Ninja Gaiden II Tournament (Swiss rounds)

I'm finally sharing my thoughts on the Swiss rounds of the Ninja Gaiden II tournament. I spoke with my fellow organizers to get their feedback as well as hearing from players and viewers. I hope this sparks even more discussion as I really want to improve the format and need everyone's feedback to do so. I would like to thank everyone who took part in the event and helped make it a reality.

TL;DR - The event was a success and there is much room for improvement. Some of the improvements will happen before the tournament concludes on May 15th. This format can work really well for shorter games and I hope others will try it out!

The main reason I wanted to put this on was because no one had really tried it before for speedrunning afaik. I thought it would be great to make a tournament that would be played out very quickly like other tournaments we see on Twitch that take place over a few days (e.g. fighting games, mtg, etc.) . I also thought it would be great from a viewer perspective since they would get a nice big chunk of fun and exciting content all at once instead of a little bit at a time over the course of many weeks. For players they would not have to keep up with a game for too long, and could quickly move on from it once the tournament was over. They would also not have to coordinate matches but just commit to one reasonable block of time. I understand that this format would not be workable for the majority of speedrunning tournaments going on now/recently finished so please keep that in mind while you read this.

Here are some positives I took away from it:
- Viewership was consistent and exceeded expectations as we hit nearly 700 with no assistance (front page or hosting) afaik. This is the highest I am aware of for any single game tournament that is not assisted.

- The chat reaction was mostly positive from what I could tell and I did not get much negative feedback from viewers (maybe they just have not spoken up yet).

- Tournament organizers have another format option that works! We determined top 8 of a tournament in less than 5 hours while still showcasing a ton of game play, something that would take many weeks with any of the other currently used tournament formats. Please note that this is not a criticism of those formats, I am merely saying that this is a very condensed format that can work for the right type of game.

- The Swiss finished in under our six hour estimate, not bad for a first time doing something this involved (more on this later).

- Despite the need to get a qualifying time, many new players still joined and succeeded in the Swiss (two made top 8, and several others were one win short).

- The commentary was focused on telling the story of the players and the tournament while balancing game mechanics, tech, strategy, and game flow. It can certainly be improved and I am confident Duckfist and I will do even better with the top 8.

- Transitions between feature matches were very smooth and Feasel did a great job handling many moving parts on the fly. We were able to show standings/results/pairings to give the viewers a clear picture of what is going on in matches they missed without them having to click away from the stream (thanks to Mithical and Jimmypoopins).

- All of the issues that came up a pretty easy to fix! There is nothing inherently wrong or problematic with the format. In fact, quite the opposite. I believe that this broadcasting format can work for double elimination tournaments as well if that is preferred to Swiss.

I have rewatched the VOD and agree with much of the feedback from players and viewers regarding things that could have been changed and/or improved so let's talk about that stuff:

- Rounds were too long. This was more of an issue for runners than viewers, but we need a better balance. Rounds can and should be faster. To be fair though, I  would like to point out that we will be completing an entire tournament in less than 10 hours by the time we are done. Once fully optimized you could theoretically complete a tournament in one day.

- Players were not well informed about what to expect (mainly time estimate) and what was going on during the event between rounds. I attempted to communicate this via the rules, a video explaining the rules/format and on Discord, but failed. Next time I will simply be more specific and clear about what to expect, especially the length of time which was made clear to organizers but not participants.

- Too many interviews. The reason we were doing this is because we had a pretty unusual setup for getting standings/results/pairings on screen which took more time than it needed to. We were also understaffed and put too much burden on Mithical9 who handled things exceptionally well. Will will have one more staff next time and we will only do interviews after the later rounds and have fewer of them. They can probably be a bit more concise as well.

- Late start time for EU players/too early for JP players. Unfortunately you cannot accommodate everyone and two very high level JP players could not join without playing at silly hours. For EU players it was something that I was aware of and we talked about changing, but by the time we did it was too close to the event to change it without really messing things up. The players can all see the start time listed when they joined Challonge, the real problem was that they did not have an estimate and probably expected it to be completed sooner much like the weekly races that take only a few hours. Next time we would start at least 1 hour earlier for EU.

- Too many feature matches. This was a criticism that I do not agree with. People said you could not be fully invested in the match if you do not see the whole thing. I think this is still way better than just seeing or hearing what the result is after the fact. It also allowed us to switch away from feature matches that are out of hand (thankfully we only had to do this round 5). Further more, it allows more players to be shown, and they deserve it after working so hard to prepare and play in this. I really need to get more feedback on this topic. I am not against modifying this but I need to be convinced of what and why something else would be a significant improvement.

- Pairings. These were done using the Challonge Swiss seeded format. I should have made how this works more clear to players. I think they understood that round 1 was based on seeding but not subsequent rounds. This resulted in an advantage for higher seeded players which is not unusual for seeded formats, but for Swiss I think it might be too big of an edge. This is also a small sample size so it is hard to know for sure. If we ran the same tourney and used random pairings rather than seeded someone besides fastatcc might have gotten screwed over/unlucky.

- Other. There is probably stuff I missed and/or forgot. Please don't hesitate to bring it to my attention.

I really believe that this format can be great for players and viewers alike. See you all for the top 8 on May 15th!!