The Online TO Experience
At least from someone who’s only been doing it for six months.
When Guilty Gear Strive came out, Wild West Guilty Gear (the SoCal Guilty Gear community, which also serviced other parts of the West Coast US anime scene as events moved online) dropped Xrd Rev2 from their tournament lineup to run the new game for Wednesday Night Fights. This was basically only possible because Pat Miller (pattheflip) and the NorCal Play Guilty Gear crew were continuing to run Rev2sdays, the (really well-branded) Tuesday Xrd online bracket, or else West Coast wouldn’t have a regular outlet for their fan favorite game. Candidly, even though Strive brought in a ton of new players and was enjoyable for older ones, myself included, the regular WWGG crew were a bunch of Xrd diehards. Between the shift to a new game that they weren’t as fond of, as well as other life changes (moving and new jobs during a pandemic,) running Strive and +R every week for several hours two nights in a row led to major burnout for the old WWGG TOs. Ruben (imnotasandwichh) and Tomik (Hursh191) passed on the GGST and +R brackets to me, since I was streaming both games regularly and was familiar with the community. I subsequently asked my friend Kimberly (doedipus) to help me run everything, anticipating that bouncing back and forth between three screens while hosting the game lobby, monitoring OBS and Twitch chat, putting out fires on smash.gg and Discord whenever something went wrong with bracket, and occasionally pulling commentary duty would probably be a lot to handle at once.
I don’t think I’ve been doing this for a long enough time to give good advice on running a tournament or hosting an event- I’m mainly writing this as a list of observations and things I’ve learned while taking over for WWGG. If and when we transition back to offline, I would be woefully unprepared for a lot of different responsibilities that most TOs and bracket runners historically need to be equipped for- things like securing a venue, negotiating costs of things like power and equipment, paying auxiliary staff and commentary, and more expensive- and expansive- streaming equipment like audio mixers for commentators. In a way, online events make all that way easier, for obvious reasons, but they come with a whole new host of concerns. From what I’ve observed, however, some stuff doesn’t go away whether offline or on. For instance:
Players Still Don’t Know How to Read
When GGPO+R dropped, and later when GGST launched, our bracket numbers climbed drastically. Now that we could host tournaments for a whole continent’s worth of players instead of a couple of states (if that- I still get 10f delay connections within SoCal in Rev2) we were maxing out our bracket caps at 64 and then 96 before the player base settled down. Before, we were doing everything by hand- making sure that every player was here and checking them into smash.gg manually, and then DQing everyone who didn’t respond to our pings at bracket start. Once we started working with larger numbers and a smaller crew, however, we took advantage of smash.gg’s automation features to speedrun the process. Along with that, we made use of a bunch of different Discord roles and specific chats so that people could read everything and see all our rules, which they could then ingest and prepare for with at least an hour of head’s up.
And people still don’t read any of that shit. They’ll forget constantly to read the rules or use features that we ask them to use. This results in a mountain of headaches, whether it’s as simple as people forgetting whether it’s best-of-three or best-of-five, to people holding up the entire bracket because they either forgot to check in (resulting in an auto-DQ that affected the outcome of several future sets) or they forgot to let us know that they were in another concurrent bracket (and they decided to prioritize one over the other.) I’ve had people show up an hour late for bracket and not know that we had already started because they failed to respond to pings and DMs, and then complain about their DQ because they didn’t know about when the bracket started, despite the smash.gg page, my Tweets, and at least three separate rules and announcements channels stating the bracket start time. I’ve also caught a certain well-known top player complaining about laggy matches they had to play in my bracket even though my tournament rules demand that players submit each other a network test before playing, which would at least screen such connections out of the tournament entirely. He also never came to me with the issues directly- I only found out by watching his stream after the fact- so I could never resolve anything about it, but his complaints to his several-hundred-viewer audience made it seem like I was purposefully poorly mismanaging the bracket rather than trying to do my best in the face of player negligence.
No matter what you do as a TO, even people who repeatedly enter your brackets will either forget or willfully ignore information that you routinely post and direct them towards. The best you can do is make sure you’ve set up as many redundancies as possible:
- Everything should be easily explained on the smash.gg page if possible. (This is not always the case since series like NLBC and WNF are usually tournaments run by multiple communities and so the smash.gg page usually links to different Discords or rulesets rather than displaying them all on one site.)
- Forgoing, or in tandem with the above, those rulesets should be explained in detail in your community hub (probably your Discord.) The WWGG Discord has a ruleset text chat for each tournament we run, and said rules are restated in full in the announcement text chat an hour prior to bracket started.
- You should summarize the important stuff whenever you make your social media posts promoting the event.
- Everything above should be reposted, pinned, and redirected to constantly in your community hub to the point of annoyance.
