Hello all! This is Riddge Mussington, also known as iRJi. As some of you may know, I was one of the main hosts for Super Smash Bros. Brawl for Apex this weekend, and in previous year(s). I would first like to say that it was fun overall, and I enjoyed the company of all the players that came out from their regions, states, or countries. It truly amazes me how diverse out community is in terms of reach, bringing together a very special presence from a common source of entertainment. However, this weekend seemed too unorganized from multiple standpoints, which resulted in a very upset customers. I also took the time to read what people felt about the event from multiple sources, ranging from Reddit, Smashboards, Facebook, and etc. I feel the best way to tackle this explanation for this weekend is to just explain what happened from my own perspective. Please note that this is ONLY from my perspective, and what I thought, and knew, was going on. I am not going to put blame or call out anyone, as it is childish and doesn’t accomplish anything other than attempting to gain sympathy and/or validation that someone’s view point was right. Sorry if there is any grammar issues. I still have not been to sleep yet, and have almost been awake for 48 hours. Day 1 (Friday) Due to me having to drive Orion and ADHD to the venue, I could not go to the venue early on Thursday to help setup. Even if I didn’t have to drive people, I couldn’t go to the venue early because I didn’t have a place to stay overnight until last minute, which at that point made me going early pointless because everything should be setup, so in short, my first day is Friday. I wake up myself and the players I am driving, and we leave around 8:15 to get to the venue, which is a bit over an hour away. I arrive on schedule (9:30), and grabbed my things to head inside to the main ballroom. I stepped inside, said my hellos, and then I ran into Alex Strife. He looked a bit agitated, but I did not want to pry as to what was going on. He only told me to head into the Tournament area to set my belongings and my laptop, and that Keitaro was not there yet. After setting my belongings, I stepped outside to familiarize myself with where everything was, and to chat with people in the little downtime I had. Keitaro comes in around 9:40, which is 20 minutes before the bracket starts (which means he is early) and sets up his belongings beside mine. Before I continue, I have to explain the Brawl floor plan so you have a better understanding of the situations I will explain later. We had a TO desk all the way in the back corner, and 3 rows of Brawl setups with 8 TV’s per row. In addition, we had 2 side tables that had Brawl Setups (4 per table, which makes it 32 setups total). We had the right amount of TV’s, however, we didn’t have the right amount of setups. If this doesn’t make any sense, this means we were short functional and viable tournament wii’s to play on. On top of this, 18 TV’s were still not setup with brawl at the time because it was missing a disc, and 6 TV’s were missing the proper save file(s) with all the characters unlocked. I am not sure of who was the staff in charge with setting up the stations, but it was not finished and we had to start in 20 minutes. I also informed the staff prior to me showing up (about 4-6 days before the event) that I would not be able to show up before Friday morning. At this time, I started walked around with Keitaro and attempting to turn on the Wii’s that were missing the disc. I brought the information to Strife, which in return told me that a staff member was burning the discs for tournament play. I said “Awesome” and returned to my desk. About 10:00, I received 4 Discs from a staff member to insert into the wii’s. Everything started up normally, and all the save data was there for those wii’s. However, it is time to start the bracket. We decided to delay the bracket at this time to make sure that we had all the basic needs required to run the event. Keitaro was taking questions from players, while I was attempting to get setups on and running. Around 10:15, I received 3 more Discs. I inserted them into the Wii’s, and again, no issues. Tony T also decided to help out by setting up his own Wii onto one of my stations to use for tournament, which I thanked him for at least 6 times lol. At this point it is 10:40, and we start the waves. We have 16 FULLY WORKING setups (The others didn’t have discs, and the rest were missing save files). I asked one of my helpers, ThunderSt0rm, to start trying to get additional Discs and a SD card with the Wii data saved on it so I can unlock the characters. He left for about 10 minutes, and when he returned, I was told that the person who was doing the Discs could not be found. From this point, I told Alex Strife that we were short setups, and he said he will handle it. I return to my TO desk, and pools were underway for the first wave. Let’s break down the pools before we continue: Players were divided into bracket pools ranging from 11-12 players per pool. Each wave of pools held 12 pools, where only top 2 make it out for the Day 2 Bracket. Due to our lack of setups at the time, I started calling pools and assigning them to 2 TV’s per pool. First wave started off nicely, but still, we were short setups for running the event. Understanding that this would slow us down even more, Keitaro and I started to give out later time frames for when people were supposed to show up, that way they didn’t have to wait as long. We are not perfect, so we can’t predict everything accurately, but I tried personally to be as accommodating