly with its buffer windows and everything, so i think that's why sometimes it seems like it can be a masher. luckily there was a good showing at the evo finals.

but yeah, like tac said both of you live about 10 minutes from where we usually have friday meets. greatone generally hosts at his place; i'm sure he'll give you guys the info if you PM him. although, i think he's going to be gone this friday, so i don't know what the plan is right now.
 
Edit: sorry I made the post before I saw game's post.
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Hey, anyone know where I can find a current tier list that is somewhat accurate? I have looked all over and I would really appreciate a link. Thx
 
Hey Minuteman and Morzas. Like howiplay said, we usually play Friday nights, and do tournaments every other week. I encourage you to come sometime, we usually draw 7-10 people and have two stations running games, typically SC4 and blazblue.

Here's my impression of the SC4 tier list
Top:
Hilde, Voldo, Algol, Kilik
High-Mid:
Ivy, Setsuka, Amy, Yoshimitsu, Lizardman, Cervantes
Mid:
Nightmare, X, Sophitia, Cassandra, Astaroth, Yun, Siegfried, Mitsu, Darth Vader
Low-Mid:
Raphael, Taki, Apprentice, Tira, Zas, Rock
Low:
Talim, Yoda, Mina
 
people are pretty much still arguing about tier placement. i would say that the absolute top is hilde, amy, and probably setsuka. the absolute low is talim and mina. there's a tier thread in general offline discussion, but i couldn't say if there's much useful information in there. i don't think that there has been a tier project for SCIV yet, but i remember hearing something about a matchup project.

i would say just stay away from the really low-tier characters, but pretty much any character beyond that can compete.
 
New people!!!! Minuteman and Morzas, I'll PM you the address to my house where we meet at. I live in north Ballard near the Crown Hill area off of Holman. We've been meeting every Friday anywhere beginning at around 5 and we usually just play all night through the next morning. If you all need rides or need help making arrangements to come around let me know and we'll do everything we can to help. I'll P.M. you both and give you all the info you'll need. Holla at us.


As far as this Friday, we are definitely gonna be having it this week. This Friday will probably be the last time we see Sweets for the next month and a half or so. He got that job back home so his schedule when he gets it to normal will be, he'll be here about every other week or so. So we gotta send him off with a bang. Brian if you could, would you bring the SC 2 over like we were talking about. Not only would it be great to play but I've been trying to explain to Emma the differences between each game and it's kind of hard with out a visual aid. Hope to see you all this Friday.

P.S.
Has anyone heard from Jaden or Ray? Are Sean and/or Mark gonna come also. I've got nothing but revenge in my heart for those guys! Lol! Holla!

P.P.S.
Cam, you know we gotta hear about them chicks goddammit! And the "Etc." you were talking about!
 
This is a little random, but this has been on my mind for a long time.

I think everybody here can safely say the biggest concern right now is the size of the seattle sc4 community. The scene for sc4 in general is not nearly as explosive as street fighter 4 has been, and I think this community's key focus should be getting more people to start showing up regularly.

What the sc4 seattle scene lacks:

-a sizable community of dedicated players
-a tournament that means something
-HYPE

What I propose to help our scene:

1. Make tournaments mean more!
A.Require either an entry fee or have a trophy that's given to the #1 placer. Much like playing poker without real money, tournaments mean a lot more when something is on the line. On top of that, it encourages new blood to come to try their hand at the pot and it also helps people practice playing under pressure.

If money's a problem, we can go the trophy route. The #1 trophy would have a section where the winner's name + date of tournament can be written. The #1 placer is required to bring the trophy to the next tournament, otherwise he forfeits his title as the NorthWest sc4 CHAMP. Tournaments should also not be held weekly as it makes it harder to plan to show up consistently. Monthly would probably make the most sense.

B.The tournament also needs a name to bring the HYPE. DEVASTATION #29 sounds way better than "gathering this friday, possible tourney". No hate, I really enjoyed myself at the last gathering.

