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Tourneys at PAX
Have tournaments become less important at PAX? The first year I went to PAX East, every tournament I had entered was run by an enforcer, and the respected medals were given out at the end, and for the most part, everything was great.
But by the third year, there's been everything from the people having to remind the enforcers that a tournament exists, to enforcers asking people in the tournament to run it themselves, to no medals at the end. Start times being moved after people have already signed up ( so they now have no way of knowing ) was a major problem last year. Not knowing what games are actually going to have tourneys until a week before the convention is a whole other matter.
Do you feel that tournaments are more of an after thought, and should be thought of as such?
P.S. Handheld tourneys have always be great, and a big thanks to the people that run those!
But by the third year, there's been everything from the people having to remind the enforcers that a tournament exists, to enforcers asking people in the tournament to run it themselves, to no medals at the end. Start times being moved after people have already signed up ( so they now have no way of knowing ) was a major problem last year. Not knowing what games are actually going to have tourneys until a week before the convention is a whole other matter.
Do you feel that tournaments are more of an after thought, and should be thought of as such?
P.S. Handheld tourneys have always be great, and a big thanks to the people that run those!
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Edit: In addition, I hope you provided your feedback effectively through the post-pax feedback survey that gets sent out. I know each and every response to that survey is read very carefully.
If you're not talking about PC Tourney's specifically, then the rest of my response probably doesn't matter.
If you are talking about PC tournaments specifically, we do our best to run them as efficiently as possible. A lot of the PC tournaments are sponsored tournaments (read exhibitors pay big bucks to put them on) and sometimes those sponsored tournaments desire last minute changes to content and/or schedules which make it hard to communicate that out to all of the Enforcers. There have even been tournaments put on, ran, and organized by sponsors themselves, which sometimes do not get communicated up the chain.
That said, there isn't a huge focus on tournaments, because of everything else PAX is. However, we know people love competition and so do our terrific sponsors and exhibitors, so we at least try to have 1 or 2 large scale PC tourneys at each PAX.
Vapok
I've actually never been in a PC tourney. I was mostly commenting on the console and board game tournaments I've been in. Sorry for the confusion.
In one, someone else had failed to return a copy of the game to the lending library the night before, so the organizers were going to have to bump out the last four to register. One of the participants (who was not one of the ones who'd be bumped) offered their own copy for play so everybody could get in. Something like that would be a lot less likely to happen if it were super-cutthroat.
Pro tip for the best chances to win: any tournament before noon on Sunday seems to have around 75% of signups drop out due to partying too hard the night before.
The other was a tabletop tournament at Prime 2012, a YGO Traditional Format one where a whopping 3 people showed up (hey, at least I came in first...). I know YGO Traditional is pretty dead, but I wasn't too thrilled about the way the guys there were running it, but that's just me.
The SSB tournament I was knocked out first round, but it seemed fine.
Now at East 2011 there was a Super Smash Bros Brawl tournament that was just run poorly beyond all reason. We waited for almost 2 hours and only a handful of matches were done (because of how terrible the staff was for it). Anybody else at the same tournament will vouch for it, tons of people just ended up leaving (myself and friends included).
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-Peggle tourney at Prime about 2 years ago and that was run well (2nd place). No hiccups.
-Street Fighter IV tournament at Prime about 2 years ago and that was run well (knocked out first round). No hiccups.
-Mario Kart DS tournament at East 2012 and no issues. Seemed very organized.
-Penny Arcade Gamers vs Evil tournament at the Cryptzoic booth at East 2012. Ran super smooth. I really hope this happens again.
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To further elaborate, I thought it was really tough to ever find people to play a tournament game (Carc, Dominion) with the system last year - where you could play over huge blocks of time as opposed to a set time. The year before you could set aside the few hours the tournament was scheduled for and decide if it was worth missing other things. I wasted multiple hours trying to find enough people to get full games going but never succeeded in 2012. Considering all other gaming tournaments at PAX have a set time, I didn't understand the change, but obviously am not privy to the reasoning.
Also - since the tournament organizers needed to have the tournament games for huge blocks of times, it meant way less popular games in the library for longer periods of time.
Thanks and curious on anyone else's opinion!
Yep, they do. I'll prod at him to make a post.
Thanks
So, at Prime 2012, we changed things up again, and I think this time it really clicked, and we have the winning formula for East.