as possible due to the delays. First couple pools finished about 20-25 minutes later than expected per pool because of the lack of setups, which again was pushing us back even more. Around 12 PM, our first row of TV’s cut out. This downed us 8 setups in total that day for about 20 minutes. We didn’t understand what happened, but then Dul0r explained that the circuit for the socket actually blew out because of an electricity overload. We moved some of the extensions around, and the power came back on. It did cut out again later in the day, but it was only 10 minutes. Sets did have to replay their matches on their current stock count from when it cut out though. Around 2 PM, I was still in wave 1, and wave 2 was supposed to start at 1 PM. Pane, who volunteered for the event, reached out to me and told me that he can take over a couple of pools to make sure that they are done as fast as possible. I thanked him while he took on the task, and ultimately he helped to the point where we were only delayed an hour. Because of this, I started Wave 2 around 2:30. At this point, things become a bit messy. I pretty much gave up on getting any more setups because I felt like no matter how much I asked, I was not receiving help for it. I just accepted the fact that I needed to work with what I got, and just needed to get it done as accurately as possible. However, I started to get complaints that people were looking for Keitaro, and he couldn’t be found. This started to worry me, because without Keitaro, I was the only person running the brackets until he came back. I was actually busy to the point where I didn’t even notice he wasn’t there at first, and I was not informed as to where he went. I continued to push through as much as I can, but I started to fall behind again, even with panes help. At 3:30, Keitaro was still nowhere to be found. I attempted to call him over the loudspeaker, but I didn’t receive any response at the time. Ori_bro, who is a god send I may add, asked if I needed help, and I pulled him in to replace Keitaro for the time being. A player named Detta also offered, and he was a huge help as well. Knowing that Ori and Detta was behind the pools, this left me time to go to players individually to make sure that they were playing the pool matches. We started to get back on track with only being delayed by an hour, but the remaining question still remained: Where is Keitaro? At 3:35ish, Alex Strife comes to me and asks where Keitaro was, and I answered the only way I could: I don’t know =/. At 3:45, I spot Keitaro talking to a player near one of the streams. I pulled him over and told him that I received several complaints about him missing, and in addition to that I was falling behind in running the event because I didn’t know where he was. Keitaro then tells me that he was playing his Melee Pool’s matches. I now know at this point that there was a huge communication error on both of our parts. Keitaro didn’t tell me he had a pools match, and because of this, several players, including me, thought that he just vanished for that time period. We settled the discrepancy, and put it in the past, and between me, detta, Ori, and Keitaro, we finished pools being only 1 hour and 30 minutes late. This was a rocky beginning, but we still finished in a reasonable time frame (around 10PM). I consulted some of the players who felt that it was disorganized, because truly it was due to the multiple issues, and explained to them what was going on and why it happened. Most were understanding, and of course some were not. I would not put blame on anyone who was mad because of what happened. Players are customers, and we didn’t cater to the needs of them to have a pleasant experience to the best of our ability. Keitaro and I then head up to the hotel room to make the pools for Doubles bracket. This took us about 2 hours, and we finished around midnight. I then took all the available links for the pools and posted them on Facebook and Smashboards. Day 2 (Saturday) This day is where everything horrible happened, and it is the one that needs the most explanation. I will try to confine it as much as possible. Keitaro and I wake and we both took a shower. Keitaro left about 20 minutes before I did. I didn’t sleep so well because I was feeling a bit sick, but I had enough energy to make it through the day. Around 8:50, I head to the ballroom to setup my stuff. When I get into the Ballroom, Some of the staff converted some of the Brawl setups (The ones that were not occupied yesterday, and some of them that were occupied) into melee setups. I asked why it was being done, and it was because they had 50 more teams than Brawl, and it made sense to switch some of the systems so they can keep on track. I had no problem with this, I just needed a good reason, and it was a good reason. However, I noticed that while I actually gained some Tv’s that morning from the Apex Staff, I lost a huge amount of working setups. I can’t even explain what happened to you because Melee didn’t even reach into that area to convert anything. On the beginning of this day, I had 12 working setups, 12 WORKING SETUPS… A good chunk of the Wii’s didn’t even have the discs that were made yesterday, and the ones that did have were missing characters. It was obvious that someone switched the wii’s, which then lead to this horrible issue. However, instead of going nuts at that moment, I did not want to delay the start of the event like I did yesterday. We received a lot of complaints about players not being able to set their teammate on the website despite the fact that both players