Somehow, I got it in my mind to do some writing this morning. Internally, I told myself that I would write this blog post soon after the last one... but a month and some change is still soon for me, right?
I'm about two month distanced from the event, but as you probably can tell from the title, I'll be taking a portion of this time to talk about Climax of Night. Continuing from the end of the last blog post covering CEOtaku, I was in a place where I wasn't sure what my relationship would be with fighting games even as I was returning from a satisfying end of that event.
I wasn't going to many, if any local events in Columbus partially out of my current hesitancy to put myself in crowds more than I had to and also because I wasn't interested in playing anything other than UNI at the time. That said, I was playing online with less frequency than I had in the early part of the fall so I was going into Climax of Night without much more additional practice.
For CoN, I actually overcompensated a bit on my non-tournament experience because the tournament took up such a large part of CEOtaku. I had the money and time to spend 4 days in a hotel room by myself. I'd put the money away for it, but even with a block discount that shit is expensive!! Really makes me appreciate my time with Sugoi Factory from a money perspective...
The new hotel was actually really amazing this time around, though getting food without a car/ubereats was more inconvenient than before. As expected of Shinobi, the place had arranged a space for us to set up and play casuals in the lobby for a set amount of time and it had an arcade room/casuals area available outside of the tournament area. The first night in, I went to dinner with Eva, Sikanto, Bri and one other person whose name I unfortunately didn't remember.
I didn't have to play in an official tournament until Saturday, so this was a really enjoyable time for me. It's unfortunate that I couldn't sleep very well though, lol.
---
On Friday, what I did have was teams tournaments. I entered UNI with Miller2B and God Hunta, MBTL with God Hunta and MBAACC with Hamel and Zepolete. Special thanks to all of you who decided to play with me! The SBO-style of team event was extremely creative and cool. I really liked that we had a full day where this was the focal point of the time. It was truly a main event instead of how teams events can feel tacked on, in regards to the dedication allocated to it.
I just wish that I had won a single game accross all of the team games I'd entered... Thankfully, I had good teammates to carry. Miller and Hunta carried us through round one of our team tournament, as did Hamel and Zepolete... and that was the end of our journeys. We got matched up with JJ and Fendo in MBTL too, lol. After that, I stayed around to watch a little more before getting dinner from Publix with Bryce and Chou, then going back to my room to rest until it was bed time.
There were a lot of strong players there, but for whatever reason I didn't choose to play a whole lot of games. I felt a little bad about it at the time, but in retrospect, I liked just playing a couple of sets and then leaving. I wonder if the Coronavirus pandemic has just changed the amount of time I want to be in crowds now, not that it's over or anything. Nevertheless, I couldn't end up sleeping that well... so I ended up watching dekillsage's stream whenever I couldn't sleep.
---
Saturday, I was actually awake from about 3:30 AM. I'd turned in the previous night around 8:30 or so, so I had gotten adequate sleep... but it was so early that I was up without anything to do. After failing to put myself back to sleep, I went down to the gym and worked out for about an hour. The gym in that hotel was really respectable and somehow or another it ended up envigorating me even though I finished my workout around 5 or something. From there, I did a test stream on the wired connection and went down to eat a light breakfast.
I didn't have to play until the afternoon, so after chopping it up with some of the early risers, I went back to my room and took a 45 min nap. My side of the pool had Guiseppe Byakuya and Liquid Floats Akatsuki before I had to play GreyFaiden. I don't typically like fighting Byakuya or playing the Mirror, but I felt like I was playing pretty well and won two contested sets.
I would go on to have to play Grey to attempt to get to Winner's Top 32. Now, Nanase is a matchup that I have a good amount of comfort in. I think it's a match where Akatsuki controls a lot of the engagement, especially if Nanase decides to play in the air or with certain fireball setups. Watching and playing Grey in the past made me feel like as long as I didn't mess things up too much that I could handle myself.
My conservative start saw me down 0-1, 0-1 though like when I played Duesta at Frosty Faustings before I committed to my reads and pushed the tempo. I had some sequences I liked, a hard call out here and there and I surived 2-1 to finish my Saturday early.
Much like the previous day, I stuck around for a little before heading back to my room to chill and watch the festivities on the stream. Tabby asked me to commentate EC vs WC's 10v10 later that night, so I needed to save as much energy as possible. That night was extremely fun, getting to commentate with Tabby, Cyn (foxof's wife) and Casey for a fantastic UNI demonstration. I ended it off with some shots of Blue Flame alongside NEFB+family and went to bed.
---
A foolish mistake because the alcohol dehydrated me and didn't let me sleep that well. I grabbed breakfast in the morning with foxof and cyn in the lobby and vibed for a bit before I was set to go down and play in Top 32. My opponent was PapaPesto, fresh off of a fantastic run at CEOtaku. Now, Carmine vs Akatsuki is not a good matchup for Carmine at all. Pesto also has experience with Salty and Silent near Texas, so I thought that I would have to work pretty hard for it. I think that my passive play was my downfall in this set here. Pesto did a fantastic job taking initiative even in spots where I thought he would wait. I never was able to get started and he won 2-0.
In loser's side, I had to wait a little bit until I would find out who my opponent was. Unfortunately for me, it would be TrockDemon. Trock and his Yuzuriha dumpstered me pretty badly in my trip up to New York for Crossover Arc 2022... but through talking to Ruric and a bit more practice, I had a little more confidence this time around. I didn't think it would be enough to win, but games still had to be played. I thought also that I had been doing well in my casual matches with Yuzu up to that point, too.
Yuzuriha vs Akatsuki is a terribly difficult match in the neutral phases because of her mobility and ability to set the pace. It requires a lot of patience to pick your spots while not giving up big hits. I think Trock was playing a bit nervously as well, which allowed me to storm off to a game one lead. Trock pulled it back in game two, baiting my antsy decisions to anti air before storming off into a commanding lead in game 3 as well. The ending of that match speaks for itself though...
Finally, my last tournament set of the tournament would match me up against Masoma. I lost to him at Frosty Faustings in Winner's Side Top 16 on his Seth and unfortunately, it happened again. Much like vs PapaPesto, I started slow and he took initiative from me pretty heavily. Some very unfortunate anti-air timings slammed the door on my runback and I lost 1-2 to finish at 13th place.
Everything equal, I thought I played well enough to give myself opportunities to get to Top 8 that weekend, even though I fell 2 spots short. I don't think anything in particulary clicked for me and it didn't feel like I elevated my quality of my play much either, so I'm not sure what I wanted to take from the weekend. That said, it was definitely the most enjoyable experience I had at a tournament outside of Combo Breaker and a good way to end my major run for 2022.
---
And so, here's what my major campaign looked like in 2022:
Frosty Faustings XV: 7th/162
Combo Breaker 2022: 25th/190
CEOtaku 2022: 17th/116
Climax of Night Season 5 [arising!]: 13th/199
I'm honestly happy that I was able to improve my placings at larger tournaments as I went along, especially with everything that went on in my life this year. I was also able to take a Tension Shift and MI Mixup #1 over strong Midwest competition to end the year. This year, I also did updates to the 17 Bible which is my Combo Document and also the #CLR_17_Trial advanced Akatsuki combo trials. If they're interesting to you, please play around with them as much as you'd like.
2023 comes with it a lot of uncertainty for me. I'm attempting to send myself to EVO Japan, where there isn't an official UNI tournament but I'll get to test myself against Japanese players.
If I can do that, I won't be at a major in the US until potentially Combo Breaker 2023. Otherwise, I'll try to make Crossover Arc and maybe even Slashback if EVOJ is a no-go. I'm still enjoying the journey. Thank you all for reading up to this point and also for spending any time you have with me this year, I can't believe it's been 5 years of blog posts already!
As always, if like what I do or you'd like to support me you can find me here:
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See you next time!
2022/11/10
Reflection - Hospitalization, Ennui and CEOtaku
Hello and welcome back! It hasn't been that long, has it? (lol)
I thought about writing all of the events post Combo Breaker in a long-form blog post and decided against it. The editing portion of putting up blog posts is often more cumbersome than I'd like it to be, so I'll just break this up into pieces to make it easier on me and hopefully more engaging for you all to take in.
Again, thank you for your time and let's move into part two of the post-CB reflection series.
---
Hospitalization. This is certainly a scary word. Though, honestly speaking, I wasn't as scared as I thought that I would be for my first ever time going into the emergency room. I don't think that I was disassociating away from what was happening to me, but by the time I chose to go to the ER, I think I had mostly understood that I'd reached the limits of what I could do by myself.
To explain a bit shortly for those who are new followers or missed that sort of "saga". I had gotten pretty sick in August with what I thought was influenza. I had fever, stuffy nose, sore throat and the whole deal. Took some time off, crashed fluids, rest and OTC (over the counter) medicine but for whatever reason I didn't feel like I was getting much better.
