European SF2HDR XBox Live Tournament – Sunday 12th June

This tournament is for Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix tournament and is only open to European XBox Live players to ensure decent ping times and connections.

When: SUNDAY 12th JUNE, 3pm UK-time (15:00 GMT) start. These tournaments usually take around 2.5 hours, but it could take longer, so please be committed to play all afternoon and into the evening if necessary due to numbers. I am also doing a slightly different format this time meaning that more games will be played for all players, which may take slightly longer.  Sometimes I manage to break the XBox Live messaging system too when I run these – so please be patient 🙂

As always, if you are not online on XBL at the start time, I will consider you to have dropped from the tournament. It will usually take at least 10 minutes for me to randomise the set up the first round and message everyone with their matches, so PLEASE BE PATIENT at the start and don’t send me messages asking me if it’s on etc. It just takes a while to sort out the 1st round especially as it depends on who turns up.

This is the same reason why everyone has to be on time, as once I’ve made the brackets I cannot easily drop or add people without spoiling the integrity of the tournament – apart from in rare circumstances where an extra person or two makes the bracket easier. So if you want to be sure you can enter, be online at the right time!

Location: XBox Live

Signups:

Signup anytime before the start time on Sunday 12th June by posting here or on the SRK forums to participate, or by messaging me over XBL.

Late signups “on the day” will usually be ok. As long as you’re online at the start time, just message me and join in! With Swiss formats, this is much easier than it was with Double Elimination.

Format:

Swiss Pairing (using Swiss Vega method – hahha, I just had to didn’t I! 😉 ). This means you will be playing a match against the closest paired player with you in the tournament each round. You’ll only play each player once and if there are odd numbers then someone will get a Bye each round. This means that no matter how well or how badly you do, you can continue to play each round until the tournament ends

I will send an XBL message each round to all players as to who they are to play next. Tournament rounds after the first will be arranged by XBL messaging. ie: You will receive an XBL message each tournament round as to who you are to play next.

Each match will be a single best 3 of 5 rounds game (ie: the standard HDR “Ranked Match” setting).
All settings must be on default.
Akuma (Gouki, Demon) is banned. You can pick any character to play (ie: the standard HDR blind pick). You are free to change character between rounds if you wish.
‘Turbo’ functions on joysticks or controllers are banned.

I recommend using a private 2-player match room on XBL. I will attempt to add all participants to my my XBL Friends List (which is visible) so you should be able to find each other and invite each other into games easily.

Reporting Results:

Once your match is completed, BOTH participants must report their results over XBL message to me. All results will collated and later be posted here. Sadly I have not found a good way I can possibly report in real-time whilst also keeping the rounds running smoothly.

Note – you only need to report who won and who lost, but if you want to report characters used etc, go ahead. If I only get a single report I will consider it accurate (eg: only the winner reports).

In the event people do not play, or there are discrepancies and disagreement in the results reported (or not reported), or any other kind of complaint reported, I will attempt to manage that. In the worst case scenario I will have to void the whole event if players do not co-operate, but I’m glad to say we’ve not had any problems yet at all. Don’t forget this is only an online tournament, and as such it isn’t too serious a deal – you should of course try your best to win, as that’s the whole point, but also look upon it as a chance to meet fellow SF2HDR players and have some fun.

Each tournament round if possible certain matches may be highlighted to be videoed by any player with available video equipment – please let me know if you can take videos and if you can, please do so and upload them. If I ask you to record a match you are not playing in, we will create a private player room with extra slots for the observer(s) and invite the actual participants in. I will post all results and links to any videos later. If possible videos will be posted at the SF2 Europe youtube channel.

Good luck and good games!

Final Entrants & Results:

1. xWAx Qarnage (Boxer, Guile) – 6 wins
2. dav 35 (Sagat, Ken, Chun Li) – 4 wins
2. BIG C DUBZ (Ryu) – 4 wins
2. DoomsDayDevice0 (Zangief) – 4 wins
2. Remy77077 (DeeJay) – 4 wins
2. ohfivepro (Zangief) – 4 wins
7. oneNEOeno (Ryu) – 3 wins
8. jamesm0786 (E.Honda)  – 2 wins
9. Bogeuk  (DeeJay) – 1 win (dropped in Round 3 – broken joystick 😦 )
9. o Chromium o (Ryu, Zangief) – 1 win
9. ZIFOpdSVK  (unknown) – 1 win (dropped in Round 3 – went offline)
12. JoeDaRipper (Ryu) – 0 win

Report:

xWAx Qarnage wins again! Congratulations 🙂 There was also a huge glut of players on 2nd place with 4 wins. I am going to have to check the tiebreaker system the software I used because I am not convinced it’s doing it correctly, so the order above might be correct or it might not. In any case, it shows just how close this contest was.

I personally played in some fantastic matches – myself vs Qarnage ended 3-2 in his favour but it was an epic match. I also went down in a close one to BIG C DUBZ, where something happened I’ve never seen before, he did Ryu’s super at point blank, while I did DeeJay’s standing.MP, and we both completely whiffed each other (I must have punched his invincible frames completely, and his fireball totally missed my hitbox), crazy! Also the difference between last and first is not as much as the total results would appear, because I only narrowly beat JoeDaRipper 3-2 myself – there really is a good competition in so many of these matchups.

It’s interesting how many players like to switch characters a lot, whereas some (like me) stick to one guy, even if they are against a wall of bad Ryu matchups! 😉 If people want it, I might do a character-lock tournament in future to see if that changes things – let me know in the comments what you think about that.

I think everything went well that I could control! However the Xbox Live gods were not so kind to me, as it took about 10 mins for ohfivepro and Qarnage to play their match in the last round as the lobbies would refuse to connect. Also, and far more problematically the xbox.com messaging system broke down for me, telling me that “This message exceeds the daily limit of messages to people not on your friends list.” … when I’ve not sent any messages to non-friends. It appears that xbox.com messaging is broken right now, counting all messages as non-friend messages However I managed to patch things to continue along by using the in-game messaging system. It meant I had to send rather quick&dirty messages (as there is no cut&paste) but luckily everyone seemed to understand and it got the job done. Still, a bit of a nightmare to happen mid-tournament.

I’m also watching my 360 message “inbox” go haywire right now as it repeatedly shows me messages coming in from weeks ago *sigh* At least this little bug only happened now AFTER the tournament not during it, as it’s given me a real headache in the past.

Bogeuk also had a broken circuit board on his custom stick that forced him to drop, and ZIFOpdSVK also dropped offline – although as fortune would have it, they both dropped at the same time, which meant we still had an even number of players so there wasn’t too many BYEs to be factored in. 🙂

 

Still, very glad to get a great bunch of players together and show there’s still some interest in HDR in Europe on XBox Live 🙂