paid for the entry. We gave the players from 9:00- 9:55 to fix the issues if they had any. We checked all of them to make sure that they paid, and then we added their names into the appropriate pools. Once that was done, we started around 10:30. We called what we could on the beginning setups that we had, and once we did that, I talked to Alex, who then told me that he will get it fixed. Not worrying about it since I told Alex about the problem already, I pressed to continue pools for doubles. Doubles pools is like Singles pools bracket except it is done in larger waves, but we had almost the same time frame to finish them. While doubles are faster, we were missing too many setups to even keep track of what was going on at the time. Especially, since Doubles were broken down into 4 pools, and into 2 waves, we were running a 50-60 man bracket (average 25-30 teams per pool) on 12 setups, in only a 3 hour time window per wave. This is completely unreasonable to do. By 1PM, and still only having 12 setups, the first table blew out AGAIN, which then blew out 8 of our 12 working setups for about 35 minutes. I stared to relocate some of the Wii’s to continue the pools. At this point, we are still only in pool 1, and we were supposed to be finished with pool 1 and 2. We fell about 3 hours behind schedule due to the lack of setups. At this point I am very upset. I went to complain about it again, but I couldn’t find Alex Strife. Me, Keitaro, and Ori continued to press on with whatever we can. By 4 PM, we just finished our second pool of Doubles, and now are very far behind. While I was just about to find someone again to get setups running, A staff member who I can’t recall his name for the life of me because I am tired right now came up and said “Alex sent me to help you with your setup situation” Happy at this point, he worked really fast and within 45 minutes, we had 19 working setups in total, with no missing characters. At 5:30 ish, Project M was finishing up their final matches, and we were told that we could convert their setups into brawl setups. Around 6:00, we had 26 setups completely working. This is where the giant gap of friendlies started to happen. We focused on getting the setups up and working with all the characters, which we eventually came to a slow halt with the bracket. Only 1 person was calling matches, and since we were setting up systems one at a time, we didn’t get any extra pools going despite the fact that we could have. All the matches that could have been played at the same for the remaining pool was going on, and because we fell so far behind due to the setups, we were not able to consistently get Stream matches going because it was so chaotic. Eventually, our streamer at the time, Jaxal, kept with his schedule and started doing a different fighting game. All of us were flustered and very tired from what was happening. However, now that we were fully operational, we were able to call both the last pools at the same time. While we were getting to the 8 matches in pool 4, 2 of our players were called to play Melee, which held up both brackets pretty long. Instead of wasting extra time, we started singles at 8:15. Now, I need you guys to keep this in mind. Singles Day 2 was supposed to take 3-4 hours to run. Since most of the doubles bracket could not be played, we called out what we could that COULD be played, and filled the extra space with Singles. We diverted most of our attention to the singles section of the bracket, as if we didn’t, we would have been there longer then we were. We stood on chairs and in between 4 rows, and the moment a person got up from their matches, EE, Myself, Keitaro, or Thunderst0rm yelled at each other to call another match. It was a last minute system, but it was very effective as we started to near completion of the bracket just a bit over 2 hours. While we were getting closer and close to finishing, this is when the fire marshal situation happened. -Fire Marshal Problem- A lot of people didn’t understand what was going on with this, and I actually ended up right in the middle of the situation, so I will explain the best I can what happens here. On Friday and Saturday, Both Melee and Brawl received warnings about overcrowding the isles. We must keep the isles clear because it is a fire hazard if you don’t. We yelled and explained that if we didn’t keep them clear, Security will have to evaluate excess players and/or shut down the event completely. Most of you, and I say this with thinking that 90% of you, took this as if it didn’t hold any weight. To get down to the point, the fire marshal himself came down to the venue and he wanted to shut down the event because of that very situation we warned you about. How did this happen? It was both events causing issues with isle control and not listening, but security ultimately called him to the event because Brawl refused to maintain a proper isle despite me giving warnings multiple times. It got to a point that I was yelling at the top of my lungs right next to people and they just completely disregarded what I said and refused to move. I ended up walking over to the main stage to handle a situation with our Mic (Which I will explain in a later section) and I saw him about to walk up to the main stage to talk to Full metal and Fatz. I asked him what was going on, and he said he wanted to shut it down because security from the hotel as well as staff members from the Apex team told players to keep it clear, and it wasn’t being maintained. Fatz and Fullmetal being there, we got into a conversation about the situation, and talked him to