Went to urgent care to get checked out and also prescribed some antibiotics. They helped, but I was still generating mucus and I thought that I had swallowed something that was stuck in my throat. Fast forward to the trip to the ER and an x-ray, I found out that my tonsils had swollen to about 4cm and were threatening to block my airway. I had felt like there was something in my diaphram that was moving around and so when I tried to sleep for a time, I was constantly adjusting in my bed to get a clear breathing path. I'm glad that I did, lol.
Anyway. I was taken over to the ICU to wait about a day and a half to get surgery and by Wednesday, I was out and home for bed rest and recovery. I'm very thankful to some policies at work, the support of my friends and family and my Health Savings Account that allows me to mostly live the way I've lived up to this point.
---
Now, what this obviously meant is that I didn't really have much time to be going out to play video games here. The hospitalization also ate up a significant amount of my PTO so it made planning to go to events that much more difficult. Typically, I'd be able to travel down to the tournament destination with a day or two's worth of time off in order to get acclimated and in the mindset of being able to compete.
This time, because of my lack of PTO... I had worked a full shift on Friday and then left on the plane at around 8pm to go to Orlando and then subsequently took an early flight out on Monday morning to work a half-day shift back at the office. Not a fan of this and certainly don't want to do it again.
By the point that I had already made the arrangements for travel and such, I was still in the previous funk from after Juu-Yon-Kakuto (JYK) and so my mindset honestly wasn't very good. To be honest, there was also the thought that I had gotten slighted in seeding as well. A top 8 to start the year, 25th at CB, 3rd at Crossover Arc and the admittedly poor 9th at JYK made me wonder if people thought I was washed or something.
Needless to say, I wasn't very enthusiastic about playing that much. The side-ballroom where UNI and some of the other games were being run was also miserably hot. Absolutely dreary in there because the AC wasn't working well or something. Nevertheless, I was the 3rd seed in a pool with Defiant and Hiari.
I had managed to win my matches over Wormy Merkava and Pokecole Byakuya, but I wasn't terribly confident with my level of play at the event. Getting smoked by Ruric and BB in casuals certainly didn't help, but I played Defi pretty closely through most of our set. I wasn't sure which character he was going to choose to play, but he picked Hyde.
Defi is a fantastic defensive player and the strategy he had for disengaging with Akatsuki until I was forced to commit to some options was a very sound one. He built on a big lead in Game 3 and I had an important drop in what I thought was a momentum changer and he won cleanly off that.
I had to play two tough sets through gravyjones' Enkidu and the rematch with Pokecole, but I'd qualified out into top 24. Rikir, who had lost to Ruric, would be my opponent, though I didn't know it until a little later in the day.
---
My day on Saturday was rather full, as I entered on Melty Blood Type Lumina a whim, went 3-2 and finished at 65th with my new Kohaku. I also went around to watch a bunch of my friends play in various games since it would be more of a hassle to go back to the hotel room and rest prior to Top 24.
I will reiterate that I was very annoyed about the Top 24 situation. We didn't know much about how it would work. UNI had a lot of time allocated, so we didn't know if all of our matches would be streamed. There wasn't a spot in the main ballroom allocated for us and so we didn't know if we had to go to the other ballroom to play and come back or how that was going to work.
I'm glad I ended up asking before our pools were set to begin at 6pm or so, but ultimately we had to convert 3 setups over and I had to sit down cold to play against Rikir after helping to find and locate everyone and get them over into the main ballroom. Truth be told, I don't remember too much about this set except that I missed another combo with tk.236a on throw tech timing and that Rikir beat me in straight rounds. So, my tournament ended with a frustrating but I suppose respectable 17th place.
I guess that I'm happy that I'd gotten out of pools every time so far for every major, but by the end of my run I wasn't sure if I would even bother trying to continue to play in 2023. I was extremely burnt out, feeling like I was washed and people thought I was washed. Just generally upset again with tournaments and tournament performance.
However, I had a very enjoyable time watching the rest of Top 24 and later Top 8 after I got eliminated. There's just something about the crowds and the atmosphere in UNI that has a pretty invigorating effect. The amount of effort and the talent that were shown off by all of the players there was simply amazing. In particular, I was very impressed with OmniDeag and PapaPesto. The "next generation" of UNI players have absolutely arrived and I'm excited to see how things continue to develop. Now, truly, we're waiting on French Bread to allow us to help further develop the amazing talent and community that has been fostered.
I also have to make a huge shoutout to cookie and F O X, who graciously let me chill and eat dinner with them in their hotel room. There was some venting, some real talk and just a very relaxed atmosphere that helped me put a lot of things back into perspective. You two are definitely some real ones for that.
Two more people I have to shoutout are Ryker and Deitz, who were my roommates over the weekend. We certainly missed you there too, wampuh! I honestly really missed being able to chat with and spend time with you as well. We haven't gone hard in the same game since the Yomi days and being in the hotel room felt like a time machine back into those times as well. I forgot how fun BBTag was, even while getting smoked. I hope we can meet up at another event soon.
Nevertheless, I still wasn't in great spirits coming back home for the reasons I mentioned and I was stuck between a mental rock and a hard place of no motivation while back in Columbus. Still not really sure what level of commitment to playing fighting games I was going to have, I looked forward to Climax of Night...
I thought about writing all of the events post Combo Breaker in a long-form blog post and decided against it. The editing portion of putting up blog posts is often more cumbersome than I'd like it to be, so I'll just break this up into pieces to make it easier on me and hopefully more engaging for you all to take in.
Again, thank you for your time and let's move into part two of the post-CB reflection series.
---
Hospitalization. This is certainly a scary word. Though, honestly speaking, I wasn't as scared as I thought that I would be for my first ever time going into the emergency room. I don't think that I was disassociating away from what was happening to me, but by the time I chose to go to the ER, I think I had mostly understood that I'd reached the limits of what I could do by myself.
To explain a bit shortly for those who are new followers or missed that sort of "saga". I had gotten pretty sick in August with what I thought was influenza. I had fever, stuffy nose, sore throat and the whole deal. Took some time off, crashed fluids, rest and OTC (over the counter) medicine but for whatever reason I didn't feel like I was getting much better.
Went to urgent care to get checked out and also prescribed some antibiotics. They helped, but I was still generating mucus and I thought that I had swallowed something that was stuck in my throat. Fast forward to the trip to the ER and an x-ray, I found out that my tonsils had swollen to about 4cm and were threatening to block my airway. I had felt like there was something in my diaphram that was moving around and so when I tried to sleep for a time, I was constantly adjusting in my bed to get a clear breathing path. I'm glad that I did, lol.
Anyway. I was taken over to the ICU to wait about a day and a half to get surgery and by Wednesday, I was out and home for bed rest and recovery. I'm very thankful to some policies at work, the support of my friends and family and my Health Savings Account that allows me to mostly live the way I've lived up to this point.
---
Now, what this obviously meant is that I didn't really have much time to be going out to play video games here. The hospitalization also ate up a significant amount of my PTO so it made planning to go to events that much more difficult. Typically, I'd be able to travel down to the tournament destination with a day or two's worth of time off in order to get acclimated and in the mindset of being able to compete.
This time, because of my lack of PTO... I had worked a full shift on Friday and then left on the plane at around 8pm to go to Orlando and then subsequently took an early flight out on Monday morning to work a half-day shift back at the office. Not a fan of this and certainly don't want to do it again.
By the point that I had already made the arrangements for travel and such, I was still in the previous funk from after Juu-Yon-Kakuto (JYK) and so my mindset honestly wasn't very good. To be honest, there was also the thought that I had gotten slighted in seeding as well. A top 8 to start the year, 25th at CB, 3rd at Crossover Arc and the admittedly poor 9th at JYK made me wonder if people thought I was washed or something.
Needless to say, I wasn't very enthusiastic about playing that much. The side-ballroom where UNI and some of the other games were being run was also miserably hot. Absolutely dreary in there because the AC wasn't working well or something. Nevertheless, I was the 3rd seed in a pool with Defiant and Hiari.
I had managed to win my matches over Wormy Merkava and Pokecole Byakuya, but I wasn't terribly confident with my level of play at the event. Getting smoked by Ruric and BB in casuals certainly didn't help, but I played Defi pretty closely through most of our set. I wasn't sure which character he was going to choose to play, but he picked Hyde.
Defi is a fantastic defensive player and the strategy he had for disengaging with Akatsuki until I was forced to commit to some options was a very sound one. He built on a big lead in Game 3 and I had an important drop in what I thought was a momentum changer and he won cleanly off that.
I had to play two tough sets through gravyjones' Enkidu and the rematch with Pokecole, but I'd qualified out into top 24. Rikir, who had lost to Ruric, would be my opponent, though I didn't know it until a little later in the day.
---
My day on Saturday was rather full, as I entered on Melty Blood Type Lumina a whim, went 3-2 and finished at 65th with my new Kohaku. I also went around to watch a bunch of my friends play in various games since it would be more of a hassle to go back to the hotel room and rest prior to Top 24.
I will reiterate that I was very annoyed about the Top 24 situation. We didn't know much about how it would work. UNI had a lot of time allocated, so we didn't know if all of our matches would be streamed. There wasn't a spot in the main ballroom allocated for us and so we didn't know if we had to go to the other ballroom to play and come back or how that was going to work.