For those of you who are players: Please read the pings. I beg you. Almost any question you’re asking me can be resolved by reading the post I pinged you in, and if it isn’t answered, the post probably has a list of things that you can resolve by asking me directly. Not everyone can have Discord open on multiple screens, but please at least check regularly and keep notifications on so you can see everything. That goes doubly if you’re waiting on a match- be ready to respond to your opponent or else you may be DQed because “I pinged them and they didn’t respond.” Also, remember that smash.gg has a chat function and that your opponent may have been messaging you in that window the whole time you were waiting for them. It’s not always so clear that this is the case since pings on smash.gg are hard to read, which leads into my next topic.
Smash.gg is what many people like to call a Website™
Smash.gg is genuinely convenient for a lot of reasons. It’s much easier to search tournaments and specific games on smash.gg than it is on Challonge, the other typical lightweight but feature-bereft bracket organization website. It also has features like automatic seeding, user profiles that track results, and support for multiple brackets at once, which makes running big events or weeklies that host a bunch of games much easier. On the other hand, some of those features leave a lot to be desired and have the tendency to sometimes just break outright. It’s always little quirks, like: if two players have checked into a match and have started reporting the set, but they forget to report the rest of the score and I need to do it manually, my reporting doesn’t get saved by the Quick Report feature; I have to manually go back and forth on the self-report feature on behalf of the players. Sometimes, also, some matches will be available for check-in just a few minutes before I’m ready to call matches or let people know when to play, so some matches will play ahead after I’ve already told people to wait for me (and since Players Still Don’t Know How to Read, this may result in a set that I’ve already queued up for stream playing in a different lobby.) And yes, the smash.gg UI shows designated stream matches, but with white text on light/yellow backgrounds, that still isn’t easy to see, even if all players were paying attention 100% of the time. There are also just other miscellaneous errors like my settings not always being saved or brackets on multi-day events being displayed as starting on the wrong day.
For all of its conveniences, if you have a smaller bracket and you don’t mind doing a lot of the stuff by hand, Challonge is probably fine. If you prefer- or need to- use Smash.gg, knowing everything in and out will take some time but is really important so that you can quickly pinpoint what could have gone wrong if something breaks. Set up a test tournament and tool around in the Settings tab so you’re familiar with what everything looks like and how it works. Some important advice: If you plan on reporting everything manually without the players doing anything, there’s no need to ever hit the Start Bracket button (Reporting > Brackets > Start Bracket.) You can just check everything off yourself as players ping you with the results. If you need to automate some stuff to make everything go faster, which may be the case for larger brackets, make sure that you’ve at least explained to your players how they need to use self-check-in and self-reporting. (For players who are reading this: once your match on the bracket page glows yellow, click on it, and just follow the instructions. Remember that you need to report each game of the set individually, and that your opponent needs to verify the results or it’ll take longer.)
A tip that Hursh taught me about smash.gg so that future rounds don’t start early is to manually set up each round so that they start several hours after their intended start so that players can’t skip ahead. If Round 1 starts at 7PM and you need Round 2 to start at 7:30PM, for instance, but you don’t want Round 2 to start automatically, set Round 2 to start at some obscene time like 9:30PM and then just change it back at 7:30PM. I employ this idiotproofing a lot, and while it sometimes scares my players who actually read the bracket, it also helps me stop those who don’t from disregarding my instructions. It also helps stop the website itself from starting early when I don’t want it to, either. There will always be situations where the TOs must step in to correct something anyway but implementing cheats and redundancies like these should help cut down on most of those. Of course, there are some things that will always be out of our control, which is what brings me to the next topic.
Playing IT is rough
Most technical issues that you’ll have to resolve while TOing a bracket can be divided into two categories: connection issues, or PC issues. I feel confident in dividing it into only these two categories because machine issues cover an absurd plethora of potential hiccups, and if it’s not something directly related to the setup then something’s going wrong as soon as the machine transmits a packet through (hopefully, otherwise you’re banned from my bracket) the Ethernet cable running from your PC down the hallway to your router, which could be related to any other number of issues.
We’ve talked about rollback till the cows come home, but it still can’t solve everything. While it makes most connections vastly more tolerable than they would be on a delay-based solution, some players will always have bad connections to other players for seemingly no reason. An example: At one point I had to step in and kick out a player who others were reporting as having connection issues, even though they passed our connection tests. I had to do this mostly because I was pressed for time, and I had to satisfy the complaints of the other players even though I couldn’t really fix anything. To make this fairer for the player I kicked, I decided to help him troubleshoot everything personally. After restarting his machine, resetting his router, and double-checking all his connections, I even played a set with him in a private lobby to see if the connection was stable- and it was. We played a ~100ms set from SoCal to Montreal with very minimal rollback- maybe only one minor visual artifact that didn’t affect gameplay. The main problem is that the players who were playing him and complaining about the connection were on ostensibly better rigs and connections than I was, and playing from the same region as me, and yet they were reporting 200+ms with intense rollbacks. That’s not to say their experience was ‘wrong’ or that they were lying, but I had verified personally that the player they were complaining about didn’t have a bad connection or any other issues. Furthermore, the ‘problem’ player had played connections as far as Mexico in our bracket with no problem as well.
