WCG Canada - Nationals, Montreal Aug 30th-Sep 1st

I thought it would be fun to blog a bit on the forums with my experience this weekend at the Canadian WCG Finals. As the weekend progresses, I'll keep updating. For now, here's Day 0.

Day 0 - Friday, August 29th
Started out quite nondescript. Flights from Toronto to Montreal are very fast - only 50mins, which is great. WCG Canada had a sponsor hotel with a discount rate in the downtown area and I quickly hopped a cab so I could check in and get settled. All would have gone just fine, until upon entering the hotel I noticed the concierge had a look of despair and the 2 people in front of me in line were looking around aimlessly. The Opera system running their check-in and room vacancies complete crashed and was frozen. Great. So there's Michel The Concierge desperately trying to find the 1-800 IT hotline so they can fix the problem. People start mulling in and lining up behind me and the wait begins...I had made the conscious decision to simply remain where I was, standing.

30 mins goes by: I'm already wiped.

Pleasantly keeping my smile on my face as Michel keeps tinkering with a pen on the keyboard and looking very busy with the phone. His trusty sidekick, Ricky, is in and out of some server room that's propped open with the flimsiest chair the world has ever seen. That chair's not going to hold that door... I say to myself. Sure enough, after the third door slam, Ricky has admitted defeat and gives up.

40mins: I can't feel my feet.

And the solution doesn't seem to be in sight, as Michel is on hold - tabarnaque!

45mins: At this point, most people have sat down or wandered and scattered in the lobby. A breakthrough! Michel gives a Eureka and eagerly motions the front of the line to check in! Woot, finally I can check in.

But no. It's a false alarm and more cursing behind the desk ensues. So far the message to the increasing line of people scattered amongst laptops and Guitar Hero 3 controllers is that is "Could be a short time, or a long time". Thanks, Michel, way to keep us in check.


1:15h: It took an additional 30mins before the system was functioning properly and I was finally at the desk providing my reservation info. I envisioned a Seinfeld moment where I would be told that my reservation had been "lost" and I was prepared to regurgitate the episode in real life if I had to, if only to entertain myself. But it was not to be - my reservation was fine, and Michel was gracious to reduce the room rate by $20 per night. I'm cool with that.

Exhausted upon entering my room. Tomorrow is registration - let's hope it has a manual backup plan. /forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/smile.gif

 

Breakfast Club!

 

wow rough start! hang in there bro and good luck!

 

considering how badly WCG Canada is run I think "luck" will only come into play if more than Llanfair shows up and if those that do aren't drooling scrubs.

Personally, I think llan will win by default and then ride the ferris wheel for the rest of the weekend.

 

I don't want to sound like a pessimist but the way the VF WCG preliminaries are going everywhere I would be impressed if it doesn't get replaced by Soul Calibur next year.

But if so, I hope all the participants make the best out of this year's event and make it really count.

 

Where Montreal's Final take place? La Ronde?

 

yep

 

Day 1: Seeding

Today started out with getting registration finalized at 9am at the hotel where most of the participants were staying. Everyone's registration package includes a "GAMER" pass that provides free access to the tournament venue, a WCG Canada 2008 T-shirt, and a Samsung 2G mp3 player that looks like a small black shiny stone. It's an mp3 player that's almost small enough that I would not let my daughter play with it for fear of her swallowing it. Pretty cool to simply get stuff for just showing up. So, I registered, took my swag back to my room and then I hit the subway to get to the venue.

This year's Canadian Championships are being held at La Ronde - it's a massive amusement park located on one the adjacent islands surrounding Montreal. La Ronde is part of the Six Flags organization and the tournament was being held in one of the centres. If anyone has ever watched online any of the Counter Strike tourneys for MLG or whatever, this place looked no different. It's a pretty big space with a main stage for CS and a few side stage areas for WC3, Halo, VF5, and Guitar Hero. There are more monitors and HG TVs here than an electronics store. It's kinda dark inside, lit up mostly by the LEDs in all the computers, etc. I was impressed - to play VF5 on a stage like this seems remarkably different and exciting compared to what most of us have ever been used to. At around 11:30am, the players were mulling in and they had a quick "Opening Ceremonies" consisting of a few videos of players being nice to one another (Spirit of the Game!) and a couple more featuring the past venues of the WCG Grand Finals. And they played the WCG theme song - A LOT. It's called Beyond the Game and it's a constant tune you hear during the tourney.

