SMB3 Tournament Postmortem and Beyond

I thought I'd write down some things I've learned while running the SMB3 Tournament. Mostly wanted to get some thoughts out there about the process, maybe give some tips to people who are thinking of running their own on what to do/what not to do. Guess I'll just go through things chronologically since that seems to make sense.

1. Pre-tournament stuff (registration, advertisement, timing, etc.)

First of all Challonge was a very helpful tool for essentially doing the heavy lifting of the tournament schedule for me. I don't think that's a big surprise to everyone, as most of these tournaments are run through Challonge, but I feel like it's worth mentioning it in case anybody doesn't know about it.

As far as advertisement goes, I think this was one of the worst jobs I did as the organizer. I absolutely loathe self-advertisement; it makes me feel scummy to be like, "Hey check out this thing I'm doing." I think in terms of "selling" the tournament I was a little better, but still I could have done more. Other than twitter posts that got retweeted by people who already knew, or mentioning it in chats occasionally, I didn't do much of anything. As a result, I had a few people who entered last second, and a few more as the tournament went on who mentioned they might have joined had they known about it or heard about it sooner. Again, this is completely on me, something I'll have to improve upon if I do run something like this again.

Timing of the tournament itself was in a way a good thing and a bad thing. I think waiting until after AGDQ was a good idea, but once the tournament was announced, the 12 Hour Challenge and GYS Tournaments were announced. Now I knew 12 Hour Challenge would roll around soonish, but to happen a week after the tournament was scheduled forced me to push some of the early rounds back to accommodate those people. The GYS Tournaments were something I had no idea were going to happen, as they were a brand new thing. While a few people did decide to do one or more of those tournies instead of the SMB3 Tournament, being in line with those tournies also helped with building hype for the restreams; I'll get more into that later.

In terms of teaching beforehand, this was something I thought would be a little bigger but ended up being just fine. I had a few people lined up saying they were gonna do stuff, but not much in terms of learning tools were put together. Lawso had just done his tutorial, or did it when it was announced I'm not sure, and Cujo's route guide and Chuk's tutorial were already out. So the only new addition was my hammer bro and backup strat series, and throwing everything together in one pastebin. To be honest though, I think these tools are enough for anybody who wants to learn the game/category, and it was brought to my attention by a couple people that the resource list was a huge help, so I think all in all less was more in that case.

I think seeding everyone was a good idea, although if the tournament was on a larger scale that might have been something that would have been a bit more tedious. I expected 20-30 entrants, got 23, and a large amount of those people were either had times on speedrun.com or SRL, or were brand new and therefore had no PB, so it wasn't a huge hassle to get everyone arranged. Also seeding the entire tourney lead to some really great matches in the early rounds, so I think it really worked out well. Had the amount of entrants been much higher, say 40-50 people, I might have decided to just seed the top 16 or whatever, as I've seen some of the other tournies do. I think once you get that many people, it's likely that the difference in people will be pretty insignificant, so you'd probably still end up with some really great early matches, which really helps get the hype built.

2. The Actual Tournament (setting up races, hosting, commentary, etc.)

Setting up races is/was/always will be the worst part of the job as a tournament organizer. Anybody that's been in a few tournaments knows what it's like when someone is difficult to set a time with, whether it's because they just have a wonky schedule compared to you, or they're just difficult in general to keep in contact with. Imagine that scenario, multiplied by 10, and you have an idea of what it's like to keep races scheduled and the tournament moving. I will say one thing, I did not look at the brackets close enough to realize that the entirety of Winner's Round 2 needed to be done before Winner's Round 1 could be completed, so that threw things off in terms of deadlines and that took a lot of time to fully recover from. To be honest though, all in all scheduling races went fairly well, there was only 1 race that didn't happen because of difficulty, and there seemed to be a smooth clip of races throughout the tournament. It was just incredibly stressful and one of the major things that would prevent me from wanting to run something like this again.

