Since there doesn’t seem to be one of these already, and there are numerous people who would want to express their appreciation for this event I thought I’d make a thread.
I personally had an amazing time playing this. All my opponents were polite and friendly and bloody good at Netrunner. Despite the huge number of participants the event ran incredibly smoothly albeit it went on for ages and I was ready to drop by the time the cut happened at 01:30 or whatever it was in BST.
A huge thank you to the organisers for making it happen. If the event could be split over two days to be a bit more Euro friendly in future I’d love it, but otherwise I’d still be desperately trying to win a Bye to get to take part. I had a blast.
yeah, much props for not just hosting the tournament, but putting in the work to secure sponsorships and prizes, hold the Last Chance Qualifier, AND produce a slick stream for it all.
really impressed with the fan-run events we’ve recently seen, between this, the ChiLo Grudge Match, and the Southern Megacity Circuit series. hope fans keep this momentum going!
Really fantastic job. Thanks to everyone involved. If you guys can sort out the insane average # of Agenda points doled out per R&D access, we could have some real competition next time
Also Congrats to Ahmed. It was painful to watch the punt-counterpunt of the final rounds at 3 am, but I’m really glad you pulled through, and I’m sure you’ll have a grand time rewatching those games and wondering what the hell you were thinking.
Really enjoyed the broadcast. Appreciate all of the behind the scenes work that had to be done for a tournament of this size to be orchestrated worldwide on OCTGN since it probably overloaded their servers a bit.
Despite my maximum saltiness on missing the cut on SoS despite having 1 more win than the other 18-pointers, it was a great tournament. I played some amazing games with some amazing opponents. And the level of competition was WAY higher than what I saw at worlds, without a doubt.
I watched as much as I could throughout the day. Enjoyed every minute. Thanks for all the hard work and for the players putting on a show, especially under the pressure of stream and fatigue.
Chiming in here to gush more about how well done this tournament was. It amazes me how you guys were able to run this so smoothly. To me, the logistics seemed to be soooo daunting: coordinating ~130 players, all over the world, dealing with OCTGN (!!!) and streaming, it just seemed like it would impossible to do smoothly, but you totally pulled it off. Great f’n job. Thanks so much to organizers.
And it was incredibly fun to play in, BTW, thanks to all my opponents too.
(I reserve the right to take all this back after I watch the streams of my games if you guys said anything mean about me)
I had a great time with this! It was a lot of fun playing everyone and great to watch the stream. Very we’ll run and I look forward to more netrunner events!
Thanks I everyone who worked so hard to make this possible.
It really means a lot to hear this. I am probably going to write an article about the whole experience, but here’s a general outline:
We had to secure sponsorship. Jason Flanzer was hugely helpful from the beginning, putting the weight of Broken Egg behind the tournament from its inception and bringing the expertise of the warmachine community, which has a huge fan-run competitive tournament scene that he’s intimately involved with. Getting Inked was even easier. I emailed them a paragraph and they said “how many playmats you want”.
We had to prepare for the stream. D1en is an accomplished streamer and was the perfect man for the job, but it still took a lot of prep work, including running test streams and practice streams and D1en having to go to the store to upgrade his rig multiple times.
We had to get all the graphics together. Sean Benson was amazing as we put him through a million iterations of everything while he was busy moving to Australia and getting married.
We had to hype the tournament. Getting a ton of people to watch a well broadcasted netrunner tournament was the main goal. so I ended up making about 100 million posts all over the place to get people to play and come watch. Having World Champ status made this a lot easier but it was still a lot of work.
I had to set myself to TO a tournament and coordinate 130 people in time, all across the world, over the internet. It can’t be understated how difficult this was. Form maker on wordpress deserves both huge slops and a lot of credit. Despite forms breaking all the time, the ability to organize all the data on spreadsheets turned out to be extremely necessary. Challonge proved to be difficult but crucial as well; we needed to input all the round data ourselves so that everyone’s name on the bracket synced with their OCTGN name and we could make sure all the match reporting got done correctly. Huge props to @SneakySly for doing a huge amount of this work behind the scenes. I also had to come up with rules for the tournament that took into consideration the fickle nature of OCTGN, round time limits, and bugs. Thank you to everyone that played for accepting all rulings without complaint; it couldn’t have been done in any other community. I have essentially no experience TOing anything, but I have played in a lot of tournaments, and in the end I am really glad I ended up thinking of basically every potential problem in advance because otherwise we all would have been fucked.
THANK YOU EVERYBODY. I am overwhelmingly proud of what we managed to put together and can’t wait for the next one.
this tournament was great to play in, and fun to watch after i was eliminated
from the preparation e-mail/video to the communication before and during, this tournament truly could not have gone any more smoothly. at one point the match reporting page completely stopped functioning and was fixed immediately. time between rounds was limited even though all the games had to manually be reported and people were dropping frequently. the level of coordination all around was impressive
The thing that’s most exciting for me is that this was you guys’ first time doing this. So even though I think you did a good job, I expect that future events will run even smoother (fewer hiccups, more automation on your end, etc).
Thanks so much for running this, it was a lot of fun : )
Fantastic tournament to spectate, thank you. The only improvement would be to deal with the lenght somehow for the players. (As a european, i could catch the finale waking up on monday )
The original plan was to play on 3 separate days; one for EU, one for US, and one for top16. I made the call to do it all at once because I thought it would make for the best stream and also allow the greatest number of players to participate. I think in the future, we’ll split it up anyway. 17 hours was certainly too many.
Speaking of things we didn’t do right that we’d like to improve on:
I don’t think we’re going to run the stream on a delay anymore, at least until we reach elimination. Being unable to communicate to players in real time was an issue, and I think the temptation to stream snipe isn’t that big until you reach elimination rounds.
Calling time in the round turned out to be next to impossible. If anyone has an idea for a fix, please let me know.
Collecting results was a huge hassle. Obviously, if we found a way players could self-report directly to the tournament manager, that would be a big deal, but we need to find a way that (1) everyone’s username on the tournament manager and OCTGN sync up so people can easily find their opponents and (2) players will be unlikely to misreport, and we can quickly find out and fix things in the event that anyone does.
We really needed someone in addition to Anthony to do background TOing and judging. I was there when I could be but whenever I was casting he was left with a huge amount of shit to do in a very short period of time with basically no help. This could probably be solved simply by having someone else helping him 100% of the time.
I can’t even imagine putting on something of this magnitude. I would have loved to play in it, but my Sunday was already spoken for. Regardless, it was a kick watching what matches I could and following the threads, and just seeing how generally excited everyone was about this whole thing. The event itself was fantastic to watch, but the excitement of the community surrounding the event was fantastic to watch as well. Amazing job putting together something with that kind of excitement surrounding it!
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