2. Grow the size of our tournament
Branch into other fighting games to have at our tournaments. This should probably be limited to two games, but this would allow for a bigger overall scene which always encourages people to cross over into other games. BlazBlue would probably be a good candidate. SF4 tournaments are almost completely dominated by Zack's gatherings so I don't think that's a good idea.

3. Bring in new blood!
Make a sizable effort to get more sc4 players around the area to come to our tournaments. There are a lot of seattle players who just simply do not show up, probably because they feel like they won't be welcomed.

4. Keep the new blood coming back
I think if the gatherings were more social this would help(poker/whatnot). This is mostly about just bringing in enough new people to offset the # of people who don't come back.

Anyway, sorry if I came across as a dick and/or douche. I talk as if I'm part of the scene currently which I'm totally not, but I see the things the sf4 scene is doing right and I want that for sc4, no disrespect. Anyway, let me know what you guys think.
 
I agree with most of what Sean said. Maybe Dion can use his game-store connection and stage of history domain name to set up a monthly tournament date? I definately think that running multi-game tournaments (SC4 and Blazblue) would be a really smart move. We should talk more about this on Friday.

Any yeah a pair of cute girls sat next to me on the flight down to vegas (they actually swapped seats to sit next to me- is that so hard to believe? Lol). They were really friendly, thought that I was cute, and were staying at the Mirage... They were both nice and the one sitting next to me was really cute, so we hung out during the afternoons/evenings over the 3 days that I was there. They'd gone down to Vegas to leave their problems behind-one had just lost her job of 7 years and the prettier one, Kendra, had just broken up her fiancee-and I guess I ended up being Kendra's rebound guy. Which I was totally fine with, lol. It felt like there was a bit of a script to follow, and I managed to avoid screwing things up too badly.
 
Yo yo yo yo yo

Sorry for not showing up after that once, I did some soul searching and decided not to bother trying to be good at fighting games. I'd still head up and play, but I don't have a car yet

To the guy above: SC4 has a masher-friendly level, and a highly competitive level. It's a lot of fun to get a bunch of drunken people together who don't know how to play and have them mash the buttons at each other, but there's a much deeper and more strategic game beyond that.

Arguably, SC4 is one of the most strategic fighters, since there isn't much super difficult timing, so there's only a couple months' barrier between a newbie and someone who can do any move in the game. Compare that to Street Fighter or Virtua Fighter where you have to be some sort of freakin cyborg to play at a high level
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PS: You guys should check out the matchmaking threads on Shoryuken too, maybe you could do a joint get together with Street Fighter and SC at the same time

http://forums.shoryuken.com/forumdisplay.php?f=22
 
i think monthly tournaments are a good idea. i'm a little wary of required buy-ins though because that can tend to scare away new players. that said, sean is right that a tournament means more if something is on the line. maybe something we could do is an optional buy-in where if you pay you get a free bye in the first however many rounds, depending on size of tournament. sort of like a normal account\gold account system where people could show up and play in the tourney for free if they wanted, but the path to the finals would be longer. that sort of system could also help with seeding if the tournament ever grew to a size where we'd need to do that.

i also think blazblue is a good choice for a second game if we wanted to go that route. i don't personally have much interest in SF4, and it sounds like zack's gatherings have the capcom games covered anyway. poker is a good idea too, i remember that the poker games that zack ran brought in a lot of people, although personally i'm completely happy just playing calibur and blazblue all night.

does dion actually have the stageofhistory.com domain? that's pretty sweet.
 
I don't know. Not having to pay and avoiding a bye sounds like a win/win to me. Maybe we could just let first time players enter at a reduced cost (as cheap as free maybe) instead? It might also be a good idea to have a free newbie tournament for people who want to have a chance to win without having to deal with cyborgs.

The only way to learn how to do this right is to try it and see how things turn out, so I'd like to just set everything in motion and see how things work out. There are a couple of decisions to make beforehand, though.

