Tag: video games

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Combo Breaker 2017 is coming up in a handful of days, and I’ll be on the floor helping run bracketsĀ to do my part to make it a great experience for competitors.

I enjoyed my volunteer time a ton last year, and I’m happy to help make this year’s event a similar success. Assuming there are new volunteers this year who haven’t run brackets at a big event before, I thought I’d put together a list of things that have worked for me in running an efficient, well-organized bracket and getting the most out of my volunteer time.

So, here we go, in no particular order other than this first one, which is most important:

Attend the Volunteers Meeting before the Event

This is non-negotiable. Every event willĀ have specific ways they do things. They are not always going to be the same from event to event or even year to year. They are almost certainly different from what you have been running for your locals, house events, or whatever you have run before. Your head TO or other bracket coordinator should have sent you a message with the meeting times. Show up.

When you are there, the most important thing you can doā€”even if you have been to a million of theseā€”is to listen. Things may have changed from the previous year, and there will be others at the meeting who have not done this before. They need to be able to hear, and for that to happen, everyone in the meeting needs to be listening.

If you have questions,Ā ask them at the meeting. It’s far more efficient for you to have your questions answered before a single bracket has started than to try to track down other staff once there are hundreds of people on the event floor and you are facing a time limit for running your pool.

Do Your Homework

You will have your pool assignments ahead of time so you know when you are needed and can schedule yourself accordingly. Players will have their pool assignments ahead of time so they can plan for their matches.

This means you should know who is in your pools before you get started. You’ll also know what games you will be running. Take the time to see who you’ll be working with, study the rules for the games you have been assigned, and make sure you know when you are supposed to be there.

Know who your game’s TO is and what they look like. Know who the head TO is and what they look like. You need to have this information in your head so you can quickly and efficiently get help if and when you need it. Come prepared.

Wear a Watch

You’ll be responsible for getting your brackets done on time. This means you will need to know the following at all times:

  • How long you have before your next bracket starts
  • Whether you are at the threshold of time for you to start DQ’ing players (varies by event)
  • How much longer you have to get the pool done to end on-time

You need to have a clock somewhere on your person the whole time you are staffing the event. A phone is fine, but phones can get dropped, run out of battery, be misplaced, or the like. (I carry a portable charging battery with me at all events in case my phone starts running low.)

YMMV on this suggestion, but I prefer a watch because it’s less obtrusive, easier to glance at when needed, and far more incident-proof than a phone.

Carry a Notebook

When you run into a sticky situation, or if you need to track what’s going on at any given point during your bracket, notes can save you from problems or time-delaying issues. Assume the following when you are running the bracket:

  • Someone will have to go to the bathroom and will (or should)Ā tell you they are doing so to prevent being DQ’d
  • A player will ask you about the rules for the game you are running
  • You’ll need to look at your own schedule to keep things straight and report to the correct place
  • Someone not even in your bracket will see your staff shirt and ask you a question to which you may or may not immediately know the answer
  • Other staff people may have things they need your help with that you can’t get to immediately

A notebook is your lifeline in most of these situations. Things I recommend for your notebook:

  • Put your schedule in it so you can refer to it at any time
  • If someone asks you something and you need to get to it later, write it down so you don’t forget
  • Jot down the rules and default settings (or anything specific that’s different!) for the games you are running so you have it available instantly
  • Write down player names if they leave and inform you they are doing so, as well as what time they left the pool stations (when they leave, you should tell them how quickly they should be back to avoid a DQ situation)

Last year, I carried my Moleskine around in the venue, but it was overly bulky and not very practical. I recommend a smaller notebook style, like a Moleskine Cahier or a Field Notes notebook. They fit in a pants pocket and are easier to move around with.

Relatedly, when you take a pencil for writing on your brackets (because events use paper brackets), takeĀ two so you have a backup.

Early = On Time. Be On Time.

Find out what the expectations are for players and when they should report to a pool station for their brackets. Be there five minutes before that time so you are there when players arrive. Politely clear away any casuals at the station in advance of your brackets by setting time expectations with those players as you get things ready. Mark players on your bracket as they check in with you so you know who is there.

Take Care of Yourself

Don’t forget to eat something. Drink water like it’s going out of style. Wear comfortable shoes you can stand in for a couple of hours at a time without problems. Clear any bathroom breaks you might need before your bracket starts. Get some good sleep the night before.