the point where we convinced him not to shut it down. This is where we kicked everyone out of the area if they were not playing a match. It was an emergency method to provide space until we were able to come up with a better solution. He actually gave us a 30 minute time limit to fix the issue or the event would have been shut down completely. This caused some issues with players in the event, because now players who were supposed to play are now not in the ballroom, and some matches for both events couldn’t be called. This again delayed us. Melee was also having some issues with Doubles not finishing on time, and they were delayed with their singles because of it. We came up with the solution to take down tables into the middle of the room, and move them completely to the side so that way people could walk around without issues. This however compromised some of our setups, but ultimately is better than not having the event at all. -Day 2 (Saturday) Cont- Now really late into the event, and still not done with Doubles because of this issue, as well as melee falling behind, we are pretty much completely dead from what has happened today. Around 11 PM, we received confirmation that Doubles Top 8 MUST BE PLAYED OUT. Both Melee and Brawl disagreed with this issue, but melee just made it in time to start their top 8 doubles matches. Because of this, they decided to do it on this say instead of the next. We finish up all of our Doubles pools except the one with M2k because he is playing Top 8 of Doubles Melee. In this time, we start to continue calling out Singles matches with the strategy we created until we got to m2k being the only person holding up the bracket. Noticing that it is really really late, if we started top 8 Brawl Doubles, we would have been there until 8 AM (I am not joking). Alex and Cristin then decided to move Brawl Doubles into the morning. Now we are waiting on M2k to Finish up Melee Top 8. It’s pretty much past midnight at this point, but M2k had a small break in between their top 8. Since he does, we get m2k to finish up his brawl pool, and then we send him back to melee. He had B05 sets to complete, and we waited until it was over since we didn’t want m2k to jump between games. We understand how hard it can be to maintain both and switching can ruin someones gameplay, and while it was really late, his Opponents for brawl were very understanding and waited, and since it was for a lot of money, he let him finish up. M2k finishes, and we start the last match at 2AM for Brawl Doubles. M2k wins, we pack up, and then we stayed after to help Chibosempai and some of the hotel staff to set up for Sunday. Keitaro ended up leaving at midnight because he wasn’t feeling well, so It was just me, Ori, Thunderst0rm, Dul0r, and the additional staff helper that got us the extra TVs’. At 3, we finish up and close the room, and then me and Ori go back up to the room to seed top 8 doubles, which only took 20 minutes. (Longer because we had a discussion about who should be playing who) We have not ate food since 2PM, so we order food, eat, and then go to sleep. -Microphone Issue & Internet Issues- Throughout the day, Brawl microphones were not working. It actually only worked about 30% of the time, which also hindered us getting matches done. I am pretty sure most of you remember, at least the ones who were there, me yelling instead of using the mic. The reasoning was because I happened to be louder the microphone. The time all the friendly setups happened was also the time where our microphone was not working at all, so it made it even harder to get anything done. As for the internet, we ran majority of the tournaments from our smart phones because the internet was not responding at all. It wasn’t until 7 PM that we received Ethernet cables that allowed us to directly access the internet from our laptops. -Day 3 (Sunday)- I only received 1 hour of sleep, and the same goes with Chibo and Ori. We come down an hour earlier then we were supposed to and helped finish setting up the ballroom. Today had no issues other than that. _____________________________________________ Conclusion: I want you at least take from this that no one is to blame, because we are all to blame. As a team; Brawl, Melee, and other staff members, we did not provide the most optimal service we could to you. However, please understand that everyone put their best efforts in to make the event run as best as possible. I have seen posts and comments calling out individual people attempting to point fingers, but at the end of the day we are all one team, even if we are doing different things. However, if you really need to point fingers, you can blame me. You can blame me all you want, and I will honestly accept it if you truly feel that I personally ruined your experienced this weekend, but I would beg of you to not blame other staff members. I put my best foot forward despite all the issues that happened, and I know they did as well. I know that Alex and Christin put their best efforts to give you the event you waited for all year, and I know that all other staff members went out of their way to make sure that you got what you needed to get. I saw that some people wanted an explanation as to what happened this weekend, and even if people didn’t ask, I feel obligated to tell you anyway because I know a lot of players were upset. Again, sorry if there is any grammar issues. I still have not been to sleep yet, and have almost been awake for 48 hours.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 05:31:03 +0000
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