You should add an option for "either date/time"; that's what I would have picked if it was available.

Alrighty then.

good

Lucky Star  XD

@,..,@

Would those who put Friday as their preferred day be able to meet Saturday instead?

Going to edit rules into the first post, which are open to revision.... [edit] Done.

I voted for Friday, but I should be free on either day.

Going to change my vote for Friday O.O
Sorry 'bout the late notice, but we've found out that the 2¢ per play deal ends on Friday, so methinks it would be more logical to gather on Friday in the late afternoon/early evening.

Official warming up would start at 5 & hopefully we could get things started by 5:30 or 6pm & be finished up by 8.

I wouldn't be able to make it that early.  Can't guarantee that I'd get there before 7.  Is there any reason it can't start a bit later?

The one disadvantage to beginning/finishing later is that we run the risk of Powerplay turning up the room music (which they do every Friday) before we complete the tournament.

I would be fine with starting later though, especially since we will be doing warm-up sets around 5. There just might not be time for you to have warm up time.

-edit- Noticed that I misread your post originally, Ben, & a couple people appear to need the tourny to start closer to 7. The earliest that you guys could arrive would be great, since starting at 9 or after wouldn't be possible.

Since seeding is random (or we're doing round robin), you can start the tournament without everyone present (since we don't need to wait for everyone to play through a qualifier to determine seeding) - just postpone any matches where a player is missing until that player shows up.

That should be enough to start and end at a reasonable time without preventing the few players who can't get there on time from entering.

Elimination brackets obviously have a bit of a cascade effect when missing players do finally arrive (since later matches depend on the results of earlier matches), but it shouldn't be too hard to come up with some reasonable way of scheduling matches as people show up to compensate.  I'd be glad to help sort things out if it does end up being a bit tricky.

Updated title to reflect this is happening TOMORROW!

EDIT: Zach, I didn't know you had a FB Event for this already.
You've got to post stuff like this! 

GO SAY YOU'RE GOING HERE: https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=168806539870543

Zach, can you finalize a bit of the information about the tournament, like start time?

Sure, I shall edit the first post. The Facebook event page is also edited.

Thanks for running this, Zach!  It was a blast!

I second that. I enjoyed it most when I lost to Laura and watching her take down 2 more of our best dance game players. What a pump pro!

I have to say, this tournament was awesome.  Even though it worked against me, I have to say I loved the difficulty cap rule; it was a great equalizer, and a completely fair one; players should have to be good not only on being able to pass hard charts, but should also have to time simpler charts.  It was a way to sort of have divisions and not have them at the same time.

There were a lot of close matches, unlike other tournaments where... there's little point to having them, since players with more stamina win and it's pretty obvious who will win before it even starts.

Agree. 

Granted, it's not really fair for me to comment, since this format WAY worked in my favor.  But honestly, I don't like really stressful, serious tournaments - I like fun ones, where the best players still usually win, but players like me can give them a run for their money on what we're good at.  Matt won and Ben took second, which IMHO is a completely fair ranking (those two are very close in skill level!)

At the same time, players like me, who decide whether or not to enter tournaments based on "Will I have to play charts that I find obnoxious and or physically painful to attempt" could still participate and have fun (and at the end of the day, take fourth. )

Very glad to hear y'all had fun.

Thank you, everyone who came. We had about 15 attendants at one point or another & the 10 who competed were great sports. The owner was kind to chip in a 2nd prize & hang out with us for a little while too.


If anyone's curious about how the tourny progressed, here's what I came up with [ LINK ]

Let's do it again sometime~

I need to participate in more tournaments with you guys. That was an exhilarating experience!

This was a fun time!

Congrats to Matt, who now has a 1st Place tournament achievement.

This is why I've kind of stopped feeling the desire to attend tournaments (this one not included 'cause I had to pick up my dog from the vet). I'm just tired of attending events where the outcome is decided once you know who's entered.

I'm glad you all had a great time, I wish that I could've participated.

Very true; it was really bad around 2006-2007 when there basically was an uber tier and there really wasn't any point to anyone besides them competing.  I know I didn't compete in most tournaments around that time after realizing that fact.  I really couldn't justify paying $5 just to play one game of ITG where I get my ass kicked, or if it was double-elimination, two games of ITG where I got my ass kicked twice.  It got so bad and I got so burned out and discouraged that I literally didn't set a single foot on a DDR or ITG pad from early 2007 to late 2008.

The problem with "I pick a song without restriction, you pick a song without restriction, tiebreaker if needed" DDR/ITG tournaments (which seems to be the format for almost every tournament we've had) is that there really isn't a point to them.  The players with more stamina win because they can simply pick songs that they know the other player physically can't pass, or will play very sub-optimally knowing that it will exhaust them and they give up.  Even if the player with less stamina wins their song, the tiebreaker will overwhelmingly favor the player with more stamina since there are songs there that they'll automatically win.  This all leads to a whole hell of a lot of one-sided matches, and ultimately one-sided tournaments which aren't interesting at all.

This tournament, however, pretty much nipped the problem in the bud with its difficulty caps.  With the difficulty caps, it got rid of all the boring, curb stomp, one-sided matches yet remained fair, forcing everyone to be good all-around players.

I dunno, I always enter tournaments that span a difficulty range that I find enjoyable to play, even if I know for a fact who the top four will be.  There will always be a handful of "best players," and it is a competition, so the best players should win.  My problem is more just that the "best players" tend to set the bar high enough that the playable tournament charts are inaccessible to me.  This tournament solved that problem by ensuring I never had to play anything over a 9. 

It was fun, and I would love for there to be more tournaments like this, but I can't really say that this is a "fair" format.  It was great for what it was - a fun, informal tournament - and I'd love to see more like it.  But while it was fun to challenge some of our best players on my terms, I am fully aware that I never had to face them on theirs, and that made my epic climb through the ranks a little bit less epic. 

This tournament was AWESOME and I'd love to do it again.  We should have more tournaments like this.  But the reason I liked it was that it allowed me to compete on stuff I find fun, not because it allowed me to compete on stuff I could win, which is a distinction I want to make.