I'm glad I ended up asking before our pools were set to begin at 6pm or so, but ultimately we had to convert 3 setups over and I had to sit down cold to play against Rikir after helping to find and locate everyone and get them over into the main ballroom. Truth be told, I don't remember too much about this set except that I missed another combo with tk.236a on throw tech timing and that Rikir beat me in straight rounds. So, my tournament ended with a frustrating but I suppose respectable 17th place.
I guess that I'm happy that I'd gotten out of pools every time so far for every major, but by the end of my run I wasn't sure if I would even bother trying to continue to play in 2023. I was extremely burnt out, feeling like I was washed and people thought I was washed. Just generally upset again with tournaments and tournament performance.
However, I had a very enjoyable time watching the rest of Top 24 and later Top 8 after I got eliminated. There's just something about the crowds and the atmosphere in UNI that has a pretty invigorating effect. The amount of effort and the talent that were shown off by all of the players there was simply amazing. In particular, I was very impressed with OmniDeag and PapaPesto. The "next generation" of UNI players have absolutely arrived and I'm excited to see how things continue to develop. Now, truly, we're waiting on French Bread to allow us to help further develop the amazing talent and community that has been fostered.
I also have to make a huge shoutout to cookie and F O X, who graciously let me chill and eat dinner with them in their hotel room. There was some venting, some real talk and just a very relaxed atmosphere that helped me put a lot of things back into perspective. You two are definitely some real ones for that.
Two more people I have to shoutout are Ryker and Deitz, who were my roommates over the weekend. We certainly missed you there too, wampuh! I honestly really missed being able to chat with and spend time with you as well. We haven't gone hard in the same game since the Yomi days and being in the hotel room felt like a time machine back into those times as well. I forgot how fun BBTag was, even while getting smoked. I hope we can meet up at another event soon.
Nevertheless, I still wasn't in great spirits coming back home for the reasons I mentioned and I was stuck between a mental rock and a hard place of no motivation while back in Columbus. Still not really sure what level of commitment to playing fighting games I was going to have, I looked forward to Climax of Night...
Reflection - Juu-Yon-Kakuto and Mentality
I'm really not consistent with these things...
Uh, hm. So, with the exception of a potential trip over to Ann Arbor looming this week, I can say that the 2022 campaign for UNI has been completed.
This has been a pretty wild year so far. I've had some ups and some downs through the duration of 2022. After reading my reflection from Combo Breaker 2022, I suppose I have a few other things to fill in. I'll try to cover a bit of these things in the coming posts. They'll be shorter than usual and not all of them will strictly be UNI related, but naturally they have something to do with my journey in the game thus far.
----
First up, I'd like to talk about Juu-Yon-Kakuto-Geemu. This was a tournament that I organized with my mentor TheKiest to run an event half to prepare people for EVO and half to give myself something to play in as I was not going to anything until CEOtaku. Silent and iThatGuy-_- came into town and stayed at my apartment and it was certainly a pleasure to have them both.
As an organizer, I really can't say that I had much to complain about. We were able to get people from multiple states to come by and spend some time playing games. The schedule had been meticulously crafted in a way that allowed ample time between games and let most people leave at a reasonable time and we actually essentially got to run everything in one room. Honestly, Coffee Underground is such a fantastic venue and I hope in the future that more of the people who might read this have the chance to come to Columbus and play here with us. I think we've got a real hidden gem in this place.
As a player... well, I guess I'll say that I wish I had a better UNI tournament showing. I remember more or less feeling like I played well through the entire weekend in casuals. I had been talking to Gosuda more leading up, attempting to adjust my mindset and recieve some coaching and I felt like it was paying off. Specifically, some of the concepts that we drilled after watching footage were fine-tuning my resource management while keeping future game-states in mind, curbing unnecessary aggression and standing my ground when in uncertain situations.
However, things didn't go as well as I hoped they did when it came to playing in tournament. I couldn't quite put it together vs Glacey and White Beast, losing 1-2 to them both, finishing at 9th in my own tournament. It really bummed me out both because 9th was the worst I'd done in UNI in my own back yard in years and also because I felt like I could handle organizational duties and playing at the same time still. In this case, maybe I can't anymore lol.
I also played Silent in my home in an exhibition based on something that Clearlamp put together. We played a FT5 game, FT3 set win exhibition between my Akatsuki and his Phonon. Gosuda also helped me with my gameplan for this one as well and we thoroughly broke down games that he played in. I had a gameplan that I felt comfortable with and mostly felt I was okay playing after the tournament day prior.
Ultimately, I lost 0-3 and wasn't able to put things together well enough to have the sort of success that I would have liked in the matches. Everything started well enough, but I wasn't able to stay up in adaptation and Silent capitalized on key mistakes to wrench momentum and run away with things.
Between these two events, I definitely think that my confidence was shaken. I thought I had a pretty good Combo Breaker and with a local win over Spoink and Bryce in June, I thought that afterwards, I was moving in the right direction. Now that I'm a couple months removed from that, I still think that I am moving in a good direction with actionable objectives I can achieve in my UNI play. At the time however, it'd caused me a mental spiral of sorts that took me a while to break out of.
Uh, hm. So, with the exception of a potential trip over to Ann Arbor looming this week, I can say that the 2022 campaign for UNI has been completed.
This has been a pretty wild year so far. I've had some ups and some downs through the duration of 2022. After reading my reflection from Combo Breaker 2022, I suppose I have a few other things to fill in. I'll try to cover a bit of these things in the coming posts. They'll be shorter than usual and not all of them will strictly be UNI related, but naturally they have something to do with my journey in the game thus far.
----
First up, I'd like to talk about Juu-Yon-Kakuto-Geemu. This was a tournament that I organized with my mentor TheKiest to run an event half to prepare people for EVO and half to give myself something to play in as I was not going to anything until CEOtaku. Silent and iThatGuy-_- came into town and stayed at my apartment and it was certainly a pleasure to have them both.
As an organizer, I really can't say that I had much to complain about. We were able to get people from multiple states to come by and spend some time playing games. The schedule had been meticulously crafted in a way that allowed ample time between games and let most people leave at a reasonable time and we actually essentially got to run everything in one room. Honestly, Coffee Underground is such a fantastic venue and I hope in the future that more of the people who might read this have the chance to come to Columbus and play here with us. I think we've got a real hidden gem in this place.
As a player... well, I guess I'll say that I wish I had a better UNI tournament showing. I remember more or less feeling like I played well through the entire weekend in casuals. I had been talking to Gosuda more leading up, attempting to adjust my mindset and recieve some coaching and I felt like it was paying off. Specifically, some of the concepts that we drilled after watching footage were fine-tuning my resource management while keeping future game-states in mind, curbing unnecessary aggression and standing my ground when in uncertain situations.
However, things didn't go as well as I hoped they did when it came to playing in tournament. I couldn't quite put it together vs Glacey and White Beast, losing 1-2 to them both, finishing at 9th in my own tournament. It really bummed me out both because 9th was the worst I'd done in UNI in my own back yard in years and also because I felt like I could handle organizational duties and playing at the same time still. In this case, maybe I can't anymore lol.
I also played Silent in my home in an exhibition based on something that Clearlamp put together. We played a FT5 game, FT3 set win exhibition between my Akatsuki and his Phonon. Gosuda also helped me with my gameplan for this one as well and we thoroughly broke down games that he played in. I had a gameplan that I felt comfortable with and mostly felt I was okay playing after the tournament day prior.
Ultimately, I lost 0-3 and wasn't able to put things together well enough to have the sort of success that I would have liked in the matches. Everything started well enough, but I wasn't able to stay up in adaptation and Silent capitalized on key mistakes to wrench momentum and run away with things.
Between these two events, I definitely think that my confidence was shaken. I thought I had a pretty good Combo Breaker and with a local win over Spoink and Bryce in June, I thought that afterwards, I was moving in the right direction. Now that I'm a couple months removed from that, I still think that I am moving in a good direction with actionable objectives I can achieve in my UNI play. At the time however, it'd caused me a mental spiral of sorts that took me a while to break out of.
2022/06/07
Reflection, Future Deliberation - Combo Breaker 2022
Hello everyone, it's been a while. Honestly, I haven't had an inkling to write for a minute, but I think I'm in a place to actually do it after some time. I realize too, that I didn't write much about my perspective as a player at CoN and truth be told, I don't remember enough about it now to make a post about that. My bad~
Over half a year since Climax of Night Type-4 [arising!] and a few events travelled since. I had a healthy Top-8 appearance at Frosty Faustings this year and a respectable 3rd place showing at Crossover Arc in New York, where I bought the new laptop that I'm keying this blogpost with! Then, with my sponsor Sugoi Factory disbanding and the sort of lull that I've been in since. Let me say that there's nothing for me to go into in regards the the last point and I would prefer not to be asked about it either. I'm very appreciative of the many years that I'd been able to work with such a cool team and the achievements that sponsorship has allowed me to hit. I won't say that I'm opposed to joining any sort of team that might be interested in having me, but I'm also not actively looking for anything right now either. Understandably, I also understand that Under Night (UNI) is not a sexy draw for this sort of thing at the moment in spite of it's dedicated player base and I'm not the most decorated player either. It is what it is.
