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Wow, so where to begin. Ah yes, the beginning.
So I decided to help out for this event for the hell of it seeing as making something smooth running like this tournament was going to be good for the community and as already said by Active Gamers LA that this was for the community. Also, they had a good amount of sponsors that I wanted to meet so just marketing myself out there. I go ahead and ask about a week in advance if we were going to be setting up the night before and was then told that everything would be setup but there was a party on that night and I should come. I was hesitant since gas prices are raping me right now but I thought it would be good to go to see who I was working with the next day and to see some friends.
I arrive and am told that we will be doing final setup at around 7am the next day. I arrive at 7am only to wait until 8am for someone to arrive. I am the first person inside the building and see that the only things "setup" are 3 fold-away tables on each end of the room and 3 small bleachers to sit and watch the main matches. No setups nothing. I started to wonder to myself how this was supposed to start at 9am or 10am as promised. Finally when some stuff arrived we started to setup. It seemed that the person in charge was busy and I was being hounded by this old guy who was a sponsor with some comic book store for his 6 tables and such. I decided to take initiative and start setting things up and letting people know where shit had to go. We had a dire lack of consoles to start off and more 360s than PS3s which didn't seem too big of an issue. There were however a bunch of 360 consoles that had component only and no HDMI support. For this they just moved them over to the BB setups. Kind of sucks since BB always gets shafted. We only had 360 setups for BB until some of my friends brought their PS3s for the tourney. So while setting up I am lead to think that it's just hook shit up, get power from the wall, and connect and we should be good, right? Wrong. Turns out that they were very limited on the supplies they bought. They kept running back and forth from the store bringing back power strips, extension cords, etc. At this point I'm thinking to myself that this shit should have been done waaaay before hand. At this point it's 9:30am and people are all standing outside in the cold. I ask them if we should let them in but they don't want to until everything has been setup.
After I setup what I can I ask if there will be more monitors since we didn't have that many. They start to unpackage some brand new monitors that they bought (brand escapes me) so I start to setup on them only to find out that there are only VGA and DVI inputs, no HDMI at all. I go ahead and ask them if we had any dvi to hdmi converters since that would be the only logical explanation why they would have bought these. They assure me that the monitors have HDMI inputs in them. I send them over to check telling them that they are not on the monitors. After realizing that they didn't have any they pack them up and put them aside. I ask them when we would be getting more monitors and they just shrugged. We never got more monitors than what were shown there.
At this point the time is around a little after 11am and things are getting very hectic outside with people waiting for hours just to play something or just be out of the damn cold. I bring in a couple people including my friends that have consoles to let them borrow and try to get them wrist bands to be in the venue. Now, as listed on the tourney posting, if you brought a console then venue fee is comped. The guy giving out the wrist bands though would not comprehend this though and I had to explain it to him about 6 or 7 different times. He was very adamant to get them to pay even though it was comped. Also, no, they were not entering any tourneys, just spectating. I find out after this incident that they even tried to charge the people from Aksys Games entry fee even though the BB tourney portion was sponsored by them!!!
I then go to the consoles, what they had was setup and some more consoles finally came in around 11:20am (better late than never). Of course people are still waiting outside. I count how many of what games we need for each console and go to tell them so we can have everything setup and finally let people in. They go ahead and tell me to not worry and they would take care of it. Instead they put me on duty of the opposite side of the venue guarding a door to make sure no one without a wrist band gets in and to tell them to go around. I go ahead and sit down in front of this door eventually passing out (I had an hour of sleep the night before). I wake up over an hour later and hear some music from the DJ that was there. I think to myself that they have finally let people in and people are playing. I go back to the area where shit is setup and NOTHING HAD CHANGED!!! People were still outside waiting while they let 1 or 2 people in at a time and many setups still had no games in them.
Finally people started to get let in at around 1pm. Only thing is, apparently someone forgot to take all the preregistered applicants and put them in the computer and get them ready for their tournies. So everyone that came in first went to the middle island to give their name and register. Now this doesn't sound too bad until it came to my attention that there was a person at the door that was collecting venue and fee for games. Now anyone who came in was just as easily able to tell them that they wanted to enter this tourney and they would have added their name. Half of SFIV contestants didn't pay venue or price to get in.
At this point I was sick and tired of all the bullshit that was going on and told them that if they needed anymore help to not ask me as they were way too unorganized. Hell, they didn't even know who was supposed to run the BB tourney. We had to just go ahead and start it ourselves and not worry about anything else.
Oh yes, also the side tournies for Brawl, 3s, and HD:R never took place. People that paid for them never got their money back either. Apparently, they were supposed to take place on the upper floor but it was taken up the whole time. From what I remember since I was the first there they told me that the upper floor was being used for a dance room but only until 2pm. Since we let people in at 1pm and tournies didn't start until a while after that this shouldn't have been an issue. I think this was just their scape goat since it didn't seem like they had enough monitors.
Okay, the best part of it all. So, BB is the first tourney to end. I go up to the guy running the whole shebang and ask him for the money. I am then told that the main guy (owner of Active Gamers) has the money and he would be there soon. This is told to me a little before 7pm. We wanted the money so we could go out and eat and just leave since everyone was fed up with the tourney already. An hour rolls by, they assure me they are trying to contact him but he is not picking up his phone. We start to get more irritated since we're really hungry. They finally pull us out at around a little before 10pm and tell us that they don't have the entire amount of money for ANY of the games. What was supposed to be $2200 was only $1580 per game. They said they would mail us a check or something later in the week. Of course people are pissed since we were told cash up front. I ask them why and they tell me that the amount of money from the entrance fees for the pot doesn't add up to $2200. I stop them right there. I tell them that I was told by Aksys that they put in the straight amount of money for BB itself and they should have the full amount for us now. They then switch their story and tell me that it's in the bank mixed with other funds and they can't retrieve the money now. Of course all the players that were supposed to get money were pissed. SFIV players wanted to take monitors as collateral in case they didn't get paid. Who can blame them, with all the times the fighting community has been shafted.
Also, I finally learn that people were charged for parking when this was not supposed to be. Also, when the amount of spots were filled for parking they did not try to fit more cars in, they just told people that they weren't allowed to enter. There was no place to park on the streets either so people just ended up not being able to attend.
Pretty sure this covered it. I know many many people were, and still are, pissed including myself. I try and do a nice thing by helping out just to see the minimum or less being done. I wash my hands of this tournament. They had too many people with no knowledge on how to run a tourney. They should have definitely trained everyone in this before sending them to hold a gathering of this proportion.
If there is anything I left out please add it in.
-Tha Hindu
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Originally Posted by marn
. the shit you come up with always puts a smile on my face. no homo
