East Coast Throwdown 4

There are only 4 majors I help run: North East Championships, Winter Brawl, Summer Jam, and East Coast Throwdown. Shortly after I started helping out Big E with his tournaments (NEC/WB/SJ), SweetJohnnyCage and LI Joe started their own tournament series called East Coast Throwdown hosted in Morristown, New Jersey. I was still up at Rutgers when they starting running this, so it was pretty much in my backyard. I approached them through Dustloop and told them that I'd help run Guilty Gear. (Note that ECT1 was in 2009 before the console release of BlazBlue, so all the anime scene really had at that point was GG and Melty Blood.)

To sum up past ECT's: they've had their problems. Some of them really bad, and some of them really REALLY bad. From starting late to power outages, from lack of setups to bad brackets (tonamento), ECT has seen it all. But even with all of the bad, the tournament has improved steadily over the years.This year was no different.

Hit the jump to read more...



Friday, June 8th (Setup Day)

I wanted to show up the night before the tournament started to setup my streaming equipment. Anyone that streams will tell you that breaking down and setting up your equipment is the most tedious thing alive and can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour (not to mention that no one can really help you while setting up since they don't know where anything goes). At tournaments I don't JUST stream, but I also help run brackets and make sure everything in my area is running smoothly, so getting this out of the way not only lets me get more sleep, but takes off a ton of stress in the morning since I know everything is ready to go for the actual tournament. The setup went fine and I didn't forget anything, but my computer wasn't booting correctly, and after about an hour of messing around with the insides of my computer I found it to be a loose connection to my OS hard drive. Setting up and getting all the power I needed to my area took about 2 hours. By this time it was pretty late so I headed back to my room to chill with some of the NY guys: Zidane and A3Religeon.

We planned to watch the last few episodes of the game of thrones since A3 and I hadn't finished it yet, but the TV in my room wouldn't let you change the input. So much for those plans

Dacidbro was coming out to this tournament to body everyone in Skullgirls, and he wasn't getting in until about 1 AM. After he showed up we went to the NYC room and Omni was bodying everyone in SG. Dacidbro sat down and I think Omni ended up running train on him as well. I'm not sure what the final score was but I heard that Omni won about 90% of their games. This got boring pretty fast so I went back to my room to pass out.

Saturday, June 9th (Day 1)

Since everything was setup already I got to sleep in pretty late (by tournament standards) and enjoy myself for a bit. Brackets were mostly done by pre-registration so we already knew the #'s for each anime game. They were going to be seeded by region and then handed to me by one of the staff helping John. While I was sitting around I had noticed that my computer didn't have internet anymore. When I approached John on this he said that the hotel had limited bandwidth and that I was pretty much SOL (shit outta luck). Sp00ky and Jaxel shared another connection that was run into the ball room, and the MK guys and I were stuck with just recording. This didn't really bother me a WHOLE lot since it has happened to me a couple times in the past, so I was used to it by now. Pretty much the hotel fucked up and I got the short end of the stick. Instead of streaming I just decided to record and upload later to Jourdal's account on YT. I asked John and Joe if it was alright that we got BB and GG put on the big screen and they said it was alright as long as I got everything done in time so that it didn't interfere with the highlight money match. I can live with that.

We got the BB brackets a little late (~30 minutes) but I always expect things to never run on time. After looking at the brackets I did a little bit of reseeding and started pools. Each pool took about 45 minutes so we made up time as brackets progressed. With 4 pools total we got though BB pretty fast. About 3/4 of the way through BB I got the brackets for GG. I wanted to start this a lot earlier, but brackets for other pools were slowing John down. I tracked him down to his room, we talked for a bit and he told me the names for all the entrants in GG. I went down to my computer, generated the brackets in TIO and started GG immediately. We started ending on pool 3 for BB when I started GG and I think it was close to 4:30PM by this time. The deal was that if we finished pools by 6 we'd be good to stream stuff before the money match at 7:30. I held BB at top 8 so that we could be on Sp00ky's stream before the MM, and I was going to hold GG at top8 so that we could stream after the MM as well. Things were good.

This is when shit started to hit the fan. I was told that I wouldn't be able to get BB on stream before the main MM between Fanatiq and RayRay because there was another MM they wanted to run on top of it, so they said I could run top 4 of each after everything was said and done. This made me a little angry since I had no idea this match was going down with the Fanatiq/RayRay match. Because of this I would be pushed back to about 9PM before I could start top 8 in anything. I made the decision to run BB top 8 immediately (and just record) and then run GG top 8 on stream after all the MM's were done. I made this decision for a few reasons:

1). We were planning to go to the Grease Trucks at Rutgers after all the anime games were done, so running both games after the MM would have us cutting it pretty close to their closing times. I had promised Canada I would take them there since they took LK, Biscuits and I to a place to get poutine while we were in Canada for Montreal Aird-Dashers. It was godlike and I wanted to repay them with our version of godlike food.

2). I hate streaming only top 4 of events. It's boring. You don't know what happened before hand. You don't know what each player had to go through to get to that point. Brackets and names only tell you so much. Top 8 is great: it's the perfect length. You're not watching one game for too long and the matches are always really good. I decided that we should only do one game of top 8 instead of top 4 of two games.

3). So what would it be? BB or GG? I decided that GG was the way to go because it would be faster and more people watching the stream would enjoy it.

I decided this all pretty fast (and no one gave me any shit for it besides LK) and we started to try and round people up for BB finals since originally we were going to run them a little later. This proved to be really difficult, so it took about an hour of tracking people down before we were able to start. BB finals were pretty hype and you can find the matches on Jourdal's YT channel.