With all of that out of the way, we are now over a week past Combo Breaker 2022.
I find myself pausing as I write that without too much to say actually... and this will be meaningful as I transition into a recap of that weekend's events:
On Thursday, our car took the trip over from Columbus to Schaumberg out from the morning and arrived at a healthy spot in the afternoon. The trip was a little longer than I had anticipated, so I was very happy to see that so many people were already set up in the lobby and playing! Once I dropped my stuff off at the hotel room, I was already down and mingling with them. It was so nice being able to catch up with some that I hadn't seen since Frosty Faustings or earlier and meeting some people for the very first time. I played some casual matches with Yuuno, Squish, Masoma and foxof then played some extended matches with Jaca. It was super enjoyable! After a while, where I had set up my recording setup for people to play at, I went down to get my badge and to confirm my vaccination. The latter line went smooth and my time in the former was absolutely brutal... The Hot Honey Chicken Sandwich from Wendy's was absolutely brutalizing my stomach while the line was actually not moving. The large group in front of us constantly had people coming and going, chatting them up while not paying attention while the line was already going slowly for registered badge pickup. Eventually my group, which included Ebonic Plague just cut them in line to get our own stuff. I took care of what I needed to, met up with Fran for dinner and ended my night.
Friday was a pretty up and down day. My stomach was still messing with me a bit, but Suna, Silmerion and I took a trip to the grocery store nearby. I picked up some pedialyte, high fiber protein shakes, cliff bars, a fruit blend and water for the morning/midday. As mentioned in one of my tweets, I always try to eat lean on the days that I will actually be playing and will attempt to hydrate myself as much as possible. Today was going to be a long day as: I expected to run a good batch of the exhibitions I had planned for the weekend, had my own pool wave to play at 3pm CST and also had the exhibition on Pange Battaile vs Clim's Phonon later in the day. The distance from the hotel rooms to the ballrooms in question weren't terribly long, but they were not short either.
Nevertheless, things didn't start as planned. Canada had gotten held up with rescheduled flights the previous day and also a good bulk of the players would be arriving in the morning. I feel like I didn't quite communicate that I would not be waiting in the ballroom, but would be waiting in the lobby to commence the exhibitions. I made an assumption that they would know some information and I was wrong. For the record, when doing anything with recording setups like the Avermedia LGP series, the official tournament consoles are leased out by third-party affiliates (like DeadState or Gaming Generations) and they have a strict clause about what gets plugged into their peripherals. My stuff cannot be used on tournament setups at any given time. It'd been a while since we did an event and I think people navigate naturally to the ballrooms and stay there, much to my chagrin. After waiting until a bit after noon and not hearing much from anyone, the only initial set that I had been able to record was Carp vs Smartsteer. I was already annoyed and short, annoyed at yet another setback on something I was making time to arrange and be present for and tweeted in frustration that I was never going to do something like this again. It's like the 3rd time I said I'd stop doing it or so, but we'll try our best to stick to it lol.
Either way, I'll soapbox for a little bit for the readers of the blog: By nature of how events work and how people tend to act at events, I think it is absolutely imperative that players who are interested in improving do *something* to make a record of their progress. In the past, I ran exhibitions and other events with the goal of showcasing talent of players in longer formats that you may not see in tournament sections or to show of competitions between regions that do not normally see each other. Honestly speaking, I think I'm one of the few people with this interest. There's more people now than there were, but I think it'd pretty damning for players to ignore the opportunity to showcase themselves. I get really annoyed and feel like I'm wasting my time organizing for people who might say that they want things--- showcases, opportunities for improvement, footage to study, but don't take advantage of opportunities I or someone else gives them. I've tried to be flexible and organize around people and I've consistently come out more bitter about doing it. So, I won't! I'll try to hold my tongue and stop being pedantic if I see complaints though. Either way, I don't think I should have to ask people to record themselves. You should know who you want to play and how you want this information recorded. If you want to improve, do the work. I'm still willing to help anyone who wants to help themselves, but you have to fucking want it for yourself. There's no point in me having all this equipment, knowledge and so on and not using it.
Off the soap box and back to the tournament. I want to say that I felt like I was mostly playing at the level that I expected could do well. My stomach was still bothering me quite a bit, but I think it was still within reasonable expectation for me to do well. My first match was against BigBoyFargo who also played Akatsuki. It honestly didn't start all that good and I felt like I was reverting back to some of the old habits from previous tournaments rather than the stuff I was practicing leading up to CB. I got a 2-0 win after struggling at first and sat down to play Spoinkman in WQF of the pool. The first game basically went according the expectations and I felt like I won it pretty convincingly, but the second match felt... weird. There wasn't really anything in particular that wasn't working from a gameplan perspective, but all of my timings were off. Things that I felt would be combos would drop because I was too slow, extensions that I would be automatic I would miss and tactical unforced errors just kept adding up to a 1-1 split. Then Spoink simply took it from me in Game 3. Just like that, I was in losers.
With a congratulations to Spoinkman, I turned to focus on my next few opponents. I had to fight from a deficit vs SlamDonkey and against Miller2B, two Linne's... a matchup that I positively despise lol. Well, vs Miller is more or less a 50/50 considering our history and familiarity with each other. He'd beaten me in our last CB appearance (CB2018) and beat me in Columbus, so I was happy to get some revenge on both of those counts. Finally, I had to play against EthicsBuster's Byakuya to get out of the pool. If I'm to be honest, I don't remember much about this set except that I survived it. I think I won game three by timeout?
In any case, I wouldn't know my opponent until the next day so I finished my pool and went back to my hotel room to rest for a bit. I had thought that my exhibition was at 7pm, but it was actually at 9... right next to the stage that Tekken was doing NA vs EU. So, I went down and loitered for a little bit before returning to my room to lay down. Thankfully, I had requested to go first because I am "old". Prior to the tournament, I had asked Gosuda to help me prepare for Clim and so I was able to take some notes and write up some of the things I expected of him and what my approach would be. Around 9, I made my way to the Low Kick stage and helped brrrr set up the console in question before sitting up and waiting for things to begin.
The first two games started really slow as I was still feeling a bit lethargic and wanting to catch what sort of patterns that clim would be shooting for. I basically knew and had internalized that there was a spacing where he would disengage from Akatsuki and shifted up to playing a resource game from there. When I got hit at first, I more or less allowed myself to get thrown to death to feel out what sort of offense he would be running before making more decisions. I went down 0-2 and then made a run to 4 straight after I felt more acclimated. After two more games, we finished up at 5-3 my favor! Honestly speaking, there was a lot more that I was hoping to show off, but I'm thankful for the opportunity against such a strong opponent. I basically left the stage and went back to my room to fall asleep, lol.
Saturday was a lot less exciting of a time in the morning. I went to the hotel restaurant for breakfast with Miller and Silent and then went down to play in the ballroom. I had told myself and the people yet to do exhibitions that I would not even bother to attempt to run exhibitions or lug my recording setup anywhere on this day. I personally didn't have to play again until 4pm or so and had planned to spend a good chunk of the morning watching Vampire Savior after pools began. Upon getting my personal fill of casual matches just before pools for UNI and Melty were to start, I was making my way to the exit when I saw Shinobi looking around. I said what's up and he asked me if I knew where Suika was. Unfortunately, he had mentioned that he was held back in Vancouver due to a positive COVID test. It didn't seem like that was quite communicated to staff, so it seemed like Shinobi needed someone to fill in for the block. We did a short look around, but I didn't see anyone who would be ready as it was going to start imminently. With that said, I offered to help out with commentary if he needed. Lo and behold, I ended up taking the 10am MBTL block alongside Akimi out of nowhere. It was actually really fun and I got to learn more Lumina and provide color commentary for a game I hadn't played too much! Unfortunately, I missed a lot of VSav going back and forth between UNI pools and that room but it was still pretty enjoyable.
After VSav Top 24 was settled, I ended up chilling in the crowd to await my own Top 32 match after the last pool wave. The rest of the morning and early afternoon's festivities lead SwirlyGlasses to be my opponent. By this point, I was actually fairly confident in my abilites vs Hilda and felt like I had a good shot to win the set. I hadn't actually gotten any Hilda games during the weekend, which was probably to my detriment but even when I went down 0-1, I had mostly felt like I was a few adjustments off from taking the set in 3 games. I felt like I had a pretty dominant game 2 in spite of some mishaps, but things fell apart much like they did in the 2nd game vs Spoinkman. One thing that stuck out in particular were two opportunities to land Kamikaze against no resource Hilda that I had messed up. In game 3, it was more of the same and some long perfects sealed my fate at 25th place. As it turned out, had I won I would have had to fight Masoma... so I suppose I wasn't too beat up about it. I watched the rest of the crazy results until we had settled on our Top 8, then went to get some food with Ebonic Plague and Miller at Miller's Tavern. After a pleasant dinner, I turned in for the night.