After the festivities, I got a chance to see the list of players that had registered for VF5 - a grand total of 7. Just before 1pm, the side stage for VF was opened up for warm ups and I looked around and saw no one besides me. Okey doke. I plug my EX2 in, sit down, and proceed to practice a little in Dojo, passing the time. I was pleasantly surprised to see another guy show up in the area and he also had a stick. He was also from Toronto, although I've never met him or heard of him before. The local qualifier that he went to, he was the only person who showed up for VF5. I know of at least 3-4 other players in the Toronto area that either didn't go or didn't know. Arg. Anyway, his handle is Yamamba and we played for a bit in versus. He played quite well and I soon discovered that he's been teaching English in Nagano most of this year and learned VF5 while he was there. Sweet!

A few of the other players showed up and warmed up as well on the same machine. After talking with some of them, I would guess that they had started playing VF5 about a month ago. Maybe 2. So, of the 7 who registered, 6 came to warm up, 4 of which were very new to the game. Really, myself and Yamamba were the only experience VFers. A little disappointing when I think that there are a handful of excellent VFers in Canada that simply were not here, and should be for it to be the "Canadian Championships".

Here are the players:
1. Yamamba - Vanessa
2. Llanfair - Pai
3. MistaKennedy - Akira
4. Skwisgaar - El Blaze
5. MaCHIne - Pai
6. Shooter - Jacky
7. Zeroy - unknown

Zeroy never actually showed up to anything at the tournament venue, so I don't know what his/her story is.

Onto the seeding matches!

Apparently, the seeding system used in WCG is called Swiss System. Essentially a win gives you 3 points, you move on to the next round, and you're paired against people with similar points. I can see how this would be beneficial for big tourneys with 64 people, etc, but if there's 6 of us, I think we would have benefitted better from a 'Everyone plays Everyone' matrix. But, this is the way it's done.

The first round of matches goes quickly and were as follows:

Llanfair v Skwisgaar: 2-0
Yamamba v MistaKennedy: 2-0
Shooter v MacHIne: 0-2
Zeroy: bye

Once these were done, the announcers call out that the seeding is done for VF5. All done. I had to question the organizers - it just didn't seem to make any sense to seed 7 people with a single match. Over comes the tourney director and another guy to try and answer my inquiry, and I was simply expressing my interest in how the seeding would work at all if there were not anymore seeding matches. Here's how the conversation went:

Llan: Are you sure there are no more matches? Won't this simply result in 3 people being seeded the same, and another 3 people seeded the same?
Director: You will be seeded by your score.
Llan: How do we get a score? I don't understand. In my experience, a seeding would...
Director: Look, I've been running these events for 12 years, and I don't care for your experience.

Nice. Awesome. Way to ensure that the tourneys are being run with the interests of the gamers in mind. Who made this guy Director is beyond me. Anyway, it turns out he thought we were playing GH3. And then he ran off to find out more as to how VF5 was to be run. Long story short, we were to play more games, but now that they messed around not knowing anything, the remainder of our games were postponed until later in the day. Much later. Like 7:30pm later. Sigh.

Overall, I think the seeding ended up kinda sketchy. Shooter dropped out. Zeroy never showed up. So MistaKennedy got 2 byes in the remaining rounds and was given full points for both. I'll find out more tomorrow when the bracket is created, I guess.

Brackets are seeded, single elimination. The way the matches will work is that it is the first player to win 9 rounds. Now, I guess that would translate to anyone with half a brain to "first person to win 3 games", but the way it will be done is that the game will be set to 5 round games, and then you carry on to the next game to win up to 9 rounds total. Kinda whacked.

So that was Day 1. Whacky. Scattered. But at least I've met another Toronto VFer who actually plays the game pretty well! I suppose that's the best we could ask for at this point. I have no doubt we'll be facing each other in the finals come Monday.