Even with rollback’s attempt to keep input delay consistent and run client-side prediction against visual parity, there’s still lots of stuff that can happen to the input file packet once it’s sent out. It can be bounced through an inefficient server path by the ISP, or the ISP itself could go out, or bandwidth can be sucked up by other users, or your router could catch on fire, or the platform’s matchmaking could go down, or literally anything else. Troubleshooting all of this on the fly mid-tournament is time-consuming and difficult, and even more detailed connection tests (we’ve been using speed.cloudflare.com and testmy.net) can’t reveal all of these problems. The decisions made are at the discretion of each individual TO, but for my part I usually try not to simply ban people outright unless they’re deliberately playing in my bracket on a bad connection (subpar hardware that can’t render the game at all, Wi-Fi, or bad down/up rates.)
Of course, even people on good hardware will still have issues from time to time, which is also one of the main reasons I revile the push for PC hardware at offline events in place of consoles. (Seriously- even if you were to have a fleet of identical, top of the line PCs, and flash all of them with the same Windows installation and backup, there would invariably be something that goes wrong in an inscrutable way down the line that would be a pain in the ass to diagnose and repair during a tournament compared to doing the same thing with a PS4. It’s also just expensive as hell, so unless you guys are willing to pay higher venue fees so that offline bracket organizers can afford that stuff along with hiring IT techs who can help maintain them, I suggest doing handwarmers before bracket so you can get used to the additional 3f input delay.) People’s games will crash, or Windows will BSoD, or some update or driver won’t have installed properly, or their PCs will overheat because they’ve been playing and haven’t turned their machine off for three days, and we’ll either have to wait for the issue to be resolved or help the player fix it. This gets further involved when using beta mode features for certain games or third-party networking tools like Parsec. Even if not all of these issues may be applicable to an offline environment, they’re enough to put me on edge about the push for PC events. Running everything on Steam versions has obvious advantages, but in my experience, as the issues with PCs begin to compound, the returns from those advantages seem to diminish fast.
Entry Fees, Matcherino, and other Payouts
As I mentioned before, one of the main reasons that the old WWGG crew turned the brackets over to me was that they were working new, lucrative jobs with long commutes. Coming home after that to stream and commentate for several hours, all night, without pay, was really exhausting. Meanwhile, my day job doesn’t have a lot of hours, meaning I can dedicate time to streaming WNF GGST and +R, but it’s also not making me a lot of money, so I can’t contribute a lot of money to the pot for my bracket’s top 3. (And of course, we’re still TOing, commentating, and streaming the event for free.)
I have a lot of complicated feelings about this, which got even more complicated once the payout for Matcherino codes dropped from 50 cents to 30 to 25. The value of Matcherino codes diminishing severely impacted how much players earned for our +R bracket- if you’re keeping track of the math, 50 Matcherino codes used to pay out $50, for top 3, but now they only pay out $25. This doesn’t affect our GGST bracket so much since they at least get a major pot bonus from the circuit, but for the +R bracket, which is almost entirely its own grassroots thing, it feels really bad that these players don’t get something more. There’s also other stuff I could say about not getting paid myself, but I feel worse about having guest commentary come on for GGST pools and all I can offer them is the VOD for their highlight reels, especially since we’re supposed to be a part of a major esports circuit.
This sort of thing should also be handled on a case-by-case basis, but if some online events need to pony up small entry fees in the future, whether it’s to pay staff, keep their offline venue afloat, or fluff up the pot bonus, I wouldn’t blame them. Free online events for games with great netcode have done wonders for growing the FGC, and I don’t think those should ever go away. For my part, I think I will always keep Feliz Jueves (our +R bracket) free to enter. But if I’m going to keep it free, and keep bringing the bracket to people for free, then I will at least continue shaking people down by panhandling with the Matcherino link every time there’s a break between sets. We will also always greatly appreciate anybody who goes beyond using the codes and directly dumps money into the pot.
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Most iconic FGC majors, like Frosty Faustings, Combo Breaker, and CEO, are returning to offline, and some weekly series are also following suit. I don’t know when WNF will be back to in-person events, but apparently Esports Arena still doesn’t have a suitable venue in SoCal, so I imagine that even with precautions in place it’ll be some time. Even when it finally comes back, there’ll probably still be a niche for online brackets for both GGST and +R, to showcase people who are out of region or can’t always make it to the local. The teams who run each event, and the playerbases who attend them, have different needs and concerns that need to be addressed to guarantee that the brackets run smoothly. I’ll probably have to make some upgrades to my streaming setup if I want to broadcast pools offline, for one thing. I also no longer live near where WNF used to run, so I’ll have to work out carpool and travel for the longer distance. These logistical challenges are different than the ones that I’ve been discussing throughout the article, but it’s honestly difficult to say whether events are harder to run in-person or not. There’s certainly improvements to be made in both versions of events as well, but ideally they can coexist in the future and cater to the most players as possible.
