1. Logistics
The signal loss on Armada vs. Westballz grand finals epitomized everything wrong with MVG: awful stream, poor environment, terrible logistics. Hungrybox expressed some grief after having a 2-1 lead on Westballz and then being forced to switch TVs, losing his momentum and, later, the set. We don’t know whether Hungrybox would have won on the original CRT setup, but it’s still a drag. Over the course of the weekend, we saw countless tweets of complaints from the players. It was an over-ambitious event with too many games and entrants for them to handle. I’m not sure what would have happened if Mew2King didn’t forfeit Melee, considering he’s a top contender in every game and also inevitably would be a bottleneck.
2. Multi-Game Events and Timing
As much as I’d love to see multi-game events, it’s too much for a 2-day regional. Hopefully, tournament organizers limit events to 2 unique games. Tournaments have too much crossover and people. It’s unrealistic to have these 3-game events finish on time.
3. Armada wins… again
It was another clean tournament for Armada, as he only dropped games to Hungrybox and cleanly beat Westballz, Wobbles, and Axe without dropping a single game. Whereas Mango and Leffen finished 5th, Armada rarely drops sets to non-gods – a hallmark of consistency.
4. A wild puff appears
To credit Hungrybox, he played marvelously, narrowly losing to Armada on one final read, taking him to last stock on game 5. He also took revenge on Leffen, who seemed to have his number for a while. Overall, it was very impressive play, but he fell short to…
5. Trick or Treat Weston Dennis
We never know what Westballz we will get from tournament to tournament. Sometimes, he places 49th at a national and other times we get a tourney performance like Sandstorm. Westballz is the most susceptible to lose to a top 50-75 level player, but has the potential to compete with the best as seen with his wins over Mango and Hungrybox. His loser’s run included victories over Axe, s2j, Gahtzu, and Tai. He has mentioned that he wanted to take a break, but, after this performance, I’m sure he’ll be back soon.
6. The Homecooking
The other demi-god, Axe, benefited from home field advantage and had very impressive wins against Mango and Leffen, two players that he hasn’t beaten before (I have to double check on Leffen). Good stuff to Axe for modifying his gameplay, showing a high-level of adaptation, and overcoming the 20XX overlords.
7. The McLeffen Connection
Winners of I’m Not Yelling and Sandstorm and definitely an amazing team. Will Leffen continue with MacD or with his long term European partner, Ice, at future majors?
8. Am I drunk?
I’m going to wake up in the morning and wonder whether or not Sandstorm was a dream. It wasn’t.
9. Peach is too slow for the 20XX meta
I’m kidding
10. Project M Grand Finals
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Thanks again for the post tournament thoughts Tafo. I just wanted to mention one thing that annoyed me as a viewer about this tournament. I live in Europe (United Kingdom) so for me it’s a +8 hour time difference. If it’s 2pm there, it’s 10pm here. That’s not the problem. If I have to stay up all night to watch a tournament with some top players, so be it. Here’s the problem, There was no communication at all by those running the MVG event when anything was going to start for the thousands that tuned into the live stream, I saw people asking each other in the chat when it begins and later, the MVG broadcaster vaguely told everyone when the stream will begin by using the twitch stream chat lol. I don’t understand how MVG that has it’s own twitter account can’t just say when they’re going live or once they’ve gone live. I only found out an hour into the stream when Mew2king tweeted that it’s live on the two channels. At least Apex 2015 and the rest of the staff kept everyone informed of what was going on. I’m sure there was 20,000+ viewers on the stream later on but they still couldn’t post that they had gone live on their Twitter account. There were many people associated with MVG at this event that didn’t think to let people know. It seemed like D1 was the only person that was letting everyone know what was going on and keeping his social media updated.
Twitter should be an essential tool to keep viewers updated on what’s going on, especially for the people who are running the event. I’ve seen tournaments a quarter of the size that at least take the initiative to let the viewers know when they are live on Twitch.
damnit tafo