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.
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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.
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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.