Before the grand finals for BB started, Sp00ky started to ask for equipment so that he could start setting up GG to be streamed. We gave him a CRT, a PS2 and my distribution amplifier and he made it work. The GG finals can be found on Sp00ky's YT channel.

After everything was said and done, we moved setups back up to our rooms and then started to head out to the grease trucks. More people ended up wanting to go than originally planned so it took a while to split everyone up into cars. Once everything was figured out we decided that we would meet out front of the hotel and then head out caravan style. While I was waiting for the last two cars to show up, LK calls me to say that his car won't start. Great. Awesome. Why can't things just be simple for once? At this point I was pretty angry since of what happened with the streaming and I just wanted to eat. Why me?

I had the Canada car and Biscuits sitting behind me so I walk up to their cars and explain what was going on. I got some jumper-cables from Canada and I drove back in to the garage to find everyone standing outside of LK's car. Now let me explain something: LK has this fucking sad puppy dog face that he does when he needs help. I've sen it a couple times so far, and this time was no different. You can't say no, his ancestors are from a 3rd world country, he needs help.

Know this: I had never jumped a car before, but I knew exactly what to do (thanks engineering!). When I tried to start his car the engine sounded really funny. It didn't sound like his battery was dead, but it sounded like the alternator was broken. Usually when a car has a low battery is just sounds like it's having a really hard time starting, this sounded like it wasn't even getting remotely close to starting, it almost sounded like something was loose or not catching. Regardless of what I thought, I decided to try and jump his car. Worst comes to worse some people can't get food and we think of a solution in the morni-oh shit, wait, apparently he needed to drive someone home tonight so we had to come up with a solution. Well shit. I put the car in neutral and I had everyone push it so that I could line it up with my own. I pulled my car around and hooked up the jumper cables and then crossed my fingers and... it worked like a charm! We all got back into our cars and started to head out.

The drive to the grease trucks is kind of far from Morristown since it's about 40 minutes one-way. These fat sandwiches are worth it though, so I'd gladly go out of my way to get good food and shoot the shit with my good friends.

By the time we showed up, the New York car was already munching down on their food, so we joined the pack and started to yell out our orders. There is no correct way to do this at the grease trucks: there is no line, you just need to man the fuck up and yell when the guy in the window looks out. Everyone got their food and we all sat down on some benches and started to talk about random shit. We talked about traveling to tournaments, funny arcade events, and shit-talked about one another. It was a good fucking time. It's times like this that make you realize why you started doing this in the first place. When you've got close to 20 guys chilling in a parking lot all laughing while eating some godlike food after playing video games all day... well shit. This is why these events are so much fun, you have a chance to hang out with all of your good friends again.

After everyone was done with their food we decided to head back to the venue to play some casuals and drink. It was mostly the just the Canadian and MD/NJ guys at this point since I think the NY guys wanted to go play Marvel and KoF instead. We talked for a bit and I didn't play a single game because I was so tired. It wasn't long before I past out while talking with Kaeru and BiBi.


Sunday, June 10th (Day 2)

Nothing was planned for this day and my computer was still there from the day before so setup was simple. I still didn't have an internet connection so streaming was still a no-go. Some people wanted to do teams so I said I'd fill an 8-team bracket for a 2v2 single-elimination tournament. I decided to do single-elimination because I had to get home at a decent time to have dinner with my family and I had work the next day. No one seemed to complain so we blew through teams on one setup and I started to pack up to leave. I always hate having to leave early since I never get to watch grand finals for the bigger games. Sometimes I actually like to watch Marvel and SF, but my priorities were elsewhere.

I wanted to take the Canadian guys out for Rita's but we decided to postpone it to another time. Rita's is an ice/custard place that originated on the EC and it's starting to spread. Their ice choices are good and their custard is amazing. It's a shame it's only open during the spring and summer or I'd take people there during NEC. I didn't get to play a lot over the weekend (which seems to happen with every tournament I help run), so I felt kind of bad since Canada had come down and I didn't play them once. I didn't get to play Cirno either, who had come up from MD. Next time guys! I'm sorry!

Wrap-Up

For the most part the tournament went smoothly except for the fact that I didn't get a stream and I was forced to change how I wanted to run finals because of the money matches. Regardless, LI Joe and SJC always bend over backward for us by giving us an area to do our thing and helping us out with any equipment we might need. They kept me in the loop during the whole planning phase of the tournament. They let me know how much space I was going to have and where I would be in relation to the entrances and stage. They also kept me updated on the number of pre-registrations for each game, so that I knew how much room I would actually need. With that being said, there's only one thing that was in their control that they could change for next year:

1). Registration. Honestly, this tournament would've ran near perfectly if registration was a little smoother and if John had requested more help with making brackets. Most tournaments like to have morning registration before the tournaments starts because there are a lot of people that don't know if they can make it until the day of, or, there are just lots of lazy people who refuse to pre-register. TBH, I wish every tournament would just do online-only and then 'fill up' the empty seeds of the brackets the morning of. CEO did this and it worked great. You want to compete in the tournament? Signup online. Not sure if you can make it? There will be a small chance in the morning, but there's a strong chance you won't be seeded 'fairly'. This makes things 100x smoother and doesn't cater to the lazies. Why should people have to wait around for their pool to start because some 50 people decided to sign up last minute when they could've registered a month ago? Seriously people: if there is an online registration option DO IT. It helps give the TO's an idea of how many entrants to expect. This helps them determine # of entrants, pool time slots, and equipment distribution. Guess what all this does? It makes your tournament experience more enjoyable. Ttournaments (besides EVO of course) should start converting to the CEO sign-up method. It's just too smart.

ECT keeps getting better and better each year for the anime section, and I'm sure next year won't be any different. Thanks again to everyone who came out, and a BIG THANKS to John and Joe for helping us do our thing. Stay godlike people.