I hosted a Splatoon tournament: who won the tournament and the challenges associated with running a tournament
If you're following us on Mastodon, you'll know that recently we held a Splatoon tournament. This post goes over who won the tournament, and challenges associated with hosting a tournament.
I recently held a Splatoon 3 tournament for mostly anyone who was on the fediverse (basically Mastodon if you’re not familiar with the term), and today I wanted to make a post here talking about it.
First of all, if you’re interested when it took place, it was a 2 hour tournament which started on the 14th of October at 6pm UTC. There were 3 teams who took part in the tournament, and they all did spectacularly. The team that won this tournament was Rainbow SAILboats. If you wanna check them out as well as the rest of the team members, all of the profiles of the people who participated in the tournament are available here.
You can also watch all of the matches from my perspective on YouTube:
Also, keep an eye on the @NorthWestStreams YouTube channel, as I believe there should be a commentated perspective from someone who participated in the tournament available over there!
Anyways, let’s talk about the challenges of hosting a tournament, which was the main thing I wanted to talk about. The truth is, it isn’t easy. Running a tournament was made harder by the lack of any personal experience in running any tournaments, or even watching any. I’m pretty critical of how I ran this tournament, and looking back, I made many major mistakes here. As far as I know, the teams that participated aren’t looking on this negatively, but I just feel as if I could have done a better job for them.
The only tournaments that I’ve really watched are the ones that the Mario Kart YouTuber TWD98 makes. They sound really fun, I ought to give them a whirl in the future considering that’s built into CTGP, but nonetheless, that was really my only experience with watching any tournaments, so I was coming in completely blind to this.
My bracket structure that I had planned before the day of the event was not great at all, my plan for the event was to do 3 best of 3 matches, that’s it. I think I forgot for a second what a best of 3 even was to be completely honest with you, I thought a set would last 5 matches maximum, and a team would need 3 points to win the set, but that’s a best of 5. I made a massive mistake in doing that honestly. Also, with the bracket that I had planned, we had the potential of a team not facing off against a certain team.
On the day of the event, I was suggested an alternative bracket to use. At the time, I think I must have quickly glossed over it and completely ignored their idea, but I should have gone through with it, because my excuse for not going through their idea was the fact that one of the players lived in Hong Kong and they had to get up at 3am to play. It literally would have not taken any longer to use the bracket idea they suggested instead, and it would have actually been shorter than what the event ended up being with my method. Either way, introducing a change last minute to how the brackets worked wouldn’t be the best idea. I have no doubt that the teams would have been fine with that last minute change though.
I also feel like I should have offered a better communication system in the tournament. If you follow me, you probably know that I don’t have an account for Discord (and to be honest that’s probably for the better). All our communications were done through Mastodon direct messages, which wasn’t the best way to communicate with everyone. This caused a few issues, such as not knowing a substitute team member after submissions closed. Overall, in the end it didn’t cause too many issues, but it wasn’t the best way for me to handle things.
Another thing I’d like to quickly talk about is the fact that it took forever to find three full teams. If I recall correctly, it took just under two months from announcement to find three teams. Initially, I wanted four, but I made changes to make it go ahead with three. I’m not sure whether any of this is related to the fact that the Splatoon community on the fediverse is quite small, I’d say there are probably only around 50 active people, but it may be more or less than that figure.
When holding an event, you generally want to put a PIN code behind the event, so that’s what I did. Except, I forgot the PIN one time, and I gave the wrong PIN another time. That’s pretty annoying isn’t it?
Finally, internet is actually quite an annoying thing to deal with when playing Splatoon. This is especially the case with a private battle, when you have to pray that the host of it actually has a good internet connection. Since I wasn’t streaming this from home, my network situation was complicated, but my stream didn’t have any issues on an 8/18 connection. Meanwhile, the game had numerous issues. It was that bad that we had to get someone else to host the lobby since they were struggling to join my lobby, and they probably had a better and more reliable internet connection. Unfortunately, I did disconnect a few times when spectating the matches, but it wasn’t really too disruptive, and by the time I loaded up a stream by one of the participants to put on my stream, the round was already finished anyways.
I’ve been writing this for a while and I don’t want this to be too long, so I’ll cap it off here. I’m hoping that this may be useful to other people looking to host a tournament. This whole experience has been a helpful lesson if I do plan to do something like this in the future.
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