If you are miserable, you are going to pass that savings on to your players, and they won’t have as good a time. Which brings me to my last point:

Have Fun. Help Players Have Fun.

This is your job when you help run an event.

Yes, you are there to enforce rules, make sure players are not being disruptive or otherwise problematic, and to run your brackets on time.Ā You can do these things and still have a good time, which will result in your players also having a good time.

Bracket runners do not get salty. Be fair. Be calm. Encourage your players to have a good time. Answer their questions. Thank your players for being there when they are out of the pool. Congratulate the players who escape the pool to later brackets.

Anything Else?

If I missed something here you think is important, drop me a reply on Twitter and let me know. I’ll be happy to add things to this guide.

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This year’s Extra Life marathon was another great time. I spent some time playing games with my kids, had a great co-op session with my best friend, and generally enjoyed the 25 hours of video games (with some breaks!) while fundraising for St. Louis-area children’s hospitals.

To date, you have helped me raise just over $700 for this cause.

For that, I thank you all. Your support every year when I do this crazy thing means a ton to me and it’s good to know you are interested in helping with this cause.

And know that it’s not too late! You can still donate to this year’s campaign by going to this page and giving what you are able or moved to do:

http://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donordrive.participant&participantID=196644

I fell short of my goal, but that’s OK. It’s the effort and your assistance that counts. :)

I’ll be working on some additional stream stuff and a different kind of donation goal starting later this month. I’ll be posting about that soon. :)

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As I finish my prep work making sure I have everything lined up for Extra Life 2016 starting tomorrow morning, I just wanted to drop one more post in for the evening. I’ll update Twitter and probably Facebook throughout the day to let you know what I’m playing and what’s going on, but I’d really love it if you would stop by and watch my livestream tomorrow (and into Sunday!) for Extra Life.

And if you have the means and the motivation, to consider donating to this very worthy cause.

Sometimes, it’s too easy to get overwhelmed with all the crap that’s out there in the world and think that you can’t make a difference. The thing is: that’s not true. Even a single person doing something meaningful can be enough to change the world, if only for a single other person.

When you watch or chat in the livestream, you brighten my day just that tiny bit more.

When you donate to help fund children’s hospitals here in my hometown of St. Louis, that donation could mean a life-saving dose of a drug. Or a stuffed animal for a kid who is too weak to get out of their hospital bed. OrĀ a piece of equipment a surgeon needs to save a gravely injured child.

And yes, when you donate and get my campaign closer to the $2,000 goal, you are (possibly unfortunately) making a difference, because that puts me one step closer to having to sing a Bieber track live on the internet.

When you share my announcements regarding the stream, you help point others to it, causing more to watch, and possibly more to donate.

Everything you doā€”this fundraising campaign notwithstandingā€”causes a difference in the lives of others. Never forget that. This thing I do every year is one thing I know I can do to try and do some good.

I hope I’ll see you tomorrow. You can watch here.

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All right; time to detail the firstĀ of the donation incentives for Extra Life this weekend!

As always, I’ll be opening my stream with some Rock Band. I have a history of always opening with “The Hellion/Electric Eye” from Judas Priest and then playing what I feel like for the remainder of the hour.

To participate in the donation incentive, either:

  • Make the donation and indicate your choice in the donation comment, or
  • Make the donation and make sure the name you choose matches your name in chat and then tell me what you want in chat

Incentives:

  • Any $10 donation entitles you to choose a track from my library for me to play (details on the library below).
  • Any $25 donation entitles you to force me to change instrument to your choice between Guitar, Bass, and Drums. I will start on Guitar.
  • EXCEPTION TO THE ABOVE: “Free Bird” requires a $100 donation.

I have set aside some time in the schedule for some overflow. If enough donations come in requesting songs, I’ll keep playing!

To view the list of songs you can choose from, go here:

http://rbdb.online

Click the button at the top that says “User Code,” and enter the code:

KOP-37D

This will show you the tracks I have available. Please note that some tracks may not yet be available to me in Rock Band 4; if you choose one of these I’ll let you know and you’ll get to choose an alternate track.

And remember: if I break my $2,000 goal for donations this year, you’ll get an hour of me on Expert Vocals! Tell your friends.

Rock Band will start this upcoming Saturday at 8 a.m. I hope I’ll see you there!

(For more information on my Extra Life marathon, please see this post.)

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(title borrowed contextually from this tweet)

I’m really sad about this. wundergeek is closing up her blog Go Make Me a Sandwich, from which I have learned quite a lot over the years about how the gaming (both video and traditional) industry treats women both in depictions and in (lack of) inclusiveness.