Where should we hold the tournament?
John's place is big enough for our current group but, if we can muster all of people who came once or twice and get them together for a bigger tournament, we might not end up with enough space. Dion, when you were trying to organize your tournament a couple months ago, you mentioned that you could get space in a Seattle game store that was willing to host tournaments. Are they still willing to do this? How much would their space cost? Or if anyone has an alternative venue (Zack have any extra space? lol) that would work, feel free to suggest it.

How many people can we get to come?
We've had a lot of people come at one time or another, but weren't into the game/company enough to devote their Fridays to it. Sean, for example, has a much harder time justifying hanging out playing SC4 to his gf on Friday than he would going to a monthly tournament. Do we still have contact information for these people/would they be willing to show up? I'm thinking of people like Dion's gf/SC-playing friends and Bryan's co-workers. Also, if we finalize this, we also ought to contact Rob. It'd be fun to get him out of retirement.
Also, if we're also going to run Blazblue, we can post an announcement on Dustloop. Anybody know Blazblue players that are interested in a tournament?

What other games are we going to play?
I really think that playing multiple games would be a good idea. If we can run tournaments for several games at the same event, people will be much more likely to play in multiple tournaments, even if they're only really into one of the games. Most of us aren't SF4 fans and the SF4 community is already pretty well established here from what Sean was saying, but I think that everyone but John likes Blazblue to some extent. Also, because it's a new game, everyone can learn it at once- there will be no original skill barrier to overcome. Tekken 6 BR also looked like fun at Evo, and I might want to play it once it's released.

What kind of Prize should we offer for winning?
Cash? Something more creative? Perhaps some kind of ridiculous costume/hat that the previous winner must wear/defend in addition to cash... like a motley (The Motley of the Master), or Native American headress, or something.

When should we hold the first tournament?
I'd prefer sooner than later. Why wait? I reckon most of the initial people are going to be from our existing social group or friends of friends. If we hold it at the game store, a poster or two advertising the tournament (emphasize Blazblue) might get a few more, but I'd still like to get this started in the next 2-3 weeks.
 
Ha, here I am, finals due tomorrow, and I thought I'd quickly check out 8way...

First things first, I caved today and drove down to the last shop that had a limited edition BlazBlue (Roxbury Gamestop - they still have one more, if anyone's interested.) I'm at home (purposefully keeping myself distant from the 360 at Mell's place,) but I checked out the dvd a bit. Yes, Tager's strat voice-over is epic (and I do try not to over-use that word.) That said, I've been practicing AC+ (the latest Guilty Gear,) ever since we played BB last time I was at GO's (as I do have a PS2 here...) This will all tie in to my next point.

Obviously, I've been really busy with summer quarter, and I'll be heading to Greece for pretty much all of August. I dropped the ball on the first tourney since I expected to have more free time to set it up. I'm willing to own that. However, I do still want to be the driving force behind it, I just want to have a couple of people in on the details with me to make sure everything stays on track. Cam's already agreed to help out, and I assume the rest of you would too, if I asked. Bryan, would you like to be the second guy? You've got a pretty consistent work schedule, have a car, and live closest to the venue.

Anyway, on to the details. I was looking at First Pick Games in Wallingford for the site. They have four 360's hooked up to wall-mounted flatscreens at a pretty good spacing for tourney-play, they're willing to set up more tv's and consoles if we supply them, they're willing to lend out the whole store interior, and they're near restaurants. They only things negative about them are that they'd be a little cramped if we have a *large* turn-out, and parking's not exactly obvious.

Still, the guys are friendly and they've run tournaments before (Smash mostly, which they set up themselves, so they know what's what.) We hadn't finalized the financial side of things, but we were talking about either 2 dollars a head on an 8 dollar buy-in (for all events) or a venue-fee of between 100-150 dollars. This was on the assumption that the tournament would last 4-6 hours, but we never made a concrete agreement... so it could go up, I don't know.

Anyway, you can check out their website at firstpickgames.com

Moving on to the itinerary, my original plan was to do three events: an SC1 (XBLA) event during sign-ups for the SCIV tourney, the main event, followed by a $1 random-stage/random-create single-elim laugh-fest to wrap things up. Crossing over with a BB tourney, I think, is genius for expanding our player-base. In fact...

