The 'Shroom:Issue LXXVIII/TF2 Tournament Thoughts

TF2 Tournament Thoughts by

If anybody remembers last year's commentaries, I was pretty much just brought onto the show for the tournament managing. Well, that applies to this year, too. If you don't want to read about not the Awards, then skip my wall of text and go on to the next section.

I knew last year's Anniconomy (thanks for the term, Tucky) was really destroyed by a lack of communication between hosts, so I suggested we peer review token distribution and whatnot. Though there were a few outliers (I'm looking at you, 150 tokens from Mafia), it was generally more balanced between each event, and nothing was too much of an economic meltdown. So I'm proud we made the effort to improve from last year's shitstorm.

Anyway, I was most involved with the second Team Fortress 2 event. I mostly led it instead of Stooben this year. Like last time, it was a three-day event with competitive settings, and also a huge salad of varying skill levels that made our matches annoyingly hard to balance. So, allow me to talk about that, again.

My original plans for it were much more ambitious, and not really any of them came to fruition. I had plans for each day doing a separate event, all of which I dropped because I felt it would either get repetitive, didn't sound too fun, or just worries over player attendance. I also had a selection of mini-games I wanted to try out, like an advanced Katana Duel.

The stress of it started even before we played. First off, the date had to be changed so much, which usually accidentally ensured other people's unavailability. Then, I lost internet connection for a week, putting me in a small panic because I didn't do too well of a job educating Stooben on what scripts to use for matches. Thank goodness almost all of that sorted itself. But it would all be worth it, because then the event was here, right?

Well, off the bat, shit went wrong. Those mini-games I mentioned earlier relied on third-party plugins, which broke about a week before the event because of a surprise update. I didn't really have any backup plans, nobody downloaded the custom maps, and nobody wanted to do intermissions anyway, so we didn't have many fun intermissions like last year. But worse than that was some severe script issues that did unexpected things, like banned a huge amount of weapons unintentionally or messed with respawn times, so we had to restart matches to fix those sometimes.

The headache from all the problems and the fact that only maybe half the players signed up were attending despite our effort to make it work the best for everyone was getting to be a bit much on Day 1, and admittedly, I was ready to call it quits. The next days were so much better as we got more players, figured out what worked best for matches, and started eradicating the problems, so I'm quite satisfied I didn't. Learn from our mistakes and make next year less of an initial shitpie, I guess.

Barring all of that nonsense, I suppose I'll begin to close this with some final thoughts. I really think the Awards should have more game events that get the community involved, even if they are not for prizes, because they are the most fun you can have during it. I wanted to do a 2v2 Mario Bros. Classic tournament, but I wasn't quite sure how to make that work without publicly endorsing an emulator with netplay. But we'll see about next year. Maybe.