Sunday was another pretty chill morning, where I went down and mashed casuals until it was time for UNI Top 8. I got to root for my boy Foxof as he progressed to winning his first major along with the many hype sets along the way. I also finally got to sit in Vampire Savior from Top 24 to Top 8 and had a good time. I pitched for VMP to try to make it up for the tournament I'm hosting in Columbus on July 16th and hopefully we'll be able to see a bunch of people come through for it. It was amazing to see Ethan (MiniMaw)'s run to 2nd place and also to see Zach (Ailerus)'s consistency in winning yet another Combo Breaker. I believe it's his 3rd one? Honestly, the North American Vsav scene has to be one of my favorite FGC scenes and I'm always happy to be around them and watch them. I don't play it as much as I probably should, but I've always said that them, the NA Skullgirls scene and the Midwest Brawl/PM scene were my inspirations as far as TO and event organization goes. But after that, I lingered around to see a couple of the people I hadn't seen up to that point and left the ballroom to set up my stuff in the hotel lobby.
It was there that I ended up finishing the last three of the planned exhibitions. Unfortunately, because Silent and Psykotik were too good at their games, I wasn't able to record their "secret" FT10 that I had planned. Joe went on to get 3rd in BBCF after doing the same in UNICLR, so he ended up pretty busy. Silent and I ordered a deep dish as I had the last few people do exhibitions. We were eventually joined by Yuuno, squish and many of the others later who all ended up playing on the setup for a while. I had sat down to play Ayr for a bit, intending to record a set when str4ng3r walked up and asked to pull Ayr away for a picture with the rest of the Vatista players there (flank, wootboost, jaca, foxof, and of course foxof42). It was there that I consigned them for the birthday kumite that I had been planning--- turned into a Vatista kumite, minus Foxof. The result is already up on Youtube, but it was really fun! Afterwards, we went to the bar and they all bought me drinks to celebrate my birthday! I turned 31 on the day and had passed it more or less the way I had wanted. Compy and some of the CBus VSAV crew joined us in drinks, since yesterday had been Compy's birthday as well. After we departed from the bar, I chilled over by my setup for a bit before breaking it down and going back to the room.
Monday we just checked out and went home, lol.
In recap... though it didn't start the best, I had experienced a pretty good birthday weekend. Now that I'm past it, I'm in a bit of a bind as far as what I want to do. I have a tournament on the horizon to prepare in Juu Yon Kakuto Geemu in July, a potential travel destination for MOsh Pit in Missouri, but other than that I think I'm going to chill until September for potentially CEOtaku. I don't have any tournament aspirations except for putting myself in the position to play my best and so things feel a bit hollow. Spitballing it with Gosuda and Vynis last night after mulling it over with myself during the week, I think for the rest of the year I'll be seeking out specific opponents at each of the events that I'm at to play long sets at. I want to take notes and prepare specifically for certain opponents, which is something that I haven't actually done much of since the Yomi days. So, for JYKG, CEOtaku and CoN5, I'll be diligently working on people to play FT10s with. This is the next step for me to keep myself invested, I think. Maybe I'll also approach people for money matches as well.
Anyway, thanks for reading. I recently made a new matchup chart for Akatsuki, but honestly I don't feel like I have things together enough to feel comfortable about it. We'll see what other content I ended up making. I do plan to restream cool stuff and tournaments coming in the future though, so look forward to that. Until next time.
Over half a year since Climax of Night Type-4 [arising!] and a few events travelled since. I had a healthy Top-8 appearance at Frosty Faustings this year and a respectable 3rd place showing at Crossover Arc in New York, where I bought the new laptop that I'm keying this blogpost with! Then, with my sponsor Sugoi Factory disbanding and the sort of lull that I've been in since. Let me say that there's nothing for me to go into in regards the the last point and I would prefer not to be asked about it either. I'm very appreciative of the many years that I'd been able to work with such a cool team and the achievements that sponsorship has allowed me to hit. I won't say that I'm opposed to joining any sort of team that might be interested in having me, but I'm also not actively looking for anything right now either. Understandably, I also understand that Under Night (UNI) is not a sexy draw for this sort of thing at the moment in spite of it's dedicated player base and I'm not the most decorated player either. It is what it is.
With all of that out of the way, we are now over a week past Combo Breaker 2022.
I find myself pausing as I write that without too much to say actually... and this will be meaningful as I transition into a recap of that weekend's events:
~o~o~
~o~o~
Friday was a pretty up and down day. My stomach was still messing with me a bit, but Suna, Silmerion and I took a trip to the grocery store nearby. I picked up some pedialyte, high fiber protein shakes, cliff bars, a fruit blend and water for the morning/midday. As mentioned in one of my tweets, I always try to eat lean on the days that I will actually be playing and will attempt to hydrate myself as much as possible. Today was going to be a long day as: I expected to run a good batch of the exhibitions I had planned for the weekend, had my own pool wave to play at 3pm CST and also had the exhibition on Pange Battaile vs Clim's Phonon later in the day. The distance from the hotel rooms to the ballrooms in question weren't terribly long, but they were not short either.
Nevertheless, things didn't start as planned. Canada had gotten held up with rescheduled flights the previous day and also a good bulk of the players would be arriving in the morning. I feel like I didn't quite communicate that I would not be waiting in the ballroom, but would be waiting in the lobby to commence the exhibitions. I made an assumption that they would know some information and I was wrong. For the record, when doing anything with recording setups like the Avermedia LGP series, the official tournament consoles are leased out by third-party affiliates (like DeadState or Gaming Generations) and they have a strict clause about what gets plugged into their peripherals. My stuff cannot be used on tournament setups at any given time. It'd been a while since we did an event and I think people navigate naturally to the ballrooms and stay there, much to my chagrin. After waiting until a bit after noon and not hearing much from anyone, the only initial set that I had been able to record was Carp vs Smartsteer. I was already annoyed and short, annoyed at yet another setback on something I was making time to arrange and be present for and tweeted in frustration that I was never going to do something like this again. It's like the 3rd time I said I'd stop doing it or so, but we'll try our best to stick to it lol.
Either way, I'll soapbox for a little bit for the readers of the blog: By nature of how events work and how people tend to act at events, I think it is absolutely imperative that players who are interested in improving do *something* to make a record of their progress. In the past, I ran exhibitions and other events with the goal of showcasing talent of players in longer formats that you may not see in tournament sections or to show of competitions between regions that do not normally see each other. Honestly speaking, I think I'm one of the few people with this interest. There's more people now than there were, but I think it'd pretty damning for players to ignore the opportunity to showcase themselves. I get really annoyed and feel like I'm wasting my time organizing for people who might say that they want things--- showcases, opportunities for improvement, footage to study, but don't take advantage of opportunities I or someone else gives them. I've tried to be flexible and organize around people and I've consistently come out more bitter about doing it. So, I won't! I'll try to hold my tongue and stop being pedantic if I see complaints though. Either way, I don't think I should have to ask people to record themselves. You should know who you want to play and how you want this information recorded. If you want to improve, do the work. I'm still willing to help anyone who wants to help themselves, but you have to fucking want it for yourself. There's no point in me having all this equipment, knowledge and so on and not using it.
Off the soap box and back to the tournament. I want to say that I felt like I was mostly playing at the level that I expected could do well. My stomach was still bothering me quite a bit, but I think it was still within reasonable expectation for me to do well. My first match was against BigBoyFargo who also played Akatsuki. It honestly didn't start all that good and I felt like I was reverting back to some of the old habits from previous tournaments rather than the stuff I was practicing leading up to CB. I got a 2-0 win after struggling at first and sat down to play Spoinkman in WQF of the pool. The first game basically went according the expectations and I felt like I won it pretty convincingly, but the second match felt... weird. There wasn't really anything in particular that wasn't working from a gameplan perspective, but all of my timings were off. Things that I felt would be combos would drop because I was too slow, extensions that I would be automatic I would miss and tactical unforced errors just kept adding up to a 1-1 split. Then Spoink simply took it from me in Game 3. Just like that, I was in losers.
With a congratulations to Spoinkman, I turned to focus on my next few opponents. I had to fight from a deficit vs SlamDonkey and against Miller2B, two Linne's... a matchup that I positively despise lol. Well, vs Miller is more or less a 50/50 considering our history and familiarity with each other. He'd beaten me in our last CB appearance (CB2018) and beat me in Columbus, so I was happy to get some revenge on both of those counts. Finally, I had to play against EthicsBuster's Byakuya to get out of the pool. If I'm to be honest, I don't remember much about this set except that I survived it. I think I won game three by timeout?
In any case, I wouldn't know my opponent until the next day so I finished my pool and went back to my hotel room to rest for a bit. I had thought that my exhibition was at 7pm, but it was actually at 9... right next to the stage that Tekken was doing NA vs EU. So, I went down and loitered for a little bit before returning to my room to lay down. Thankfully, I had requested to go first because I am "old". Prior to the tournament, I had asked Gosuda to help me prepare for Clim and so I was able to take some notes and write up some of the things I expected of him and what my approach would be. Around 9, I made my way to the Low Kick stage and helped brrrr set up the console in question before sitting up and waiting for things to begin.