She writes:

Before Origins, I ended up crying in a bathroom as I chatted with friends online about the vitriolic response to a thing that Iā€™d written. It made me doubt myself so much that I actually wondered if it would be worthwhile going to Origins. Would I even be welcome there? (Spoiler alert: I was.) Fast forward two months to a different crisis before a different convention, which saw me crying for more than a week in the runup to that convention. Truth is, Iā€™ve doneĀ a lot of crying about my blog in the past year. But I didnā€™t let myself think about that, because I had to keep moving forward. I had to keep putting one foot in front of the other. I had to keep my head above water and just. Keep. Fighting.

Or at least thatā€™s how I was approaching things until several weeks ago, when the final straw happened. As is the way with such things, it was so small. Such a quiet thing those most community insiders, even, probably missed. Really, it doesnā€™t even matter what the eventĀ was. What matters is that it represented a tipping point ā€“ the moment in which I finally had toĀ confront the fact that I havenā€™t felt passionate about what I do here for a long, long time. And for most of this year, Iā€™ve felt only resentment. That this stupid blog has cost me so much, and I feel trapped by it. A victim of my own success ā€“ forever tarnished by my connection to it, and yet dependent on the income it provides, that I require because of the damage itā€™s done to my reputation. (See what a vicious cycle that is?) The final straw made me realize that I donā€™t want to do this anymore, and indeed, that I was rapidly approaching a point where IĀ couldnā€™t do it anymore.

Of course, this is made harder by the fact that I hate losing. And thereĀ willĀ be people who will celebrate, people who call this a victory, which only intensifies my feelings of defeat. My feelings of weakness. I feel like Iā€™m giving up, and it kills me because Iā€™m competitive! Iā€™m contrary! Telling me not to do a thing is enough to make me want toĀ do the thing. I donā€™t give up on things and IĀ hate losing. But in this situation, I have to accept thatĀ there is no winning play. No win condition. Iā€™m one person at war withĀ an entire culture, and there just arenā€™t enough people who give a damn, and Iā€™m not willing to continue sacrificing my health and well-being on the altar of moral obligation. If this fight is so important, then let someone else fight it for a while.

There’s a lot more on the original post, which you should read, because it underlines in very stark detail what the problem is and how pervasive it is within gaming culture.

I could share a bunch here about how I’ve read it over the years, how it helped bring these things to my attention, or how proud I always was that it was on WordPress.com (NB: I work for the company that runs WordPress.com). But I won’t.

Nor will I say that she needs to keep going, keep fighting, because at the least she has realized that doing so is not a healthy option and is choosing to cut it out of her life to move forward in other things. We should support that.

What I will say is that as a community, we need to take a look at this, realize that people within our community have chased off yet another person who stepped up and saidĀ hey, something is wrong with what we are doing and how we treat people, and realize that when we see that kind of crap behavior, we need to call it out and condemn it for what it is.

Because the more this happens, the greater the chilling effect that stops other people from raising their voices and bringing unique viewpoints to the table.

And that harms us all.

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Viscant with another great post about Street Fighter V on Brokentier:

In the old days your only way of getting new tech was having access to top players. In the old days we also had to walk 10 miles to the arcade. Up hill. In the snow. Both ways. But seriously one of the main reasons I was good at games then was because I grew up in Southern California and was driving distance away from multiple top arcades including Southern Hills Golfland, probably the best fighting game arcade in the whole US. The process of getting tech in those days was just being able to play against guys like Alex Valle, Mike Watson and James Chen and leeching off of them. There really was no shortcut to improving your game in those days; if you didn’t have access to good arcades and good players, improving on your own was near impossible. Even if you were creative enough and resourceful enough to come up with ideas on your own, you couldn’t come up with ideas for every character or get matchup practice by yourself.

In the modern era though, access to good tech is much more equal. If anything we have the opposite problem now. Instead of the average person having no access to good tech, now the problem is having tech everywhere. How do we find the most important tech? How do we prioritize what to work on first? How do we make sure we don’t miss out on anything important?

SFV is coming into the scene in a different world, where the playerbase is much larger and the communication between players is much more frequent and open. This is moreso even than Street Fighter IV. New tech is being found left and right and it’s only the first couple of weeks.