 

Re: WCG Canada - Nationals, Montreal Aug 30th-Sep

Won the online qualifiers (out of 2 people) , but couldn't show to the national finals due to work. Good to hear what is taking place there. Good luck Llanfair

 

Re: WCG Canada - Nationals, Montreal Aug 30th-Sep

Go Llanfair!!!
Sorry I couldn't come to this. But like I said, I have no time fot this something always comes up. for example. I'm moving this weekend. Lol so a trip to montreal was out of the question.
BUt it's good to see more toronto players. when you guys get back lets have a gathering. I know Johnsons been wanting to for a while.

 

Day 1: Saturday August 30th - Seeding (continued)

Now that I've got some sleep, I've compiled the seeding results from the notes that I took.

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Code:</div><div class="ubbcode-body ubbcode-pre" style="height: 150px;"><pre>
---- Round 1 ----- ---- Round 2 ----- ---- Round 3 -----

------------------ ------------------ ------------------
| Llanfair |2| | Llanfair |2| | Yamamba |2|
| Skwisgaar |0| | Zeroy |0| | Llanfair |1|
------------------ ------------------ ------------------
------------------ ------------------ ------------------
| Yamamba |2| | Yamamba |2| | MistaKennedy |2|
| MistaKennedy |0| | MacHiNe |0| | Zeroy |0|
------------------ ------------------ ------------------
------------------ ------------------ ------------------
| Shooter |0| | MistaKennedy |2| | MaCHiNe |2|
| MaCHiNe |2| | Skwisgaar |0| | Skwisgaar |0|
------------------ ------------------ ------------------
------------------
| Zeroy |bye|
| |
------------------

* After Round 1, Shooter dropped from the tournament.</pre></div></div>

From what I was told, a win (first to win 2 games) yields 3 points, a loss is worth 0, and a bye is worth 1. Based on the above, the seeding points should work out to be the following:

1. Yamamba: 9
2. Llanfair: 6
2. MistaKennedy: 6
2. MaCHiNe: 6
3. Zeroy: 1
4. Skwisgaar: 0

Like I said in my previous post, perhaps this system would be efficient at providing a decent seeding for a large group of people. But, in this case with 6 people, it fails miserably. Here's why:

In Round 1, Zeroy did not show up for his first round bye. He was then awarded 1 point. He didn't show up for his 2nd round match against me, so I was given the default 3 point win. Again, he didn't make an appearance for Round 3 and MistaKennedy was given the default 3 points. So Zeroy, the no-show, finishes the day with 1 point. The fact that he finishes the day (and I'll bet my breakfast I see his name on the single-elim chart later when I get back to the venue), is mind-boggling - if you don't show up, does it not usually result in disqualification?

My issue with this, is that Skwisgaar showed up. He's new to the game, likes the game, etc. He showed up. He lost every one of his matches, but at least he WAS THERE. And he has 0 points! Zeroy out-seeds him! Wow, good system.

Furthermore, due to the lack of more rounds of seeding, there are 3 second seeds. 50% of the pool of players have a tied seeding. Again, this is not a good system for 6 players, unless another 2 rounds of matches were done - which then brings us to simply the standard "Everyone plays Everyone" matrix. /sigh

Running the single elim brackets today should be quite interesting.

 

Llanfair, I can see this getting frustrating, but don't lose focus of why you are there. Just concentrate on winning to make the most of this trip.

by the way nice report, thanks for sharing!

 

Aye -- it's a shame I didn't qualify -- would have been fun (well maybe not after reading how it's being run ). But then it was my mistake for going to a qualifier where the only 3 people that showed up were you, me, and GE.

Obivously GE and Llan are both stronger players than me -- because of that I have a deep seated hatred for, and irrational fear of, Jeff and Pai.

I expect to hear of your triumphant return to the "Greater Oakville Area" soon /forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/wink.gif

 

you had other opportunities to qualify!! /forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/smile.gif

you should have just taken my spot and tried to pass yourself off as GodEater. I have no regrets telling the WCG to stuff themselves and staying home.