AC+ was back at EVO this year.

I like BB. I love me some Guilty. And there were pretty regular meet-ups happening in Seattle, last I checked. I know we have GG players. I'm assuming most of them are also BB-curious. The two games don't run on the same system, but I have two PS2s and two copies of AC (regular and plus, which are identical for tournaments,) so we could split a tourney between (for instance) Arc-Sys mornings and SC afternoons. Did anyone else pick up BB? We now have two copies confirmed between our regular players, if we could get up to four we could utilize all the large screens and fly through two tournaments in a day, with GG on the side.

If Bryan's willing to get in on this, the four of us (Mellissa is a bracket-running Goddess, we've run stuff together before,) could figure out a good date in early-mid September for the first Stage of History. That way there will be two contacts here in case anything comes up while Mell and I are gone. Hopefully interest will be high enough to make it a monthly; I know the First Pick guys said that they'd be cool with that.

Beyond that, let's talk about this at GO's. Guttinboy, try to show up on Friday, it sounds like you're interested in this too. :) We can discuss buy-in amount, prizes, etc.

Ok, back to writing text that will actually help me graduate...

PS - Yes, Bryan, I do own StageofHistory.com. It doesn't have much up at the moment, but you should check it out. ;)
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Cam, you ninja'd me. I think I still managed to answer most of your questions, though. :P

I forgot to mention promotion; I checked with some of my local game-stores, and they were willing to put up printed letter-size fliers. I can also canvas campus, and if we do cross-over with GG and BB dustloop will probably kick back at least 5-10 entrants. I have the feeling that if we promote and run the first tournament successfully, we'll get 25-35 people (I can bring at least 5 of my friends/acquaintances, and I'm counting on all of you showing up too.) If it goes well, I'd imagine that number would grow.

Anyway, the first step is to build the stageofhistory.com front-page, and incorporate some kind of RSVP system. Worst case scenario I just set up an e-mail account off the site for interested people, but I'd rather have something they can fill out on the homepage. I'm hosting the site on Office Live at the moment (free and eternal,) so choice of scripts is somewhat limited. They probably have a feedback form I can use, I'll dig around when I'm done with my papers.

As for prizes, I debated this with Mellissa. A cash prize is really the way to go to generate excitement over the tournament results, usually something like a 70/20/10 split. I was thinking of adding something quirky to the random-create event, like spending 20 dollars at Red Light for random and ridiculous articles of clothing, to dress the winner up as a random-creation. Doing that with a group after the match would be ridiculously fun, but it's just not feasible with the amount of business and clean-up after the events are through (not to mention the hundreds of dollars of consoles, controllers, and games left sitting in the trunk.) If you guys come up with ideas on something fun to do, just shout them out (or tell me personally if it's more fun as a secret.)
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Oh, btw, this is kinda funny. I made a mascot for Stage of History. I don't know if anyone else will think it's cute, but... I noticed that Sophitia's face in her official artwork closely matches Cosette's face in the Les Mis promotional poster. I also thought it was fortunate that the tricolore behind Cosette resembled the red/blue gradient used between Soul Edge and Soul Calibur... anyway, I'll try to dig up the png. I don't know how many people would instantly get the reference, and we don't even *have* a Sophie player... but things like that amuse me.

EDIT: I just remembered something. A while back, while planning SoH, I went through the complete user-lists of 8way and caliburforum and got the names/e-mails of everyone who had a NW location. It came out to about 50 people. I don't know where that list has gone (it might have been deleted in a comp migration,) but it only took an hour to put together.

Also, I know the Portland scene mentioned that they'd come up for a tourney. I can't remember if I talked with someone, or if I just caught that somewhere during the search (I think the latter, but I remember that it was about coming up to Seattle specifically.) I had some contact info for them, too, that I have misplaced. Easy enough to get back.

Yeah, when the promotion gears get rolling, we'll get people. :) Man, I'm getting excited about this again, and I have real work I should be doing...
 
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