If you are new to the fighting game scene, you don’t know how awesome you have it right now. :)

If you are like me, you are seeing a ton of videos pop up on YouTube explaining how to do very specific things in the game. It can be hard to balance out what to learn and how to apply it. If you want to know more about the best ways to handle this information, check out the full article and follow those basic rules. They’re pretty great.

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This is pretty crazy. As Mike Willams posted on USGamer:

Last year for Evo 2015, Ultra Street Fighter IV hit 2,227 registrants, so this puts Street Fighter V somewhere above that number. The community must feel pretty good about Street Fighter V in order for the game to beat Ultra’s numbers in only a few days.

I think this is less about the community’s feelings regarding Street Fighter V and more:

  • Ultra Street Fighter IV isn’t being offered as a main game at Evo.
  • Street Fighter V is definitely going to be the prime time highlight game for finals. Everybody wants a shot.
  • A new main entry in the series means that the competition field is going to be slightly leveled. People who have been playing for a long time will still be good, but there’s always a few new faces who rise to the top with each new game release.
  • The fighting game community is on the riseā€”for every gameā€”and events are only going to get bigger.

I’m bummed that I can’t afford Evo this year; it would have been fun. (Though it’s probably best to wait until year two of the finals being in an arena so they can figure it out.)

I still have a room booked for Combo Breaker, though, which I expect will be just as huge when it happens later this spring. I hope I’ll be able to afford to make the trip after the office renovation expenses popped upā€”it promises to be a fun time.

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I meant to publish something linking to this post on the KI site the other day when the post went up. I can’t ignore this; it looks too rad.

We are excited to be adding several new elements to KI Season 3 that we believe really improve the overall experience, and Iā€™m going to be speaking to the ā€˜Art sideā€™ of things today.

In terms of visuals, we are adding new graphics technology; reflection tech for the stages; re-introducing screen space color adjustments that work with gameplay; adding an all-new dynamic lighting system that provides greater realism and interaction for the characters and stages. Not only will Season 3 feature this new lighting, but weā€™ve gone back and re-lit everything for Season 1 and 2 as well. We canā€™t wait for our fans to see the enhancements of KIā€™s visuals!

KI S1 had a ā€œdeep blackā€ look that many fans really loved, and weā€™ve gone back to it (with a ton of upgrades!), so youā€™ll see deeper darks and more ā€œmoodā€ throughout all the stages.

It’s a huge difference just in screenshots. From this:

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to this:

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Killer Instinct is kind of the little fighting game that could; it does a good number of things super-well that other fighters haven’t so far, and it has a dev team behind it that’s committed to making progress on a number of fronts.

The changes they have announced for Season 3 are pretty big changes and I’m looking forward to seeing what the competitive scene looks like in another couple of months.

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Dear Capcom,

When I am playing Street Fighter V and I am trying to get placed into a ranked match, and while trying to sync up with my matchmade opponent I get this:

12716281_10154159230724384_5562893748186238334_o.jpg

Do not take me here:

12768408_10154159230719384_9021864172842546029_o.jpg

I NEVER WANT TO GO THERE.

Just take me here instead:

12719340_10154159230654384_2784261058652081788_o.jpg

And put me in the hopper for another match.

 

Sincerely,

Someone who is kind of tired of suffering through bizarre UI decisions

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Hayward in the Players’ Tribune:

This isnā€™t a fad. Itā€™s the future.

Professional gamers themselves are developing a massive following. These guys train just as rigorously as any professional athlete to master their craft. And while they probably couldnā€™t be distinguished in a crowd of people, when they log in under their usernames ā€” whether it be Doublelift, Faker or Snip3down (who actually grew up down the street from me; really good tennis player) ā€” there are hundreds of thousands of people who want to watch them do their thing.

Iā€™m not writing this to defend gaming. It doesnā€™t need defending. I just want non-gamers to recognize this incredible thing thatā€™s happening right now. Video game culture has now gone mainstream ā€” and weā€™re only scratching the surface. Because whether you acknowledge or not, youā€™re probably a gamer. Have you ever felt a certain rush when a perfect candy arrives and takes out multiple rows? Youā€™re a gamer. Have you killed some time by flinging a bird into a rudimentary structure? Gamer. Have you moved even numbers around to make them add up to 2048? Thatā€™s gaming, bro.

I suggest you read the whole thing; it’s a fantastic peek into where gaming is right now and why it’s such a big thing. If you have ever wondered why I spend my weekends watching fighting game tournaments, or take time off around Evo weekend every year, this article will help you understand.