Go llan!

 

You forget that I am lazy

 

Day 2: Sunday August 31st - Single Elimination

Sure enough, this morning I went down early to see how the results for the seeding had worked out at the tourney venue. It was a bit of a mess - they had me seeded first despite my loss to Yamamba. Thankfully, I was able to speak with their results director and had the results properly recorded. They also had kept both the player who had dropped out, and the player who never showed up, in the brackets - why, I don't know. So, once it was sorted out, the seeds looked like what I posted yesterday, and they all realized that more seeding rounds should be played to determine the true 2-4 seeds. At ~12:30pm we played those out:

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Code:</div><div class="ubbcode-body ubbcode-pre" style="height: 150px;"><pre>
---- Round 4 -----
------------------
| Llanfair |2|
| MistaKennedy |0|
------------------
------------------
| mAcHiNe |2|
| Llanfair |1|
------------------
------------------
| mAcHiNe |2|
| MistaKennedy |0|
------------------
</pre></div></div>

Once these final seeding matches were done, we were then told that the brackets for single elimination would be compiled and the matches would then be played out at 8:00pm.

Here's the final seedings:
1. Yamamba - Vanessa
2. Llanfair - Pai
3. mAcHiNe - Pai
4. MistaKennedy - Akira
5. Skwisgaar - El Blaze

Both Shooter and Zeroy were finally removed from the tournament brackets.

Unfortunately, because there's only one area for Xbox-run games (GH3, VF5, and Project Gotham), there's no spare area to play VF5 while we wait for our matches at 8:00pm. It would be great to keep playing VF, but really it's not possible unless we had our own system to set up somewhere. It's kinda tiring just hanging out for multiple hours where you have to suck it up and watch the CS games, or the Halo games, go out and ride a rollercoaster, or whathaveyou - when you'd rather play VF! /forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/smile.gif

At 8:00pm, the brackets were printed out and were informed of the format for single elimination. Single elimination would be determined by the player who wins best of 5 matches. Each match would be played with the game set to the maximum 5 rounds (best of 9). That's a lot of VF /forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/smile.gif At least we get to make up for the lack of VF while we waited around, I guess.

Because there was only 5 of us, there was only one quarterfinal match between the bottom 2 seeds. The bracket essentially worked out to:

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Code:</div><div class="ubbcode-body ubbcode-pre" style="height: 150px;"><pre>

** Quarterfinal ** *** Semi-Final *** ***** Finals *****

------------------
| Skwisgaar |3|
| |---------------------
| MistaKennedy |2| Skwisgaar |0|
------------------ | |-------------------
Yamamba |3| Yamamba | |
------------------ | |
| |---------------
------------------ | |
Llanfair |3| Llanfair | |
| |-------------------
mAcHiNe |0|
------------------
</pre></div></div>


So, tomorrow at noon are the finals between myself and Yamamba. Should be a fun match.

 

Good luck Llanfair!!

 

Hey !
Good game Llanfair! I was pretty tired with all the waiting because of the tournament issues. I agree that it's all messed up and that I spent most of my day watching CS, GH3, Halo 3, and PGR4. Hopufully, you were there to organize all the seedings and the tournament brackets. Thanks for your help by the way. Also, I knew that you and YOMAMBA will be in the finals. May the best win...Good Luck Llanfair! You and YOMAMBA are decent VF5 players /forums/images/%%GRAEMLIN_URL%%/wink.gif See you tomorrow at noon.

 

If I can imagine anything worse than a nearly empty VF comp, it's Jimmy Buffett singing "VFburger in Paradise" on stage through the eyes of Eric Cartman.

Can I say the organisation of the event is gamist towards all Xbox games, mostly to the VFers. Well, good luck "today", in your match against Yamamba, and your charisma for inviting him to VFDC.

 

Be careful Llan, vannessa can be a little tough so if it's getting a little hectic because you can't find a place to cut in then do what needs to be done... RUN! Let her come to you and bait her with random shit. I can't imagine this vanessa player being better than you, but hey it's VF5 so anything is possible.

Good luck bro I know you can take it!