Hosting was a part of the tournament that was completely different than what I originally expected, and in a very good way. At first, I thought it would likely be hosted on various people's streams and likely viewed by the community and the people who already watch the community. I had an idea to maybe host a race or two on SRL, maybe just the finals when they rolled around, but I thought with all their GYS stuff going on that there wouldn't be much room for our little tournament. A couple of conversations with MrCab and Blechy later, and suddenly we're hosting nearly every race on SRL to hundreds of people, many of which had no idea the community existed the way it does. I will never be able to truly thank SRL enough for giving us that platform to show off the community and bring entertainment to multitudes more than we would have been able to on our own.

Next we'll talk about commentary, which I think was another high point of the tournament. I think nearly everybody who wanted to get on the mic and talk about the game had a chance to do so, and everyone did a really great job. I'm not sure if I would have handled things differently in terms of getting people set up, as it was mostly just a first come first serve kind of thing. This ended up with me hosting/commentating A LOT, since I usually would be available to do so. Not sure if I hogged the mic too much or not, there were a few times where I needed to jump in anyways, but at the same time it was definitely nice toward the end when I knew things would be handled and I wouldn't have to commentate/host. One idea I had toward the beginning but never really tried was to essentially have shifts where people would essentially be on call to host/commentate during different time slots. After consideration though, I don't know if this would have been fair as most races happened in the evening or during weekends, so the people working those shifts would have more work than the people handling daytime weekday stuff. In the end, the variable nature of the scheduling of races, perhaps just having people jump in worked out best.

The races themselves were great. We had incredible matchups come down to the wire, "fun" races between competitors that just wanted to swag out since the end result was pretty much already decided, and some great stories of perseverance from some of our new competitors who were doing some of their very first runs live on the big stage. One thing the tournament proved is that Warpless really is a great category for racing, I don't think Any%, Any% no WW, or 100% would have made for the great races and awesome storylines that Warpless brought. I think having some really great races early on in the tournament was a huge benefit, as people started rooting for certain runners, or bringing up things that happened in earlier races. Some great jokes came about, off the top of my head the ones that still make me smile are: C O N T R O V E R S Y, MrCab controlling the first hand, and of course The World Famous Patented Aweglib Super Tanks Strat ™ (holy crap the TM looks tiny in pastebin lol). I think all of this got people excited to watch races, to come back next time and have a good time. Viewership seemed to constantly be on the rise as the tournament went on, and I think the great races and great commentary were a huge factor in that.

3. Prizes and Next Steps

That's it for the tournament, I think one thing I'd like to bring up next is prizes. This was perhaps another area I didn't quite do the best job with. It was something that I could have brought more attention to in the moments leading up to the tournament, and when I started to announce the prizes during the finale, a lot of people didn't even know about them lol. I don't know when during the tournament itself it could have been talked about, perhaps in between times when we had multiple races in one night, not sure tbh. Another thing I perhaps could have done is looked for more SMB3 themed prizes. The perlers were awesome, and if Lutz decides to go with that option I think the repro cart is a good idea also, but maybe I could have looked for other prizes for people other than just Steam gift cards.

So what's next? In terms of SMB3... who knows. Personally I'm taking some time off from the game; I wouldn't be too terribly surprised if others did also. There's been talks of another sort of community event, but as far as I know that's still very much in the early stages and will likely be something smaller scale than the tournament. In terms of tournaments in general, there's tons more going on or coming up. I'm looking to get something other than awful at MMX for that tournament coming up, and there's tournaments for Blaster Master, LTTP, Ninja Gaiden 2, and Super Metroid that I know of, I'm sure I'm probably missing at least 1 or 2 others. I still think it'd be great if there were some sort of central hub for speedrun tournaments, I think that would be a big benefit for the tournaments themselves and for the community at large, but I'm still not sure what I can do to help make that dream a reality... stay tuned. I think it'd be great if this current trend of popular speedrun tournaments continues, they're really a ton of fun for everybody.

TL;DR: SMB3 Warpless Tournament was great, some areas that could have better, but all in all it was all I hoped it would be and more. Hopefully tournaments continue to be a big part of the community as they're awesome :)