The first two games started really slow as I was still feeling a bit lethargic and wanting to catch what sort of patterns that clim would be shooting for. I basically knew and had internalized that there was a spacing where he would disengage from Akatsuki and shifted up to playing a resource game from there. When I got hit at first, I more or less allowed myself to get thrown to death to feel out what sort of offense he would be running before making more decisions. I went down 0-2 and then made a run to 4 straight after I felt more acclimated. After two more games, we finished up at 5-3 my favor! Honestly speaking, there was a lot more that I was hoping to show off, but I'm thankful for the opportunity against such a strong opponent. I basically left the stage and went back to my room to fall asleep, lol.
~o~o~
Saturday was a lot less exciting of a time in the morning. I went to the hotel restaurant for breakfast with Miller and Silent and then went down to play in the ballroom. I had told myself and the people yet to do exhibitions that I would not even bother to attempt to run exhibitions or lug my recording setup anywhere on this day. I personally didn't have to play again until 4pm or so and had planned to spend a good chunk of the morning watching Vampire Savior after pools began. Upon getting my personal fill of casual matches just before pools for UNI and Melty were to start, I was making my way to the exit when I saw Shinobi looking around. I said what's up and he asked me if I knew where Suika was. Unfortunately, he had mentioned that he was held back in Vancouver due to a positive COVID test. It didn't seem like that was quite communicated to staff, so it seemed like Shinobi needed someone to fill in for the block. We did a short look around, but I didn't see anyone who would be ready as it was going to start imminently. With that said, I offered to help out with commentary if he needed. Lo and behold, I ended up taking the 10am MBTL block alongside Akimi out of nowhere. It was actually really fun and I got to learn more Lumina and provide color commentary for a game I hadn't played too much! Unfortunately, I missed a lot of VSav going back and forth between UNI pools and that room but it was still pretty enjoyable.
After VSav Top 24 was settled, I ended up chilling in the crowd to await my own Top 32 match after the last pool wave. The rest of the morning and early afternoon's festivities lead SwirlyGlasses to be my opponent. By this point, I was actually fairly confident in my abilites vs Hilda and felt like I had a good shot to win the set. I hadn't actually gotten any Hilda games during the weekend, which was probably to my detriment but even when I went down 0-1, I had mostly felt like I was a few adjustments off from taking the set in 3 games. I felt like I had a pretty dominant game 2 in spite of some mishaps, but things fell apart much like they did in the 2nd game vs Spoinkman. One thing that stuck out in particular were two opportunities to land Kamikaze against no resource Hilda that I had messed up. In game 3, it was more of the same and some long perfects sealed my fate at 25th place. As it turned out, had I won I would have had to fight Masoma... so I suppose I wasn't too beat up about it. I watched the rest of the crazy results until we had settled on our Top 8, then went to get some food with Ebonic Plague and Miller at Miller's Tavern. After a pleasant dinner, I turned in for the night.
~o~o~
Sunday was another pretty chill morning, where I went down and mashed casuals until it was time for UNI Top 8. I got to root for my boy Foxof as he progressed to winning his first major along with the many hype sets along the way. I also finally got to sit in Vampire Savior from Top 24 to Top 8 and had a good time. I pitched for VMP to try to make it up for the tournament I'm hosting in Columbus on July 16th and hopefully we'll be able to see a bunch of people come through for it. It was amazing to see Ethan (MiniMaw)'s run to 2nd place and also to see Zach (Ailerus)'s consistency in winning yet another Combo Breaker. I believe it's his 3rd one? Honestly, the North American Vsav scene has to be one of my favorite FGC scenes and I'm always happy to be around them and watch them. I don't play it as much as I probably should, but I've always said that them, the NA Skullgirls scene and the Midwest Brawl/PM scene were my inspirations as far as TO and event organization goes. But after that, I lingered around to see a couple of the people I hadn't seen up to that point and left the ballroom to set up my stuff in the hotel lobby.
It was there that I ended up finishing the last three of the planned exhibitions. Unfortunately, because Silent and Psykotik were too good at their games, I wasn't able to record their "secret" FT10 that I had planned. Joe went on to get 3rd in BBCF after doing the same in UNICLR, so he ended up pretty busy. Silent and I ordered a deep dish as I had the last few people do exhibitions. We were eventually joined by Yuuno, squish and many of the others later who all ended up playing on the setup for a while. I had sat down to play Ayr for a bit, intending to record a set when str4ng3r walked up and asked to pull Ayr away for a picture with the rest of the Vatista players there (flank, wootboost, jaca, foxof, and of course foxof42). It was there that I consigned them for the birthday kumite that I had been planning--- turned into a Vatista kumite, minus Foxof. The result is already up on Youtube, but it was really fun! Afterwards, we went to the bar and they all bought me drinks to celebrate my birthday! I turned 31 on the day and had passed it more or less the way I had wanted. Compy and some of the CBus VSAV crew joined us in drinks, since yesterday had been Compy's birthday as well. After we departed from the bar, I chilled over by my setup for a bit before breaking it down and going back to the room.
Monday we just checked out and went home, lol.
~o~o~
In recap... though it didn't start the best, I had experienced a pretty good birthday weekend. Now that I'm past it, I'm in a bit of a bind as far as what I want to do. I have a tournament on the horizon to prepare in Juu Yon Kakuto Geemu in July, a potential travel destination for MOsh Pit in Missouri, but other than that I think I'm going to chill until September for potentially CEOtaku. I don't have any tournament aspirations except for putting myself in the position to play my best and so things feel a bit hollow. Spitballing it with Gosuda and Vynis last night after mulling it over with myself during the week, I think for the rest of the year I'll be seeking out specific opponents at each of the events that I'm at to play long sets at. I want to take notes and prepare specifically for certain opponents, which is something that I haven't actually done much of since the Yomi days. So, for JYKG, CEOtaku and CoN5, I'll be diligently working on people to play FT10s with. This is the next step for me to keep myself invested, I think. Maybe I'll also approach people for money matches as well.
Anyway, thanks for reading. I recently made a new matchup chart for Akatsuki, but honestly I don't feel like I have things together enough to feel comfortable about it. We'll see what other content I ended up making. I do plan to restream cool stuff and tournaments coming in the future though, so look forward to that. Until next time.
2021/11/26
Reflection, Observation - [exposition] @ Climax of Night Type-4
So, first things first... I would like to say that I consider this undertaking to have been a pretty modest success. I'll go ahead and say that I want to elaborate on this feeling a bit later in the blog post. This is being written in one shot, so I don't know if it will be short or if it will be long. Forgive me for this, lol.
-----
Nevertheless, this sort of undertaking is not something that is new or unique to the greater FGC. The Smash community actually undertook an even greater endeavor all the way back in 2011 at DBR's Genesis 2. The hardware that they used was significantly less sophisticated and easy than the Avermedia LGP2 products that I used, but they were still able to capture the entirety of that tournament's post-pools bracket--- a feat that has yet to be frequently replicated in modern times.
I don't believe that this is due to lack of trying in contemporary times either. I recall a conversation with Rick back at Combo Breaker... perhaps it was 2018 (?) where I had asked him if it was okay for me to plug in my LGP into one of the tournament setups in order to record some of the pools matches of the day. It's been a while and because I don't want to put words into his mouth, I'll paraphrase what I remember the gist of the conversation to be.
Your modern tournament these days have their tournaments supplied by hardware owned by various supplying groups for events. DataFGC, Gaming Generations and DeadStateDesign are common ones that one might see at events. These organizations have contracts with the tournament organizers which dictate how their systems are to be used. For Combo Breaker, audio equipment and controllers were allowed to be plugged into those machines--- things like capture cards were not.
This is one of, if not the main reason that any time that I do recordings at events, I make sure that I generally bring and supply my own equipment or collaborate with other volunteers to use their own. For [exposition], it was collaborating with CookieFGC and foxof42 primarily... but Data, Airco, sixfortyfive, Shinobi, Hagure, OutlawVinegar and other team members helped me put everything together to make it as smooth as possible. It would have not been possible with out them and it was quite the ordeal to do honestly, even though I did not have too much in the way of roadblocks in organizing this. I'll detail a bit of this in the next coming section.
More or less, I don't believe that anyone who wasn't involved even know that I later drafted up a Project Proposal for this event to pair with the Data Capture Sheet graciously crafted by Hagure. It actually started in general with a verbal proposal and a conversation with Shinobi. I wanted to do something specifically in collaboration with Climax of Night--- which meant that I wanted direct assistance from the group in order to do it. This would be a much more involved process in certain ways than simply to run an exhibition or do a teams tournament like I had done in previous years:
- Needed to schedule around times I expected people would be willing to show up to play.
- Needed to train people on how to record, what expectations were, etc.
- Needed to directly ask some of my peers to assist me and collaborate that expectation between them and Shinobi directly.