To see what we did at Prime 2012, check out the Prime 2012 Tabletop Tournament Schedule. A very similar system will be used for PAX East 2013, with the most popular tournaments having a Friday Qualifier, a Saturday Qualifier, and the top performers from each qualifier feed into the Finals on Sunday for each game.
Look for the PAX East 2013 tabletop tournament schedule soon!
Team Yellow (S) 2013 - The Ampharos Association
Pokécrawl Episode 4
Team Blue (G) 2012 - The Fightin' Totodiles
Pokécrawl Episode 3
PAX East 2012 - Rookie - Saturday, April 7
PAX East 2013 - Twice as Nice - March 22-24
Thanks a lot for the reply. Glad to hear you guys are all over it! Looking at the Prime schedule, I think it makes more sense to me now. Also, it looks like Carcassonne was set up as a single few hour tournament at Prime which was the main one that seemed really tough over multiple days given the short gameplay time. Thanks again and see everybody in a few weeks!
Thanks a lot for the reply. Glad to hear you guys are all over it! Looking at the Prime schedule, I think it makes more sense to me now. Also, it looks like Carcassonne was set up as a single few hour tournament at Prime which was the main one that seemed really tough over multiple days given the short gameplay time. Thanks again and see everybody in a few weeks!
Why do the tabletop tournaments get to be about the games people love while the PC tournaments are about showcasing the latest casual-pc-gamer trend?
No Team Fortress 2? No SC2? No DotA? No LoL? No Battlefield 3? No Left4Dead? No WoW? No Warcraft 3? No StreetFighter x Tekken? Not even CoD, HoN, Halo, or Mortal Kombat? There is probably no point in mentioning Battlefield 1942 or Quake 3/4 or CS:S/1.6 as I doubt these games would even be considered. Maybe it's just me, but when I go to a PC LAN, I'm there for the adrenaline and excitement of playing competitive games. The games with the interesting complexities and challenges that a PC allows for. Instead you have 3 mediocre casual shooters nobody's heard of and a sandbox game. Games that I could just play on my 360 at home and that I can all but guarantee no one will be playing in the PC free-to-play arena.
If this is the trend PAX is following with PC tourneys, please just don't hold them. In light of the fact that there are 22 console tournaments and 39 table-top tournaments, it's just a huge disappointment.
CS:GO and Warsow are casual? Are you serious?
CS:GO is Counter-Strike. One of the least "casual" shooters out there, and always in the top-10 most-played games on Steam.
Warsow is based on Quake 2, one of the fastest and most skill-heavy shooters ever, and has had a community since 2005.
I may sign up for the CS:GO Tournament, do we know what the format is?
Sign ups may vary by department -- PC holds them day of.
Riot is doing their own thing in their booth including a major event, so we're not doing a LoL tournament. As far as additional details go:
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/175847/pax-east-2013-pc-tournaments-info
Buck stops here. We have a lot of various considerations to balance, I'm happy to talk about a few of them briefly. We plan for our available bandwidth (it's more expensive than printer ink and needs to be shared with ~800 machines), the amount of time each tournament is going to take, our available infrastructure, what's going on with the rest of the expo, our available staff, our available admins, and what's popular. From there we think about what's gotten a little stale (*cough*TF2*cough*) and what might conflict with an exhibitor or an exhibitor event (LoL). We also think about the flex that it's going to take away from PC Freeplay, because the lines are Disneyland-esque and we want to make sure that Freeplay has as many machines as possible.
You sound like you would be interested in our BYOC area. Think about it for Prime or next East!
No, we couldn't get it on the machines this year.
Vapok
Oh and @c_los, Counterstrike: GO is basically CS 1.6 with updated graphics and it's even more competitive than Source. Any CS fan should know this. However, I'll agree with you that there should be more PC tournaments on the schedule rather then the handful they have now.
Bummer I know they are releasing a major milestone patch the first day of pax
I was beginning to think that I was the only one..
Please stop by the booth and we can chat. We are always looking for additional volunteers / good feedback.
Like taumeson mentioned, running PC tournaments take a lot of planning and experience. It's not simple to point of saying - ok we'll host a WoW PVP tournament, thats that. If that were the case, a lot of tournaments would be potentially cancelled or executed poorly. We plan with all of the teams in the PC area (server / network / PCFP / Security / BYOC), look at the requirements / conflicts / concerns and then measure the feasibility of all tournaments. Some tournaments make it in, some of them don't.