- Needed to calculate how much time a set would take per game and how much data each day would roughly take up.
- Needed to calculate how much time it would take to transfer data at the end of each day.
- Needed to take time for setup and also for teardown prior to the agreed-upon time schedule.
- Needed to do ad-hoc advertisement of the event at the event.
-----
But, we'll move onto actually talking about how it went down.
On Friday, it was a lot more of a hodgepodge than I thought it would be. Shinobi and the team were still very much in the midst of setting up the ballroom and more when we started to set up. We were going to be out in the ballroom floor, outside of the actual tournament room, which meant that we needed to move around some of the tables that were negotiated for artist alley vendors. We also needed monitors and power, which the team was graciously able to procure for us. I had Shinobi buy a hard drive for the footage to be placed on, as I had specifically stated that I would not be uploading this stuff to my channel. I wanted players to feel involved more intimately with CoN's branding and also had my own things I had planned to upload outside of this project. Nevertheless, we had to borrow sixfourtyfive's drive because Shinobi's hadn't actually come in yet. We also didn't have a PS4 for DFC:I, so I asked Airco if she would graciously loan it to me for two hours. She did and we were up and running.
Except... no one was sitting down to play! Everyone had lined up in order to get their badges after playing downstairs, but there was no one sitting down. Fame was also on standby near our MBTL setup, but more people had decided to go to the 4o4 tournament than I thought... so I ended up coercing people to sit down as I saw them finishing up with their registration particulars. Eventually, we had gotten a big enough crowd to run it and things were going smoothly.
Until we found out that something odd was going on at the UNI setups. I had both UNI setups plugged into my power strip, and for those who are familiar with that gigantic hoss of an item... this is not an uncommon thing. However, for whatever reason, when a player would plug into one of the PS4s, it would disconnect a player from the adjacent setup. This also ended up happening as far as I knew at the tournament portion for pools as well, so when I noticed it, I let shinobi know about it as well. I learned that for Sunday, I needed to put everything on its own power.
We began to tear down at 9 and then I had to borrow sixfortyfive's hard drive to start uploading everything there. This process overall ended up taking two hours (with other miscellaneous running around), which was much longer than I had expected. Foxof and cookie got to hear me grumble and complain for a while and I'm thankful and apologetic that I had them accompany me through that, lol. It was certainly a dark time as everyone else went off to enjoy the rest of their evening. Overall, I had been running around from about 5:45 to 11 or so in order to get this popping.
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Sunday was a lot less dramatic/traumatic, though because of the time setup, I ended up missing a large majority of the Top 8. At about 6:30, I called cookie and foxof to get their equipment and meet me in the Peachtree meeting room to set up. Once they dropped everything off, I didn't want to hold them to stand by there with me so I let them go in order to set up by myself. Here, I'd also like to say how thankful I was to OutlawVinegar for sticking around with me and helping me set up as well. I threw up the stream on my tablet and went to work getting everything ready for that as well.
In any case, a lot of the WASD crew ended up popping by afterwards to play some games when the Top 8 had completed and I was able to finish up successfully. For Sunday, just as a pragmatic sort of choice, we went with 3 setups that were all Under Night. Even so, with the amount of people who had come through, I do wish that we had one more to accomodate people. There were a lot of players who were waiting one or two sets deep in order to play against their opponent. First-to-three was both relatively short and longer than I would have expected, actually. With that said, I closed up a little early and began the teardown and footage capture transfer process. This time, I was done a little bit before 10:30 and got to chill out with everyone else before I went to bed that night.
Overall, I think the feeling that I have coming away from this particular side project is... relief. I'm glad that I'm done with it. I'm happy that it seemed to be successful and I'm glad that it more or less did what I set out to do. I do wish that I had advertised it and pushed more newer or lesser-known players to play some sets on the recording. I remember encountering some people who thought they weren't good enough to get sets recorded, were too rusty or things of that nature. To them, I want to say that this is what it's for! It's for you, who review and learn something against players who you don't normally encounter! I sincerely hope that it was able to be that for those who were able to participate. You can also find the footage in question here at the Climax of Night [exposition] Library!
This feeling of relief extends itself to my overall feeling about doing community work. It's taken me about 4 years of heavy community involvement, but I think that I'm mostly done with it. Done volunteering, done coming up with crackpot ideas to do various things, done adding significantly more to my plate at events I'm trying to compete at a high level for. I find it pretty hard to just mess around at events. I don't love to drink and get drunk. I have a relatively low threshold of the amount of games that I play against people over the course of any given day. This was how I ended up channeling that energy, but I think I'm actually ready to give it up. I'll be happy to advise people who want to continue this path, but I think my road has been traversed to my heart's content.
Thank you for reading up to this point! My next post will be about my experience as a player at Climax of Night: Type-4 [arising!]. Please look forward to it.
2021/05/06
Publication - Statistical Data from 2019-2020 UNI[st] Major/Important Top 8's
Surprise blog update time!
For those of you who are avid followers of my blog, you'll know that for at least a few years of UNI[st], I had created year end reviews. With my looming graduation from Ohio State University and some issues with motivation and energy, I decided not to create a review for the whole community. However, as a part of the work that I did to prepare for the ultimately failed undertaking, I collected a lot of data. Data that I will release soon below. Initially, as per the terms of the year end review, I only had covered 2019 events... but when I sat and thought for an extra minute, adding the 2020 events that fit the criteria wasn't that hard.
I will list tournaments of "significance" and the Top 8 below. Events that break 64 entrants or more fall under this category. I've also added in every Red Bull Conquest qualifier from 2019, though if they had less than 64 entrants, I did not list them in character usage table. Without further ado:
2021/04/09
Contemplation - Thoughts and opinions on optimizing what happens behind the curtain
Greetings all, glad to see you back. Or, if you're a new reader, welcome to my blog. Typically, this space has been used for me to speak about Under Night directly, be it my own thoughts about the game version, my character or something else.
Today however, I will be speaking loosely about Tournament Organizing --- or TOing for short. For an additional bit of a background, in addition to being a player of Under Night, I have a relatively long history of organizing events for fighting games in my local area of Columbus, Ohio. I've detailed this more in my personal review blog posts, but I have also assisted with organizing parts of events at larger tournament events. I've also done my fair share of spin-off events such as exhibitions and team tournaments at these events as well.
There is a necessity for me to state that a large majority of my comfort zone with organizing events is at the local and smaller regional volunteering levels. I've paid out of my pocket to obtain spaces to hold events, but I have not particularly been familiar with hiring streaming talent for really large events. So... if you're looking for advice for purchasing contracts for venue internet (most relevant for streaming), how to handle negotiating with hotels for ballroom arrangements or what is or isn't a reasonable price for streaming services, this is not quite the blog post for that. Please talk to your local streamer/venue for more details there!
Oh, I'll also mention that this operates under the assumption that you have a venue in mind or you've secured a venue. This isn't quite a "start from scratch" discussion, but more of a "here's stuff to think about" kind of deal. As far as how to obtain a venue, there are many ways you can approach them, so I won't give detailed advice on that. However, churches, community centers, various spaces on college campuses, bars, LAN centers and restaurants are some such locations that I have seen work. Do research to see what works best for you!
---
There are generally six areas that I think that warrant important attention when it comes to improving the tournament experience for both the organizer and attendees. I gave some of them funny names and phrases, but there's certainly more formal ways you can describe them. In order, they are:
1. Spatial Awareness
2. Staffing
3. Venue Fee/Payment
4. Equipment
5. Gaming!! (w/ some bracketeering)
6. Time Mastery Tips
Keep in mind that most of the early parts apply primarily to offline, but some of them apply to online as well!
-o-
To lead off, let's talk about Spatial Awareness. More literally, I'm talking about the layout of your space and theoretical floor plans for your venue space. I actually think that Organizers are really good at this step, so I won't really need to talk about this deeply.
One of the things that I do in any sort of space that I plan to use is to do a walkthrough of the area. On the surface, this can mean looking at the physical layout of your space, looking for electrical outlets and mentally (or physically) placing tables where you need players to sit.
If you want to think about it more critically, I think it's important to keep in mind how you orient your tables in order not to block walk paths to important sections of your space (like bathrooms, exits and the TO area). This means keeping in mind standing space behind your setups (as people like to stand and watch games which are not being streamed), allowing a room for chairs to be scooted up forward or back, as well as the physical distance between two players sitting at a setup.
A general rule of thumb is that the corner of a typical rectangular folding table is the best at arranging people to sit around and not bump others and also that two setups will rest there. If you have space to use the other side, a good optimizing point could mean that a 3rd setup could be rested in the middle, oriented oppositely from the other two. This allows that third group of two people to sit comfortably.
It's also very important to designate a space for yourself (or your staff) that is relatively isolated from setups for you to conduct your activities in peace.
-o-
Speaking of Staffing, we should have a brief discussion about this as well.
Honestly, much like anything else... this is going to be context dependent. I generally am the only primary organizer in anything I'm directly running, but because I often collaborate with other local TO's (like TheKiest or compy905), the roles end up blending more than anything. I'll go loose and fast about my opinion on staffing though.
I believe that as a TO, you should have a strong understanding there should a primary organizer for any sort of individual game that is being run. You personally might be the primary organizer for multiple events, but I think that there should be an understanding that someone needs to run point on any given game. I think it's also important to understand that you should know who is expected to perform a given sub-role in your event.
Roles in this sense include common things like Streamer and Bracket Runner. For some of you, all of the roles and sub-roles are going to be your responsibility. But even with that being the case, I believe that you can and should get assistance with this as necessary. In regards to bracket running, I pretty firmly believe that two to three active people should have access to being able to enter results into a bracket. Obviously, it should be people that you trust though. It should go without saying that your streamer should be one of them, if you have one lol.
If you can solicit dedicated volunteers to help you on a consistent basis, absolutely do that! Though, if you are being paid or are paying fellow staff, then I think you should also pay them, too. Or, if there are other incentives like reducing or refunding venue fees where applicable, that should apply to them.
For online tournaments, I think it's basically a requirement that you have more than one person able to report scores for your events to speed up the experience for your events. There's even less overhead to deal with online compared to offline.
-o-
Speaking of money, I'll touch on this with a lot more hard opinion lines than anything else. This section will mostly apply to Venue Fees, Entry Costs and Incentives.
The first thing I would like to mention about this is that it is up to your own interpretation what the Venue Fees are going to apply to. There is a conversation to be had about whether Organizers should pocket money pertaining to Venue Fees or not. There's a lot of nuance and context involved in this and as such, I will not be taking a stance on this. That's something that you will have to negotiate with yourself and your community.
Some venues will expect you to pay them directly, every time, for using their space. This will likely mean that there is little negotiation around how much you are required to charge patrons for occupying that space. You can choose to charge more to recoup costs, there are options like Matcherino incentives that could allow you to take a cut back as well. You could put in a tip jar or something similar.
Some organizers have arrangements with venues where they are not charged for spaces that are used and organizing money is used towards improving or purchasing new equipment. In Columbus, for both the Smash and General FGC space (I've separated them here because our smash scenes are large enough to be autonomous rather than any statement that they are or are not FGC members--- I think they absolutely are.), we pooled together resources to buy pads, tables and extension cables that we transport from our various venues to assist with organization.
As far as Game Entry cost, I personally tend to err on the side of lower entry as it encourages newer or less experienced players to enter events more frequently. $5 is the typical cutoff for entry, but I think that you can go as low as $2-3 dollars if you want more player retention. This is less enticing for top players who want more money, but honestly speaking I don't care much about them here. I think broader player retention and engagement is more important in most circumstances! For the record, I also think that a wider pot distribution for top placings (1st through T-5th or more) is more preferred than the typical one (1st-3rd) for the same reason.
Along those lines, I think that incentives also go a long way towards player retention as well. I didn't mention this outright in this blog, though I've done it in social media, but my background is influenced by the Eastern Midwest Smash (mainly Brawl and PM) communities, so this influences my thinking here.
With that said, we've given incentives in the past for players who do things like:
- bring a carpool of players from other areas (discounted/removed venue fee for drivers)
- bring setups that are used for the tournament
- volunteer or staff the events
- travel from far distances (gas reimbursement)
Again, I think these things may or may not be feasible depending on your arrangements... but I think as a TO, it enhances the experience for attendees if you are able to do something like this. There is room for events like raffles and more that you can think of if you don't want to do these. If you can do it, you should!
-o-
With that out the way, we're going to talk about Equipment! Well, I'm going to specifically talk about gaming equipment here. A lot of these topics are going to refer to topics that I've talked about already and will be referenced in topics I talk about afterwards so this individual section will be short.
The most important thing that you'll have to consider is how you're going to get the equipment in question to run. Often times, organizers will use their own equipment towards running events. There is also high incentive for organizers to use community supply. Some venues (LAN centers) may have components that can be used to lessen the burden and some don't. Keep in mind the solution that is best for you.
The main thing that I think you will need to think about in regards to equipment after acquisition is: "How many setups do I expect to be able to use for [game] at any given time?" Understanding how to answer this question depends on a few different things, but I'll lay out some sample sub-questions to answer for yourself.
- How long do I have the venue for?
- How many people have or are expected to enter the bracket for [game]?
- How many games am I running at the event?
- What is the tournament format for [game]? Swiss? Single Elimination? Double Elimination? Round Robin?
- How long, on average, does a set of [game] take to complete?
- With the expectation of {x} entrants for [game], how long should a round (Winner's Round 1, etc) take to conclude in <tournament format>?
Now, it's perfectly feasible to run events without thinking deeply about all of these things. Many events do this already, even. Many events also could serve to be run more efficiently. I've been in plenty of events, both online and offline that have loads more dead time than they have any business having. I think consideration of these ideas will only help your tournament thrive, though.
-o-
Finally, it's time to talk about Gaming!!! Yaaaaaay! Well, kind of.
Let's start by talking about intention. Please, don't boo me yet... I have a good reason to mention this first. When I say that we need to think about intention, I think this informs a lot of the previous sections too. I think you have to ask yourself what kind of event for your game(s) you want to run in the first place. If you just want to run a bracket for your friends and see who is the best, ignore the next paragraph.
Do you want to just run one game? When you run the game(s) that you're running, what kind of environment do you want to encourage? Do you want a event to help teach new players? Do you want individual players to play as many games as possible? These questions inform the format that you're going to choose to use for your event.
Alright, if you skipped ahead... welcome back! It may be obvious when I say this, but single elimination takes much less time than double elimination. Round Robin and Swiss can take more time than double elimination, as well. I feel like I need to restate this because, again, I've noticed some organizers aren't as cognizant of the time they are asking of their attendees when running events. Your individual game also informs how long your events are going to take.
It is also important in that sense to be aware of what your community wants. It's perfectly good and should be encouraged to ask your players what they want and get feedback about different ways that they can stay engaged. I've played in many double elimination brackets in my life and honestly, they get kinda boring.
Speaking of double elimination though, let's have a short lecture about bracketeering and time mastery!
- The largest collection of players is going to be in R1 Winners. Most, if not all of your players are going to be playing at this phase. Half of them will be sent to Loser's R1.
- Half of those players in Losers will be finished at this point. I know I'm sounding obvious when I'm speaking here, but stay with me.
- Your objective is to remove as many players from your workload as possible in regards to Winners progression.
- Ideally, you will want the winner of a Losers set to be waiting to play the loser of a Winners set as quickly as possible. This removes more players from your workload.
-o-
Finally, here are some of my tips for Time Mastery in regard to TOing in action.
[Before the event]
- If possible, set up your venue space either the night before or hours before attendees are expected to get to your event.
- Pre-seed your brackets as much as possible. Yes, you may not get all of your attendees until the day of, but this helps shorten a step at the venue. It's much easier to add someone and slightly adjust your brackets from there.
- Organize areas of your venue where your individual games are kept together. If possible, don't have players walking from one area to the next to play the same game.
- Stagger large events with pools waves so you are not running everything concurrently. Make sure to also stagger start times between different games in case you need to use the same setups for them.
- Multi-Game Masters (1): These are players who are expected to do well in multiple games. These are players like HARD BREAD, Justin Wong or VickiViper. These players require an extra amount of attention and you will be managing them. Make sure fellow TOs know them and their rough schedules. Hold their matches off as long as you can relative to their other brackets.
- Multi-Game Masters (2): Implement some sort of system specifically for them. Keister and I designated a spot in the venue for Fizzle, who was talented in Melee, PM and Brawl. We literally set up 3 setups in one area and had opponents go to him so we could track him at all times. Figure out a solution that works for you. Actively communicate expectations w/ your fellow TOs. Stagger event start times to avoid as much bottlenecking as possible.
[At the start of the event]
- Stop ALL action and get the attention of your attendees. Take this time to re-explain expectations, staff/ bracket reporting channels and open for questions right there. This will save you a lot of time in the midst of an event. People will ask you about restrooms, food options nearby and more.
[During the event]
- Utilize your attendees as much as possible. Tell player A and player B to look at each other and communicate to them where you expect them to play. Point it out to them. Allow them to keep track of each other.
- Set up the baseball system for players: At Bat (Active), In the Bullpen (Up Next), Warm Up (On Standby). Set expectations for players where they know who they're playing, where they're playing and when they're playing. This is especially salient when you have limited setups.
- Remind them about where to confirm the results of the set.
[Miscellaneous]
- Generally... for the love of god do not stream every game in a round. Pick two or maybe 3 games per round (if applicable) to stream ahead of time and keep your bracket moving.
- Allow your streamer to report the bracket matches they're streaming, or to be told the results of a match to report.
- Try to enter your own events to get a feel of how things run and understand how to optimize. Utilize other staff members or volunteers to help you with some parts where you're playing. Reporting results and updating scoreboards on streams can absolutely be taught to people if you're comfortable letting off the reigns.
-- If you enter your own events, play your own matches among the last of any given round, at least up until you are potentially holding up round progression by not playing.
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